Alex Manly was a prominent figure in history known for his role as a newspaper editor and publisher. He was the editor of the “Daily Record,” a newspaper in Wilmington, North Carolina, during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In 1898, Wilmington experienced a racial riot and massacre known as the Wilmington Insurrection of 1898, where a white mob attacked the black community and forcibly overthrew the city’s biracial government.
The incident was triggered, in part, by an editorial written by Alex Manly in response to the widely circulated inflammatory speech by Rebecca Latimer Felton, a white woman who advocated for lynching black men based on false accusations of assaulting white women.
Manly’s editorial in the “Daily Record” addressed the taboo subject of interracial relationships and highlighted the consensual relationships between black men and white women, challenging the prevailing racial prejudices of the time. His writings were considered daring and provocative, but they also fueled the anger of white supremacists who used this as a pretext to incite violence against the black community.
Following the uprising, Alex Manly was forced to flee Wilmington for his own safety, and the “Daily Record” was destroyed. His courageous stance on racial issues in a deeply segregated and racist society left a significant impact on the civil rights movement in the United States.