UNCW Alumni and Faculty Contribute to Archiving of Historic Black-Owned Newspaper

Members of UNCW’s creative writing community played an integral part in preserving a piece of Wilmington’s past recently when copies of the Wilmington Daily Record, a black-owned newspaper once thought lost to history, were delivered to the N.C. Digital Heritage Center at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for digital archiving. Distinguished visiting writer John Jeremiah Sullivan and UNCW alumnus Joel Finsel led the project, with department chair David Gessner and Thomas S. Kenan III Distinguished Chair Clyde Edgerton serving as special advisers. Recent MFA graduate Griffin Limerick served as field researcher.

The black-owned Daily Record angered white supremacists almost immediately upon its founding in the 1890s. After the paper published an editorial arguing that not all interracial relationships constituted rape, a mob of extremists torched its offices during the Wilmington Race Riot of August 1898, leading many to believe that the paper had been lost forever. However, Sullivan and Finsel—meeting weekly with a group of twelve eighth graders from Williston Middle School and the Friends School of Wilmington—worked diligently for more than a year to recover these artifacts of Wilmington’s past. With the generosity of the Cape Fear Museum and especially the vital help of the museum's staff historian, Jan Davidson, they were able to locate seven legible copies of the paper, which they delivered to the N.C. Digital Heritage Center on July 11. There, high-resolution cameras captured the documents for archival preservation.

“When Jan Davidson realized that three never-before-seen physical copies of the Record had been hiding in the museum's basement for decades, she gave us all the sort of Indiana Jones-style thrill that's among the highest and rarest pleasures of long research projects,” says Sullivan, who contributes regularly to the New York Times Magazine and the Paris Review. “The greatest pleasure of the whole experience, though, was watching the eighth graders experience real historical work for the first time. They were feeling what it's like to dip your hands into the liquid ink of history, to reach places where primary documents remain to be read and primary work remains to be done.”

The archived copies of the Daily Record can be viewed via the Digital Heritage Center’s website.

 Recent MFA graduate Griffin Limerick (far right), distinguished visiting writer John Jeremiah Sullivan (second from right), and members of the Wilmington Daily Record project deliver copies of the newspaper to the N.C. Digital Heritage Center in Chapel Hill [photo courtesy of Joel Finsel]

“When we started this project, it didn't seem likely or even worth hoping for that we would end up finding unknown copies of the Daily Record. We had braced ourselves for the probability that we (and by extension our gang of eighth-grade student-researchers) would find nothing. In fact we'd written a draft of a syllabus that centered around the total absence of the newspaper from the historical record. That absence would have been fascinating in and of itself, because we're talking about one of the most important and controversial African-American papers in our history. How could it vanish? How could it be missing even from the fancy new electronic databases of old black newspapers? Yet it undeniably was. As we learned, that was not an accident. Certain parties involved in the massacre of 1898 had actually made efforts to buy up all existing copies of the Record and burn them. The paper was deliberately erased from history. This made it all the more exciting when we began finding scattered copies on microfilm at different libraries, one here, two there. The libraries didn't even know where the original copies had come from, and no longer had them, or had never possessed them. When Jan Davidson, the historian at the Cape Fear Museum, realized that three never-before-seen physical copies of the Record had been hiding in the museum's basement for decades, she gave us all the sort of Indiana Jones-style thrill that's among the highest and rarest pleasures of long research projects. The greatest pleasure of the whole experience, though, was watching the eighth graders experience real historical work for the first time. They were feeling what it's like to dip your hands into the liquid ink of history, to reach places where primary documents remain to be read and primary work remains to be done. On a very special day, one of our Williston advisors, Dorothy DeShields, brought to class with her an elderly man named Michael Brown, an active parishioner at one of the local African-American churches. He told us of hearing, as a boy, his mother and grandmother's stories about 1898. For a few moments the students watched as the subject we'd been studying in the archives came visibly and literally to life. All of us there in the room knew what Faulkner meant when he said that the past is not even past. 

“Apart from Mrs. DeShields, there are several people whose work was crucial to the project, and who deserve to be thanked. Most are mentioned in Ben Steelman's Star News article. But Cameron Francisco was left out, and he was a rock.

“One final thing that seems worth saying: a beautiful aspect of this project, and something we couldn't have predicted going in, is that it gave us a way to talk about black Wilmington in the 1890s without dwelling entirely on the massacre and coup. Not that we avoided it—not that one ever could—or tried to paint over it. But we went deeper. By focusing on the Daily Record not merely as a casualty or a burn site but as a working black newspaper with a journalistic culture and a material legacy, we were able to go further back into time, into the history of black Wilmington pre-1898, when this city was home, after all, to one of the most important African-American communities in the country, and when its institutions were racially mixed to an often-surprising degree. The world of the Daily Record's offices and readership, black and white, was precisely what the massacre of 1898 destabilized and to a large extent destroyed. Learning about that world at its peak, or in its flowering, brought the violence and destruction of the massacre into even greater relief. But it also taught us that much survives. Much waits to be woven into the story.” —John Jeremiah Sullivan