Book Review

Democracy Betrayed: The Wilmington Race Riot of 1898 and Its Legacy. Ed. by David S. Cecelski and Timothy B. Tyson. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998. xvi, 301 pp. Cloth, $45.00, isbn 0-8078-2451-8. Paper, $18.95, isbn 0-8078-4755-0.)

Throughout the South, African Americans began fashioning new lives for themselves in the wake of the Civil War. With the legalization of marriage, former slaves constructed or reconstructed households whenever they were able to reunite with family members. They built or expanded community institutions as they sought an education and withdrew from white churches to create their own. They protected themselves from white hostility in part through the courts and polling booths, but as federal troops withdrew from the last three southern states in 1877 and Reconstruction ended, most African Americans in the Lower South found their civil and voting rights sharply curtailed. This occurred in the Upper South as well, but not until the end of the nineteenth century.	1
Seizing the New Day and Democracy Betrayed bookend this era. Wilbert L. Jenkins shows how African Americans in Charleston, South Carolina, constructed their lives and their community as they moved from the antebellum years through Reconstruction. The scholars whose articles appear in Democracy Betrayed use as a starting point the racial violence in Wilmington, North Carolina, in 1898 that helped end black political participation in the state two years later.	2
Jenkins's book is prodigiously researched. Although he offers few surprises as he discusses African Americans and their struggles for economic independence, for literacy, for autonomous houses of worship, and for civil rights and personal security, the book does highlight the extent to which the devastation wreaked on Charleston's economy by the war and the subsequent economic depression in the 1870s blighted the hopes and dreams of black migrants who poured into the city in search of a better life.	3
Throughout, Jenkins tries to distinguish among black Charlestonians on the basis of class and color (light skinned versus dark). Although distinctions surfaced sometimes in the operation of schools, in denominational choices, and in the nature of religious services, considerable unity characterized black educational and religious endeavors. Within the Republican party, however, black Charlestonians were decidedly disunited. Indeed, after reading the earlier chapters on education and religion, the reader is unprepared for the degree of disunion along class and color lines within the gop. In his final chapter, Jenkins argues that the violence that blacks used to combat white abuse in Charleston was unique. In fact, black assertiveness in Charleston may have differed in degree from that in other parts of the South, but probably not in kind. Still, the preponderance of black Americans in the region (73 percent of the population in Charleston and surrounding areas in 1875) gave them a decided advantage in confrontations with whites.	4
Like African Americans in Charleston, blacks in Wilmington, North Carolina, made considerable gains following the Civil War. Unlike Charleston, where the economic and political fortunes of African Americans began to falter in the 1870s with the onset of an economic depression and the defeat of the Republican party, Wilmington was a city where blacks continued to do relatively well economically, and their political fortunes experienced a definite resurgence in the 1890s with the rise of the fusionist faction (Populists and Republicans) and the restoration of local self-rule. The pogrom that ended that political comeback is the subject of the dozen essays in Democracy Betrayed.	. . .