Specter of the Incubus

The incubus, in Christian mythology of yore, was a demon that raped chaste or virtuous women as they slept. Sometimes this resulted in pregnancy, with the little devils (so to speak) produced by this union harbingers of sin and degradation. Sometimes, they would produce individuals of checkered character, but immense power (e.g., Merlin, wizard of King Arthur lore). More often, the viciousness of the assault would result in the death of the victim. Almost always, the victim, should she survive in the physical realm, would be destined for an eternity of hellfire and damnation unless she submitted to a torturous exorcism.*

Such sex monsters also exist in non-Christian cultures. Zulus refer to a similar entity as Tokoloshe, In northeastern India, locals talk about a kindred spirit as a Pori, whose rapes lead the victim to madness and suicide.

Seems like these kind of legends would have little to do with nineteenth-century North Carolina. The sad fact is that they shouldn’t in an industrial age of mechanical innovation and growing electrical technology.

Yet, they did.

Late in 1897, nine Democratic city fathers made secret plans to expel the legally elected, mostly white Fusionist/Republican party by any means necessary.** Despite the fact that their real beefs had to do with Fusionist policies, such as of regulating interest rates,*** regulating railroads (which would prevent another bond scandal) and proportional taxation, political moves that would benefit not only African Americans but the majority of whites who lived in Wilmington, these Democrats knew that they had to find an issue that would forcefully compel the Euro Americans benefiting from these new progressive laws to, in essence, rally against their own interests. What they needed was the populist to revolt against the Populist party.

State Democratic Party Chairman Furnifold Simmons knew how to do it. He cited an op-ed piece written earlier by The Caucasian in which Marion Butler asserted:

There is but one chance and but one hope for the railroads to capture the net [sic] legislature, and that is for the [negro] to be made the issue.***

Despite the fact that Africans held a minority of offices in a predominately black city, the “Secret Nine” enlisted the help of sympathetic newspapers and visiting orators to condemn the multicultural government as “Black Rule,” subject to the stereotypical proclivities attributed to black men since the end of the US Civil War.

Nowadays, we use this term, “status anxiety,” to denote the existential threat to an individual's or community’s position in the social hierarchy. Although it’s really more of current usage, the concept behind it is as old as hierarchy itself, and this became the case here. Although under no threat from the current government, which might have actually represented their interests, some whites nevertheless noted that people who once deemed slaves, legally and culturally considered little more than livestock less than forty-five years ago, were now, because of hard word, dedication and opportunity, possibly more affluent than they. These people whom they still considered biologically and intellectually inferior were making policies that affected their lives.  And black magistrates not only had the official authority to judge but to impose penalties on them.

Not surprisingly, status anxiety became an issue that resonated with some white voters, even though they realized over all that they were better off with the new government than they were with the puppets of city bosses. But the S9, their press and their strategists honed on a more primal fear based on stereotype: the wanton sexual lust of the black male, which, if empowered, would ultimately violate, rape white womanhood all over the state.

 

Fig. 1. Political cartoon appearing in the 27 September 1898 edition of the News and Observer.

 

It wasn’t enough here to equate black masculinity with criminality. The conspirators actively sought to resurrect the legend of the incubus, a preternatural sex monster recklessly killing, looting, and raping at will. If status anxiety didn’t hit close to home, this did. I mean who doesn’t have sisters, wives, sweethearts, mothers et cetera? The purveyors of this sentiment gave a very clear-cut message to white voters: either you are against us, or your in support of rape. If we don’t get your support, don’t complain to us when, not if, your loved ones are brutalized and murdered.

As the election drew closer, the sex-monster meme grew increasingly more potent as press articles amplified the looming rapist threat. A high point came when a prominent feminist, Rebecca Felton, weighed in on the matter during an 11 August 1898 speech made before the Georgia Agricultural society:****

I must make a strong effort to stop lynching, by keeping closer watch over the poor white girls on the secluded farms; and if these poor maidens are destroyed in a land that their fathers died to save from the invader’s foot, I say the shame lies with the survivors, who fail to be the protectors for the children of their dead comrades…

When there is not enough religion in the pulpit to organize a crusade against sin; nor justice in the court house to promptly punish crime; nor manhood enough in the nation to put a sheltering arm about innocence and virtue – if it needs lynching to protect woman’s dearest possession from the ravening human beasts – then I say lynch; a thousand times a week if necessary.

Okay, I’m certain that everyone reading this is against the crime of rape.  While the above quote doesn’t necessarily identify a specific person or persons as habitual attackers, she made clear who she thought were the true villains:

I say it’s a disgrace in a free country when such things are a public reproach and the best part of God’s creation are trembling and crying for protection in their own homes. And I say, with due respect to all who listen to me, that so long as your politics takes the colored into your embraces on election day to control the vote; and so long as politicians use liquor to befuddle his understanding and make him think he is a man and a brother when the purpose is to defeat the opposition by honey-snuggling him at the polls, and so long as he is made familiar with their dirty tricks in politics so long will lynching prevail, because the causes of it grow and increase.

