Alexander Manly
Alexander Lightfoot Manly (May 13, 1866 – October 5, 1944) was an American newspaper owner and editor who lived in Wilmington, North Carolina.
At the time, the port of Wilmington had 10,000 residents and was the state's largest city; its population was majority black, with a rising middle class.
In August 1898 Manly published a editorial objecting to lynchings[2] and rejected stereotypes of black men as rapists of white women.
He had earlier responded to a Rebecca Latimer Felton in Georgia who wrote about African-American males having relationships with white women.
Alex Manly supported his family as a painter, but remained politically active; he helped found The Armstrong Association, a precursor to the National Urban League, and was a member of the African-American newspaper council.
In 1898 the fusionist legislature passed a law to expand the franchise for the first time since Reconstruction by lowering property requirements, which benefited the white majority of the state as well as black voters.
Wells, he therefore argued that the stereotype of the "Big Burly Black Brute" punished in lynchings was incorrect: many were "sufficiently attractive for white girls of culture and refinement to fall in love with them, as is very well-known to all.
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.
It also gained national attention, in a year when North Carolina racial tensions were already high, inflamed by the Democratic campaigns for the pending election.
Democrats were promoting white supremacy and exaggerating racial fears related to miscegenation to bring out their supporters.
[10] Democrats capitalized on Manly's editorial, claiming that "as long as fusion remains, Negro men would continue preying on white women".
Additionally, Democrats carried copies of Manly's editorial with them to generate controversy in conversations and to strengthen their appeal.
A secret committee of white Democrats led by Alfred Waddell had already planned the Wilmington Insurrection of 1898 if they lost local offices and control of the city government.
[29] A group of white supremacists, known as the Committee of Twenty-five, first decided to remove publisher Manly from Wilmington by force.
The Committee gave leaders of the black community an ultimatum: the Manly brothers would have to be gone from the city by 10 A.M. on November 10, or else they would be forcefully removed.
For a time, Manly served in his office and wrote civil rights legislation, which White was unable to get through Congress.
[36] Frank Manly eventually moved to Alabama, where he taught at Tuskegee University, a noted historically black college.
White had announced that he would not run for a third term under such conditions, and instead built a law practice in the capital and also became a highly successful banker.
The former became an activist and fought for black property rights in Wilmington;[42][43] he later became executive director of the Pennsylvania Human Relations Commission.
When a Commission was appointed to study what is now known as the Wilmington Insurrection of 1898, Lewin Manly Jr. was among those who favored compensation to descendants of victims for property and economic losses.
