The Ghosts of 1898: The Backlash Cycle and the Fight for Racial Justice

?Article Insights

• There is a long historical pattern of advances in racial equality, from Reconstruction to the Civil Rights Movement, subsequently being met with intense white resistance and backlash. This backlash has succeeded in blunting further progress time and time again.
• The 1898 Wilmington coup, within this theme of initial progress, was followed by swift and brutal suppression of black rights. The overthrow of Wilmington's biracial government epitomized the white supremacist backlash against Reconstruction.
• We see this pattern repeated during the Civil Rights Movement's legislative successes and the subsequent white resistance through violence, political maneuvering, etc.
• Backlash politics have become deeply embedded in the partisan divide, used cynically to inflame racial resentment among white voters. However, you note that even recent modest progress has unleashed renewed grievance and backlash.
• The cycles of progress and backlash stem from a zero-sum mentality amongst some whites and others that see modern DEI as a threat. Overcoming this is key to ending this historical pattern.

·?????? The key insight is that organizations behave as systems, rather than just the sum of individual biases. And systems-based interventions, guided by network science, may succeed where previous efforts have repeatedly failed. This network perspective represents a breakthrough strategy against systemic racial bias.

The Ghosts of 1898: The Backlash Cycle and the Fight for Racial Justice

The date of November 10, 1898, is etched in North Carolina's history as the only successful coup d'état in American history. On that fateful day in Wilmington, a heavily armed white mob overthrew the local biracial government and killed dozens of black residents in a brutal display of white supremacist violence.

The seeds of the 1898 Wilmington coup were sown in the aftermath of the Civil War and Reconstruction. In 1867, black men gained the right to vote and won elections to local and state offices across the South. This ushered in a brief period of progress and hope for racial equality. White backlash, however, quickly halted this progress. By the late 1870s, white supremacist Democrats had regained control across the South, stripping black citizens of many newly won rights and protections.

In Wilmington, however, a biracial coalition known as Fusionists held power for over a decade. Led by black Republicans and white populists, the Fusionists made Wilmington "a rare haven of African American political power," according to LeRae Umfleet, a historian of the 1898 coup. The city's black middle class prospered under fusionist rule. But this small gain in racial progress could not stand.

On November 10, 1898, a mob of over 2,000 heavily armed white men marched on Wilmington's black neighborhoods, torching black-owned businesses and shooting black residents who failed to flee. They overthrew the city's biracial government, exiled black and white Fusionist leaders, and declared white supremacist Democrat Alfred Waddell as the new mayor. Overnight, black political power in Wilmington was crushed.

The Wilmington coup was a brutal backlash against even modest gains in racial equality. It fit squarely within the broader pattern of reconstruction's demise across the South. Heather McGhee powerfully summarizes this history in her book The Sum of Us: "The overthrow of biracial democracy in Wilmington was the last battle in a twenty-five-year backlash by white Southern aristocracy against the effort to build interracial democracy." This white backlash undid the brief progress made towards racial equality during Reconstruction. Its effects reverberated for decades after, as black Americans faced accelerating oppression under Jim Crow segregation.

Backlash and the Civil Rights Movement

The white backlash to Reconstruction established white supremacy as the operating principle across the South for nearly a century. The next major effort to achieve racial justice did not come until the 1950s and 1960s Civil Rights Movement. And once again, fragile gains towards equality faced swift and brutal backlash.

The Civil Rights Movement won monumental victories with the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, finally delivering on long delayed promises of equality before the law. However, backlash formed as soon as it became clear that these laws would actually be enforced. Martin Luther King Jr. was acutely aware of these rumblings, warning in 1965 that “a section of the white population perceives Negro pressure for change, misconstrues it as a demand for privileges rather than as a desperate quest for existence.” King feared that this backlash “intimidates government officials” and “paralyzes” racial progress.