The Weekly Star and other white Wilmington press outlets carried transcriptions of Felton’s speech. Alexander Manly, publisher of town’s most influential black newspaper, The Wilmington Daily Record, felt compelled to respond, perhaps in no small part to his own mixed heritage.***** In an op-ed piece published a week after the speech, he asserted that white female/black male couplings, if they existed at all, would most likely be consensual, at least on the level of white male/black female couplings:

….our experience among poor white people in the country teaches us that the women of that race are not any more particular in the matter of clandestine meetings with colored men, than are the white men with colored women. Meetings of this kind go on for some time until the woman’s infatuation or the man’s boldness, bring attention to them and the man is lynched for rape. Every negro lynched is called a ‘big, burly, black brute,’ when in fact many of those who have thus been dealt with had white men for their fathers, and were not only not ‘black’ and ‘burly’ but were sufficiently attractive for white girls of culture and refinement to fall in love with them as is well known to all….

Teach your men purity. Let virtue be something more than an excuse for them to intimidate and torture a helpless people. Tell your men that it is no worse for a black man to be intimate with a white woman, than for a white man to be intimate with a colored woman.

You set yourselves down as a lot of carping hypocrites; in fact you cry aloud for the virtue of your women while you seek to destroy the morality of ours.

The Weekly Star and other papers published Manly’s op-ed with introductory remarks crafted to fan white animosity. It’s perhaps tempting to speculate on why these remarks stirred so much social antipathy. Maybe, as Dr. Calvin Hernton (Sociology, Oberlin) suggests in his 1965 book Sex and Racism in America, the thought of white women as sexually autonomous beings flew counter to the prevailing dogma that they were, more or less, asexual. On the other hand it could have constituted good-old-fashioned externalization, the discomfort of white men of knowing that (1) they or those of their kind had for centuries often engaged in sex with enslaved black women, sex which (2) the women themselves were in no position to decline or resist and (3) produced offspring. It’s easy to think that freedom and enfranchisement of the negro male might have provided fertile grounds for comeuppance.

Whatever the case, lynch mob passions, already inflamed, became explosive, with some whites expressing their desire to march down to the Daily Record offices and lynch Manly on the spot. And maybe they would have had the S9 not urged them to wait until after the election.

That’s because they had a plan, one they’d been working on all year. 

After producing the propaganda necessary to minimize challenge, they succeeded in squashing the black vote by getting employers to threaten termination or violence should their African American employees so much as show up at the polls. They subsequently siphoned off white support for the Fusionists through the White Government Union, a racial supremacy club to which many of their employers belonged. The WGU likewise strong-armed apolitical and anti-racist whites into supporting this plan by coercing them into signing contracts declaring their allegiance to the Democratic Party and the city fathers. It was, for some, a no-brainer when told to sign a loyalty oath to white supremacy when faced with the alternative of losing their jobs and entering the wonderful world of penury. Yet other whites took a bit more convincing. As then-Alderman Benjamin Franklin Keith rued at the time:

Many good people were marched from their homes...taken to headquarters, and told to sign. Those that did not were notified that they must leave the city...as there was plenty of rope in the city.

The S9 plan also included an army. The Red Shirt Brigades, so-named because of their distinctive uniform, grew out of the ranks of former Klansmen, who carried on the tradition of mounted, masked racial violence against black Republicans after federal intervention neutralized the first incarnation of the KKK in 1871. Founded 1875 in Mississippi, chapters sprung up across the former Confederate states, including North Carolina. For a couple of decades, they served as anything from bodyguards of prominent southern Democrats to shock troops who could enforce white rule and intimate politicians seeking political change. 

Many of the Democrats relying on their Red Shirts and their minions saw them as vulgar men, lowlifes, or as they themselves would say in the parlance of the day “ruffians.” Not that it mattered. The Red Shirts loyalty to racial hegemony, their severe status-anxiety and their fear of racial inclusiveness and equality, led them to pledge their allegiance to, fight, kill and die for a political and economic class that not-so-secretly despised them.

The S9 and their allies patiently waited for all the pieces to fall into place before they launched this plan: specifically a coup d'etat. They wanted to wait until the elections had concluded. If they won the elections – which by now should have been a cakewalk since a substantial percentage of the opposition’s base was under threat – they would simply take City Hall by force the following day, not even waiting for the incumbents’ terms to expire. If they somehow managed to lose the election, they would simply take City Hall by force the following day, the official tally be damned.

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*There’s also a female version called succubus. According to legend, the initial succubus was Lilith, Adam’s first wife who was banished from Eden for sexually emasculating the first man – she insisted that she be on top when they did the dirty. Over the centuries, she’s said to prey upon adolescent boys as they sleep, thus resulting in nocturnal emissions.

**The “Secret Nine” as they came to be known consisted of Hardy Fennell, William Gilchrist, W.A. Johnson, E.S. Lathrop, Hugh MacRae, P.B. Manning, J. Allen Taylor, L.B. Sasser and Walter Parsley.

*** While white banks often charged the more well-heeled to an interest rate of 5% or less, poorer whites typically payed 7.5%, while African Americans could only take loans at a staggering 15%. This threatened to force local black businesses into insolvency, whereupon they could be purchased cheaply by new owners.

****No the original piece did not use the word “negro.”

*****Felton, like Susan B. Anthony and Victoria Woodhull, was a prominent suffragette around the turn of the century. She also was a lifetime member of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. While both organizations had some roots in nineteenth-century progressive politics, the latter has increasingly exhibited far-right tendencies since the turn of the Twentieth Century. Past officials endorsed lynching, and coordinated with the second incarnation of the Ku-Klux-Klan during Prohibition They still champion sobriety, but have in recent years turned their advocacy toward anti-LBGQT measures in public broadcasting and anti-abortion measures.  They also oppose sexual activity before or outside of marriage.

******Manly was the biological grandson of former North Carolina Governor Charles Manly.