Rebecca Latimer Felton was a southern political activist, writer, and lecturer. She was an enslaver, a staunch segregationist, and vocal proponent of lynching. She was the first woman to serve in the U.S. Senate, for a brief 24 hours.
In her speech, “Women on the Farm”, given on August 11, 1898, for the Georgia Agricultural Society Felton advocated for unrelenting lynching of Black men who she described as dangers to innocent white women on farms. Alexander Manly’s response to her speech claiming that many interracial sexual encounters are consensual enraged white supremacists and eventually led to the destruction of his newspaper, The Daily Record.
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This lesson explores the Wilmington Massacre and Coup d’état of 1898 by examining the events and political environment leading up to and the people and groups involved in the massacre and coup.
