1898 - Human Rights, Social Justice

Human Rights, Social Justice

The U.S. Supreme Court rules March 28 in United States v. Wong Kim Ark that the 14th Amendment applies to all people born in the United States "regardless of race or color" (see 1886). Plaintiff Wong cannot be prevented by the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 from re-entering the country after returning from a trip to China.

Drunken white Ohio volunteers at Tampa seize a black child June 6, precipitating a race riot among troops awaiting embarkation orders for Cuba. The rioters burn cafés and other business establishments, but blacks fight side by side with whites in the Spanish-American War and gain praise for their courage and skill.

Louisiana adopts a new constitution with a "grandfather clause" restricting permanent voting registration to whites and those blacks whose fathers and grandfathers were qualified to vote as of January 1, 1867, a clause that virtually disenfranchises blacks. Race riots and lynchings sweep the South; 101 black men are lynched (see Mississippi, 1890; Alabama, 1901).

Wilmington, N.C., has a race riot and coup d'état November 10 that leaves at least 14 blacks dead. The city's population is mostly black, blacks have held important positions in the municipal government and more blacks have gained office in the recent election, former Confederate officer and U.S. congressman Col. Alfred Moore Waddell, 64, has called for the removal of Republicans and Populists from power and given a speech urging whites to "choke the Cape Fear with carcasses" if need be, editor Alex Manly, 32, of the black-owned Wilmington Daily Record has inflamed hatred with an August 18 editorial charging that "poor white men are careless in the matter of protecting their women," and that "our experience among poor white people in the country teaches us that women of that race are not any more particular in the matter of clandestine meetings with colored men than the white men with the colored women," some 500 white men assemble at the armory of the Wilmington Light Infantry at 8 o'clock in the morning, Manly flees the city, hundreds of black men, women, and children take refuge in the woods and swamps, the crowd grows to perhaps 2,000 as it moves toward the Daily Record offices, a fire destroys the building's top floor, Wilmington's white mayor resigns under pressure, other white and black officials follow suit, and North Carolina will adopt a Jim Crow "grandfather clause" providing that henceforth men may vote only if they can read and write or if their grandfathers voted, thereby disenfranchising black men.

Chippewa (Ojibway) in Minnesota go on the warpath, bringing U.S. Army troops to put down the tribesmen. Normally peaceful, the Chippewa protest a law that permits logging on their lands and dams that have flooded their crops and eroded tribal burial grounds.

New Zealand women gain the right to vote on the same basis as men, becoming the world's first women to enjoy equal suffrage (see 1893).

Irish women gain the right to sit on district councils beginning December 22.