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I recieved a comment the other day from Larry Reni Thomas, a native black from Wilmington who has written two books related to the coup/massacre. He is also the founder of ICROW1898, Inc.--The International Organization for the Compensation and Reparation for the Wilmington Victims of 1898. He lives in Chapel Hill and would like to help us out by giving his own perspective of the Riots. Im not sure how but it seems that Larry knows our other interveiwees Sue Cody and Tim Tyson and does not support their position on the issue. He even said that Sue Cody and Tim Tyson are clearly not interested in reparations or compensation for the victims of the riot.
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Sirs:
It is no big secret that Tim Tyson and Sue Cody are not supporters of compensation for the victims of the 1898 Wilmington Coup. Tim and I go back to the 1990s when we met when I operated a black bookstore called Roots Cultural Store on Red Cross Street in Wilmington. He used some of my taped oral history interviews during some of his research one summer. I used them to write my M.A. thesis, called "A Study of Racial Violence in Wilmington, North Carolina Prior to February 1, 1971" at UNC-Chapel Hill in 1980. The title was later changed to The True Story Behind The Wilmington Ten. Tim and I also worked together during the 100th anniversary of the 1898 event at UNC-W in 1998. He is an excellent and progressive historian who I disagree about very little, except perhaps compensation for the victims. My AP photo was recently used in a June issue of Washington Post as a longtime compensation advocate and I was also featured in a recent News and Observer profile as a person who was a lone voice for compensation. Although I haven't met Ms. Cody, I am familiar with her masters thesis, "After the Storm." I totally disagree with her contention that no one, specifically blacks, lost anything after the affair was over with and find it amusing that any scholar would not call her research anything but short-sighted. I am so happy to see and hear about scholars wanting to find out more about this shameful incident, that was supposed to be a secret, and look forward to talking about it in the near and distant future.
Larry Reni Thomas
Chapel HIll
Tim Tyson here, wishing to add to what Larry Thomas has to say. He and I are good friends and sturdy allies. Our labors lean on one another in a lifelong sort of way; we'll be working side by side, figuratively speaking, and perhaps even literally at some point, for the long haul. Our disagreement on the question of reparations is narrow and shallow. In fact, we have not really talked about it much. In my view, writing checks to the comparatively few remaining direct victims of the Wilmington "Race Riot" is justice on the cheap and would not do that much good. (I would like to hear what the specific problem with Cody's research is; I saw no obvious flaws in her study, though I don't think the most important damage can be calculated with a calculator.) Payments to individuals also would not acknowledge the much larger civic devastation that the rise of the one-party racial state inflicted on North Carolina and the nation. I think reparations should be used for voter registration, public education, and economic infrastructure. It's not that I oppose payments to the specific financial victioms, exactly, though I think it risks limiting our efforts to the repairs imaginable to accountants. I just don't think it's enough, and I think it confines the assessment to financial terms, and I think it's politically less likely and less lofty than a place of reparations that accounts more fully for the actual damage to our civic life.
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