King's fears proved prescient. Even as the movement achieved major legislative wins, white resentment simmered before boiling over as outright resistance. This resistance took forms ranging from white flight to suburban enclaves to outright violence against civil rights activists. Perhaps most damaging was the political backlash against civil rights within the Democratic Party itself. Fearing they had lost the support of white Southern voters, Democrats refused to embrace the movement’s more radical economic aims such as the Poor People’s Campaign. According to Thomas J. Sugrue, “the white backlash against civil rights stopped the movement in its tracks” in the late 1960s.

Once again, white backlash succeeded in blunting the movement’s push for substantive equality. Although civil rights legislation is still important, systematic white American resistance has consistently undermined its effectiveness and impact. As statutory equality failed to translate into actual social and economic equality, the unresolved tensions of the civil rights era have boiled over in recent years.

The Persistence of Backlash Politics

In the decades since the civil rights era, white grievance and backlash have become a core part of partisan identity and electoral politics. Politicians have weaponized white racial resentment, using coded rhetoric and policies to appeal to white Americans’ fear of losing status under growing racial diversity. This “backlash politics” fueled the rise of the Republican “Southern strategy” as well as Trump's overt appeals to white racial grievances.

Today's white backlash politics have antecedents in the past but are fueled by new demographic changes. As McGhee argues, “the election of the first Black president opened the floodgates.” Many white Americans perceived Obama's presidency as an unjust loss of status, fueling the rise of militant white nationalism. Trump capitalized on this aggrieved entitlement, vowing to overturn Obama's legacy. January 6th showed the violent potential of these reactionary movements.

Just as in 1898 and the 1960s, even modest progress toward racial justice has been met with virulent resistance. The racial reckoning sparked by 2020’s Black Lives Matter protests surfaced once again the deep divisions over racial justice versus white identity. And this racial progress has been met with predictable backlash, from gerrymandered electoral maps to censorious education laws.

An Unfinished Reckoning

The ghosts of 1898 haunt our current-day struggles for racial justice. Despite long, courageous battles to dismantle white supremacy, the dynamics of white backlash remain deeply embedded in our body politic. Each small step towards substantive equality has been met with resistance meant to halt further progress.

At heart, as McGhee writes, white backlash stems from “the zero-sum assumption that gains for people of color must come at the expense of white people.” This scarcity mindset fuels policies that reinforce inequality, based on the myth that inclusion threatens rather than strengthens society.

Applying Network Science to Overcome Racial Bias

Racial bias and discrimination have proven enormously resistant to traditional approaches to awareness training and appeals to equality. However, insights from network science may provide innovative new angles of attack against persistent biases. Specifically, network analyses reveal how even a small number of prejudiced people can exert outsized influence across an entire social network.

This finding implies that focusing change efforts on those few nodes of influence within organizations could yield dramatic improvements systemwide. Rather than blanket interventions, which often fail, network science suggests the high leverage points in structures of racial bias. For example, significant reductions in biased behavior have resulted from focusing bias training on just a couple dozen key leaders across organizations. Additionally, network simulations show that increasing network connections between racial groups can lessen prejudice and improve attitudes. In essence, network science allows seeing organizations as dynamic systems rather than collections of individuals. This perspective reveals that shifting key relationships and network positions can unleash exponential change. These novel applications of network theory demonstrate the huge potential to attack racial bias from a systems level using insights from complexity science. Rather than weary resurgence of inadequate diversity training, network-based interventions provide cause for hope.

The key insight is that organizations behave as systems, rather than just the sum of individual biases. And systems-based interventions, guided by network science, may succeed where previous efforts have repeatedly failed. This network perspective represents a breakthrough strategy against systemic racial bias.

The history of racial progress in America is thus one of recurring backlash. But recognizing this pattern is the first step toward changing it. Each generation has taken up the mantle from those who came before. Perhaps this generation can finally reckon with the politics of white grievance that have long impeded the realization of equality before the law. As Martin Luther King Jr. wrote from Birmingham Jail, “We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people.” Only by confronting this history can we finally lay the ghosts of 1898 to rest.