North Carolina
Red Shirts were active in Raleigh, North Carolina and during the Wilmington Insurrection of 1898. On November 4, 1898, the Raleigh News & Observer noted,
The first Red Shirt parade on horseback ever witnessed in Wilmington electrified the people today. It created enthusiasm among the whites and consternation among the Negroes. The whole town turned out to see it. It was an enthusiastic body of men. Otherwise it was quiet and orderly.
Six days later, a group of local men implemented their plan to overthrow the government when Republicans won the offices of mayor and aldermen. It was the only coup d'état in United States history.
The Red Shirts were part of a Democratic campaign to oppose the interracial coalition of Republicans and Populists, which had gained control of the state legislature in the 1894 election and elected a Republican governor in 1896. Such biracial coalitions had also occurred in other states across the South, threatening white Democratic control of state legislatures. Upper-class and middle-class white populations feared the empowerment of freedmen and poor whites.
To break up the coalition, white Democrats used intimidation to reduce black Republican voting and regained control of the legislature in 1896. They passed laws and a new constitution in 1899 that disfranchised most African Americans and many poor whites by the requirements for poll taxes and literacy tests.
From 1896 to 1904, black voter turnout in North Carolina was reduced to zero by a combination of provisions such as poll taxes, residency requirements, literacy tests, grandfather clause and more complicated rules for voting. This followed a pattern of similar state actions across the South, starting with the state of Mississippi's new constitution in 1890. By 1900 after a decade of white supremacy, many people forgot that North Carolina had thriving middle-class blacks.
Read more about this topic: Red Shirts (Southern United States)
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