After 1898...

On June 13, 2020, David Cecelski published a beautifully written piece about Thomas McKeller, an African American man, born in Wilmington, North Carolina. The essay is a moving rumination on McKeller’s life experiences. Before you go any further, you should read the article, “Their Eyes, Their Faces.” 

As I read the piece, my heart was struck by the beginning and the ending of the post. 

 

Cecelski starts his piece with “I always wonder what happened to them– the men, women and children that fled Wilmington, N.C., after whites started killing black people there in 1898.”  His exploration of the relationship between Thomas McKeller and the painter John Singer Sargent, ends with the words “Now I want to know what happened to all the others who fled Wilmington. I want to know where they ended up and what became of them. I want to see their eyes, their faces.” 

Today, I want to tell you a little bit about a couple who fled Wilmington in the aftermath of the violence of 1898. I don’t have a photo or image of them, so can’t show you their eyes or faces.  But I can tell you part of their story.

Sharing history seems simultaneously more and less important as this interminable year keeps unfolding. It’s hard to continue to believe that learning about the past is that critical when more than 450,000 people around the world have died from Covid-19. It’s hard to continue to trust that understanding the past matters, when yet another Black person lays dead because of the actions of a police officer. Still, despite the weight of current events, like Cecelski, I want to know what happened to all those who fled Wilmington after 1898. 

So, let’s learn a little bit about Alexander and Polly Avant Rhone.   

Alexander Rhone (also sometimes called Roan in the records) was born in 1860 or 1861.  And his wife-to-be Polly Avant, was born later in the 1860s. We first see the pair in the record in the 1870 census. At that time, Alex and Polly both attended school. A decade later, the census tells us Polly worked as a servant and Alexander was a laborer. 

Alexander and Polly married in 1889. Reverend Small, of St. Luke's Methodist Episcopal Church presided over their wedding, which was held in a private home on Walnut Street. 

The world that the Rhones lived in as adults was dramatically different than the one that they would have experienced if they’d grown up a generation earlier. As Polly and Alexander grew into adults, they lived in a world where they could get an education, they could legally marry, they could practice religion as they saw fit, they could control their own labor. Alexander and Polly lived in a county where Black men, women, and children made up the majority of the population. 

 

After 1868, Black men could vote. And they used their new political power and elect African American men to local and state government. Freedom also brought economic opportunities.  Wilmington was home to black entrepreneurs, craftspeople, educators, doctors and lawyers.

After Emancipation, members of the Black community created new associations and organizations like the Giblem Lodge, and a chapter of the International Order of Odd Fellows. Men who’d served in the U. S. Army set up a Grand Army of the Republic in town. Alexander Rhone was definitely in the midst of some of these changes. He was a member of the Asaph club, a singing group.  

Alexander was also a longstanding volunteer firefighter with one of the most renowned fire companies in the state, the Cape Fear Steam Fire Engine Company.

 

Volunteer Hose Reel Company, about 1890

By the 1890s, he was the assistant foreman of the fire company. Alexander Rhone and his firefighting brethren helped organize the county’s Decoration Day celebrations – where pro-Union members of the community joined together to hold memorial services at the National Cemetery. 

African American firefighters, about 1895

By 1897,  Alexander was also an entrepreneur -  he’s listed in the city directory as a confectioner, with a shop at 507 S. Front Street. 

On the eve of the massacre the ripped Wilmington apart, Alexander Rhone was a member of the paid fire department, having parlayed his years of volunteer fire fighting into a position in the new organization. According to an article in a Brooklyn paper from 1905 account, “When Alexander Rhone grew to manhood he became a member of this company [Cape Fear Steam Engine No 3] and on account of his excellent record as a fireman in the volunteer service he was among the few selected to enter the paid service, when the old volunteer service was discontinued. The political upheaval in 1898 caused the disbanding of the negro companies in the City of Wilmington and that necessitated Alexander Rhone’s leaving Wilmington for the North.” 

Rhone, along with every other Black firefighter was kicked off the job after the massacre and coup of 1898.  On November 9, 1898 over 450 white men signed a document, known to history as the White Declaration of Independence, that included a call “….to give to white men a large part of the employment heretofore given to negroes because we realize that white families cannot thrive here unless there are more opportunities for the employment of the different members of said families.”  

City officials could not pass a law that made businesses hire white people, but they did control municipal hiring. And so within a week of the coup that put Democrats in charge of the local government, the fire department fired all its Black firefighters. Men like Rhone, who had experience in firefighting and were upstanding members of the community were replaced with men like Mike Dowling, a violent white supremacist who seems to have received the fire department job as a reward for his role in the 1898 massacre.

Alexander and Polly left town shortly after Alexander lost his job with the city. They, like a number of other folks from Wilmington, relocated to Brooklyn, New York. 

Brooklyn, about 1897, courtesy of the Library of Congress

In New York, Polly and Alexander made a new life, although they didn’t forget their birth state. Rhone was a member of the Society of the Sons of North Carolina, “…the largest and most influential organization among the Afro-Americans of Brooklyn.”  Alexander Rhone was one of the organization’s board of directors. Mrs. Rhone was also involved – she was President of the Ladies Auxiliary.  

By 1904, Mr. Rhone had joined another AME church: the Fleet Street A.M.E. Zion Church in Brooklyn. In 1905, Mr. Rhone’s quick thinking helped save a number of people when part of the Fleet Street church collapsed during a very large funeral. Rhone was on the first floor of the building at the time, and as the New York Times put it, “The firemen found two ladders raised against the windows on the eastern side of the church. Both had been raised by Alexander Rhone, one of the Trustees of the church, and one of the few that did not lose their heads when the crash came. He was in the Sunday school room at the time, and promptly jumped through one of the windows into the alley. Then he ran to the back of the church where the ladders were and carried them, one by one, round to the eastern side. More than a score of persons got out safely with his assistance.” Mr. Rhone was given a medal for his efforts by his friends in April of 1905.

Brooklyn Daily Eagle, March 6, 1905

Alexander and Polly’s journey from New Hanover County to New York represents just two examples of the ways that the massacre of 1898 diminished our county. They were just two of thousands who voted with their feet, leaving Wilmington, New Hanover County, North Carolina, and the segregated South behind.