S6 E3: A Day of Blood

Scene on Radio: Capitalism

Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University

Society & Culture, Audiodoc, Radio, Documentary, Stories

4.9 • 11K Ratings

🗓️ 24 January 2024

⏱️ 38 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

On November 1898, North Carolina Democrats won a sweeping victory at the polls – confirming the success of their campaign based on white supremacy, intimidation, and fraud. But in Wilmington, the state’s largest city, white supremacist leaders were not satisfied. This episode tells what happened on November 10, 1898, in Wilmington: a massacre of Black men, and the only successful coup d'etat in U.S. history.

By John Biewen and Michael A. Betts, II. Interviews with LeRae Umfleet, Bertha Todd, William Sturkey, Cedric Harrison, and Milo Manly. Story editor: Loretta Williams. Voice actor: Mike Wiley. Music by Kieran Haile, Blue Dot Sessions, Okaya, Jameson Nathan Jones, Kevin McLeod, and Lucas Biewen. Art by Zaire McPhearson. “Echoes of a Coup” is an initiative of America’s Hallowed Ground, a project of the Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University.

Transcript

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0:00.0	A Content warning. This episode contains descriptions of violence and the use of a racial epithet.
0:07.0	Hey, another note here at the top, and bear with us, this is going to take a couple minutes.
0:13.0	You may have noticed in the credits for previous episodes of this season that Echoes of
0:17.3	a Coo is a collaboration with a project called America's Hallowed Ground. Both seen on radio and America's Hallowed Ground. Both seen on radio and America's Hallowed Ground
0:25.3	are supported by the Keenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University.
0:29.6	In this episode we'll hear about a man named William Rand Keenan Senior, who played a disturbing
0:35.1	role in the events of Wilmington, 1898.
0:38.3	The Keenan Institute was not named for William Keenan Senior., who died in 1903,
0:43.4	and much of the wealth that allowed his relatives
0:45.4	to end out institutions like the Keenan Institute
0:48.4	came to later generations.
0:51.1	In the 18th and 19th centuries, the Keenans owned a large plantation in
0:54.9	Duplin County, North Carolina, where they enslaved 20 to 50 black people.
0:59.1	Their slave-based cotton and timber business made them well off.
1:04.3	They would lose that fortune with the end of the Civil War and emancipation,
1:08.1	but by the 1890s William Keenan Sr. was a successful merchant in Wilmington.
1:13.7	The bigger family fortune came to Keenan Sr's daughter, Mary Lily Keenan, through her marriage
1:19.5	in 1901 to the oil and real estate tycoon Henry Flagler.
1:24.0	When Flagler died in 1913, his fortune went to his widow,
1:28.0	and when she died four years later,
1:30.0	she had no children, so the estate was split mostly among her siblings
1:34.6	including her brother William Rand Keenan Jr. William Jr. grew up in
	...

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