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In August 1898, Wilmington,
North Carolina, was a mecca for middle-class Negroes. Many of the city's
lawyers, businessmen, and other professionals were black, as were all
the tradesmen and stevedores. Negroes outnumbered whites by more than
two to one.
But the white civic leaders,
many descended from the antebellum aristocracy, did not consider this
progress. They looked around and saw working class whites out of jobs.
They heard Negroes addressing whites "in the familiar." They
hated the fact that local government was run by Republican
"Fusionists" sympathetic to the black majority.
Rumors began to fly. The
newspaper office turned into an arsenal. Secret societies espousing
white supremacy were formed. Isolated incidents occurred: a shot was
fired through a streetcar bearing whites, a black cemetery was
desecrated.
This incendiary atmosphere
was inflamed further by public speeches from an ex-Confederate colonel
and a firebrand Negro preacher.
One morning in November, the
almost inevitable gunfire began. By the time order was restored, many of
the city's most visible black leaders had been literally put on trains
and told to leave town, hundreds of blacks were forced to hide out in
the city's cemetery or the nearby swamps to avoid massacre, and dozens
of victims lay dead.
Based on actual events, Cape
Fear Rising tells a story of one city's racial nightmare--a
nightmare that was repeated throughout the South at the turn of the
century. Although told as fiction, the core of this novel strikes at the
heart of racial strife in America.
about the author
Philip Gerard holds an M.F.A. from the University of Arizona. He has
published three novels and several books of nonfiction. He directs the
professional and creative writing program at the University of North
Carolina at Wilmington.
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