Lynne Scott Constantine
Diptych Digital Photomontage, 2024. 21” x 9”
In North Carolina history, the year 1898 was infamous for the Wilmington Coup and Massacre, in which white supremacists and their terrorist wing, the Red Shirts, stole an election from “fusionists” (Black and white politicians trying to run the city together), murdering and running off prominent Black leaders, burning their businesses and homes to the ground, and setting back Black voting rights and political power in the South for nearly a century. In the lower image in this piece, we see the only known photo of a Red Shirt gang, posing on the day of the coup in a small town not far from Wilmington.
Although I (and many Americans, until recently) knew nothing about what happened in Wilmington in 1898, another historical event that I did know well had taken place that same year: the Spanish-American War. My childhood history texts were full of the lore of Teddy Roosevelt and the Rough Riders, a band of ragtag fighters recruited from the western and central plains states.
In the upper photo, we see TR posing with his Rough Riders; his men are wearing their brown uniforms, but TR was wearing a Western-style red shirt. Roosevelt had been a sickly child and built himself up by intensive exercise. He was famous for wearing Western-style red shirts as a sign of masculine vigor, which he also associated with the white imperative toward territorial expansion.
I found a couple of 1898 North Carolina newspaper stories identifying the Rough Riders as taking part in post-Coup parades and identifying the Red Shirts as TR’s recruits, but neither claim is accurate. Perhaps the confusion was just the manly red shirts; or perhaps it’s the overlap of Red Shirt white supremacy with TR’s documented white supremacist views. Rudyard Kipling even wrote a poem called “The White Man’s Burden” to encourage TR’s fight against Spain in the Pacific arm of the Spanish-American War, through which the US became the colonial power over the Phillipines.
Image Sources: The top image of Theodore Roosevelt standing with his Rough Riders on San Juan Hill is an image held by the Library of Congress. Although the LOC image is a black-and-white print, its stored negative is a color negative that shows Roosevelt wearing his characteristic red shirt, with the soldiers around him wearing the brown uniforms of their regiment. Using the negative’s color information as a guide, I digitally colored the shirt.
The lower image, which is the only known photograph of a Red Shirt gang, is in the North Carolina State Archives. The photo was taken on November 8, 1898, the date of the Wilmington Massacre and Coup, in the town of Laurinburg, about one hundred miles northwest of Wilmington. Guided by a museum specimen of a Red Shirt worn in the late 1890s, I digitally colored the shirts.