The Wilmington Massacre of 1898
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2020-07-21
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en
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Abstract
The Wilmington massacre of 1898 occurred in a political environment of white supremacy in the American South, which ultimately led to one-sided and racist local news coverage of the only coup d’état in United States’ history. Subsequent research on this massacre has long been non-existing, until the centennial commemoration in 1998, when there was renewed attention for this massacre, after which the research was frequently filled with misunderstandings, for example on the recurrent denomination of the massacre as a ‘race riot.’ The key problem is that these frames, such as ‘race riot,’ were originally introduced by white supremacists, but still remain in contemporary research. and This thesis investigates the contribution local news coverage has made on following research on the Wilmington massacre. Since newspapers were the principal news sources at the end of the nineteenth century, this analysis will be done from the perspective of The Morning Star, the most read newspaper in Wilmington in 1898, particularly interesting because of its unequivocal Democratic and White Supremacist incentive. The methodology of this thesis is a qualitative content analysis, focusing on news frames. This analysis is further divided in analyses on rhetorical framing devices and on technical framing devices. This thesis shows that local news coverage of the Wilmington massacre by The Morning Star helped to lay the foundations for a one-sided and racist narrative, used by white supremacists for political and ideological purposes, and that some elements from this narrative can still be detected in the recent historiography and research.
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