"The rights and privileges all people should enjoy": Reflections on Archival Collaboration and Black Women's Epistolary Resistance

A few days after a neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, on 12 August 2017, reminded the nation of the continued virulence of anti-Black racism, I attended a letter-writing event organized by my local Black Lives Matter chapter. Of conversation were the potential risks involved in signing one's name to a political statement that could be made public, especially with renewed fears about governmental surveillance and emboldened commitments to white supremacy. This discussion was reminiscent of one in which I had been engaged with a recent acquaintance and fellow North Carolina native Derrick C. Jones, who had been culling through letters within Department of Justice file 1898–17743. These letters—several of which were composed by African American women and a few of which were unsigned for fear of retribution—implore then United States President William McKinley to intervene on the Black community's behalf as white supremacist forces threatened their businesses, their homes, and ultimately their lives in what is commonly known as the 1898 Wilmington Insurrection (and, more accurately, as the Wilmington coup d'etat).

Regrettably, such epistolary entreatments to President McKinley were ignored, and what H. Leon Prather, Sr. describes as "the most ghastly racial massacre of the Progressive Era" occurred without a federal response.¹ As Timothy B. Tyson and David S. Cecelski recount,

Victory at the polls did not satisfy the Democrats. … White vigilantes first burned the printing press of Alexander Manly, publisher of what was said to be the only black-owned daily newspaper in the United States. Next they marched into the neighborhood called Brooklyn, where they left a trail of dead and dying African Americans. Armed with repeating rifles and rapid-fire guns, they outgunned the black men who sought to defend their homes with antique revolvers and shotguns. That night and the next day, hundreds of black women and children huddled in the swamps outside Wilmington. The white insurgents forced the city's officials who had not been up for election two days earlier to resign and took power for themselves. … many Wilmington blacks believe that the death toll exceeded 300. Yet not even the highest estimate of the dead aroused white outrage.²

Historians such as Tyson, Cecelski, Prather, Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, David Zucchino, among others, as well as two turn-of-the-twentiethcentury novels, Charles W. Chesnutt's The Marrow of Tradition (1901) and David Bryant Fulton's Hanover; or The Persecution of the Lowly: A Story of the Wilmington Massacre (1900), have kept the 1898 events in Wilmington alive in America's conscience.³ These writers and historians demonstrate both the bloody toll that postbellum Democrats—"the self-avowed 'party of white supremacy'"—were willing to exact in order to dismantle an integrationist Republican agenda and the complicity of the federal government in these extralegal waves of white terror.⁴ The cache of letters that Jones sifted through and subsequently shared with me are also an integral part of this history. As this essay suggests, these letters are especially crucial in documenting late-nineteenth-century Black women's united resistance to postbellum efforts to deny African Americans their hard won and newly granted citizenship rights.

Taking our cues from this network of Black women scribblers, Jones and I have been engaged in an epistolary dialogue, exchanging correspondence about the letters in file 1898–17743 and working in tandem to draft our findings. In an effort to ensure that these letters receive the attention they deserve in terms of women's history—and Black women's history in particular—we have found that transgressing the often invisible boundary drawn between academic and non-academic researchers has been key. Like nearly all non-academics, Jones, a retired public school administrator, does not have access to online databases paid for by an institution or knowledge...