People in this chapter · Alex Manly · Armond Scott

Alex Manly and his brother Frank ran Wilmington’s Daily Record. A surviving front page from March 26, 1898, gives readers a chance to see the paper as its subscribers saw it, months before other editors reduced it to a single disputed article. The newspaper was part of Wilmington’s public life, and its destruction would take away a means of reaching readers and a place where Black people could publish on their own terms. The North Carolina Digital Heritage Center preserves that issue. New Hanover County’s finding aid identifies seven known surviving editions.

On August 18, 1898, Manly published an editorial responding to Rebecca Latimer Felton of Georgia, who had defended lynching in a public speech. He challenged the routine use of accusations against Black men to justify mob killing. He also said that some relationships white audiences were told to understand as assaults were consensual. His editorial had placed a question of evidence and sexual double standards in public view. Opponents took its language out to a much larger audience through reprints and hostile coverage. In that campaign version, a Black editor’s criticism of lynching became an alleged affront for which an entire community could be held responsible. Read the editorial transcript at East Carolina University.

The morning after the election, white men gathered at the county courthouse and adopted a set of resolutions commonly called the White Declaration of Independence. They claimed the city for white rule and demanded that Manly leave and his newspaper cease publication. The group required a response by 7:30 the next morning from a committee of Black residents. This put people who neither ran the white political campaign nor commanded its armed supporters in the position of answering an ultimatum about a newspaper and editor they did not control. NC State’s newspaper exhibit puts the resolutions beside contemporary coverage.

The committee met at the barber shop of David Jacobs, the elected county coroner. It prepared a written response, and lawyer Armond Scott was assigned to deliver it. Scott, worried for his safety on streets patrolled by armed men, mailed it. White leaders said the reply did not reach them by the deadline. By the time the mob marched, Manly had already fled. The danger to him was real, and his departure also makes plain the scope of the operation. The crowd still went to the newspaper office and destroyed its means of publishing. The Cape Fear Museum narrative describes the committee’s meeting and the response.