Last week I was interviewed about Charles B. Aycock for a historic site video and visited the Aycock Birthplace to talk about a piece of Wayne County, North Carolina’s political history. The popular, and anodyne, celebration of Aycock as the Education Governor casts deep shadow over his activity as the golden orator of North Carolina’s white supremacist movement and the noxious role he played in the disenfranchisement of thousands of African-Americans. It’s past time his hagiography was rewritten, and I’m honored to contribute to the effort. Meanwhile, though, go visit the Birthplace for a glimpse of late nineteenth-century farmlife that would have been familiar to nearby Wilson County residents — including a one-room schoolhouse like so many that housed Black students until after World War II.

If you’re interested, here’s the text of my talk about the assassination of John Frank Baker, an African-American politician from southern Wayne County. Baker would have been well known to Samuel H. Vick and other Wilson County Republicans, and his murder surely shocked and frightened them and their community.

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The story goes something like this: John Frank Baker was the first black man elected to Congress from Wayne County. He never made it to Washington — assassinated as he attempted to board a train north for his swearing-in.

Frank Baker married into my extended family, and I’ve heard versions of this story for decades. Something about it didn’t sit right with me though. What is the real story?

First, who was John Frank Baker?

Baker was born Christmas Day 1852 to William and Patsey Baker, perhaps in Wayne County. He had at least one brother, William B. Baker Jr.  Lacking evidence of their freedom prior to the Civil War, the family likely was enslaved.

By the early 1870s, the Bakers had settled in Dudley, a crossroads village in southern Wayne County. On 4 December 1874, 22 year-old Frank Baker married 17 year-old Della Aldridge (my great-great-grandfather’s first cousin). Della gave birth to a daughter, Vera, in January 1877, but died soon after, and Frank married her sister Mary Ann Aldridge in November 1879. Della and Mary Ann were the daughters of J. Matthew and Catherine Boseman Aldridge, born of whom were born free. The Aldridges had roots in Duplin County, and the Bosemans were a free family of color originally from the southern Edgecombe County area.

Frank and Mary Ann Baker remained in Dudley, where Frank operated a small grocery. Mary Ann gave birth to Jesse Frank in 1886, Beulah in 1893, and Blossom in 1895.

Though never a major political seat, Wayne County was in (and out of for a brief stretch) the so-called Black Second, the Congressional district that encompassed a cluster of eastern North Carolina’s mostly-black counties during Reconstruction and into the early 20th century. African-American political activity in the district during this tumultuous period was extensive and well-documented, and the Black Second sent four black Congressmen to Washington DC in the last quarter of the nineteenth century: John Adams Hyman of Warren County (1875-1877), James Edward O’Hara of Enfield (1883-1887), Henry Plummer Cheatham of Littleton (1889-1893), and George Henry White of Tarboro (1897-1901).

No John Frank Baker.

In fact, Frank Baker died 20 March 1897, the same month that George H. White was sworn into the 55th Congress, having defeated white Democratic incumbent Frederick A. Woodard of Wilson. Clearly, Frank Baker was never elected to Congress. What, then, was the origin of the story I heard?

African-Americans in Wayne County, both freeborn and newly freed, were eager participants in post-Civil War political life. Even after Reconstruction ended, Black men – and only men – in Wayne County served as jurors, election workers, aldermen, commissioners, and Republican party movers and shakers. At the same time that Wayne County native Charles B. Aycock, future golden orator of white supremacy, established his law practice in Goldsboro, Black attorney George T. Wassom hung his shingle – and founded a newspaper to champion causes important to his people.

In 1879, Frank Baker was appointed to a two-year term as a school committeeman, his first known position of public service. In 1880, he was appointed pollholder – the person responsible for overseeing a voting site — at Dudley. In 1882, he was elected delegate to the county Republican party convention. In 1884, Baker accepted a year-long stint as Dudley’s postmaster. This position, a patronage appointment granted to party stalwarts, is evidence of Frank’s solid place among Second District politicos. In fact, in 1891, his wife Mary Ann Baker also was appointed to a year as postmaster, which angered many of the whites she served.  Undaunted, in 1894, Baker attended the state Republican Party convention as a Wayne County delegate. In 1896, a Wilson newspaper reported that Baker was in town as part of the multiracial Republican district executive committee that included black U.S. Congressman Henry Cheatham and white State Senator Hiram L. Grant of Goldsboro, a former Union Army major.

Though a party loyalist, Frank Baker did not simply go along to get along and was known as a passionate community activist. On November 4, 1896, newspapers across the United States ran a sensational story about Negroes “taking control” of Goldsboro after a “clash with whites.” The alleged cause of the uprising? “An incendiary speech” made on Election Day by John Frank Baker, “a colored Republican of Dudley.” Breathless and dramatic, the articles described an improbable scenario – 150 armed Black men marching through the city and overwhelming law enforcement. Curiously, however, none gave details of Baker’s allegedly fiery speech.

On November 5, the Argus attacked Frank Baker’s speech as “a vicious firebrand of hatred against the white people and purposely intended to stir up the passions of his negro audience” and pointed a finger at State Senator Grant and “the miserable white hounds [who] sat by and listened with satisfaction.” Ignoring the fire-breathing, white supremacist rhetoric regularly published in its own pages, the paper went on to warn its readers: “The white people of Goldsboro are a law-abiding people; but they are also a self-respecting and self-governing people, and no negro, or class of negroes, or race of negroes can assail them with impunity.” The writer reminded African-Americans that they relied on the generosity of white people “for help … for justice” and that Baker had been lucky to escape with his life.

We don’t know Frank Baker’s exact words or why they touched off such a passionate response, but it is clear he was a powerfully polarizing figure in Wayne County. On November 18, eight of black Goldsboro’s leading lights – including Frank Baker’s cousin by marriage, Matthew W. Aldridge, as well as well-known Presbyterian minister Clarence Dillard, tried to pour oil on roiled waters with a joint letter to the Daily Argus. Needing to strike an inoffensive tone, the letter started with general statements about political civility, then expressed regrets “that anything like a race riot should have taken place in Goldsboro, which hitherto has had an almost unspotted record.” Though acknowledging the many kindnesses of white people, the writers carefully suggested the incident “was doubtless caused by the unthoughtful hastiness of both parties and races…” The writers did not denounce Frank Baker or even mention him by name, but their unease was clear, and their letter closed with hope for a “return to the same friendly and neighborly feeling that has characterized us in the past.”

Despite the tension on both sides, Baker’s speech and the so-called riot it sparked quickly faded from the news, and he continued about his business. In January 1897, Baker traveled to Raleigh to lobby for the incorporation of Dudley. Baker was an avid proponent of this idea, which would have allowed the village to elect its own officials, raise its own taxes, and govern itself. He may, however, have underestimated the depth of opposition to his plan.

In mid-February, Wayne County’s Republican Senator Hiram L. Grant introduced a bill to incorporate Dudley, which passed with little discussion. 

A month later John Frank Baker was dead.

The Raleigh Daily Tribune broke the story in a brief post emphasizing Baker’s poor reputation. The Raleigh Gazette, an African-American paper, reported differently, describing Baker as an “honest, upright, industrious man.”

The Goldsboro Headlight and the Argus, rival newspapers operating in Wayne County, soon weighed in. Though no killer had been identified, much less charged and convicted, the papers proclaimed the motive for the murder was Baker’s unpopular move to incorporate Dudley.

Assuming that the newspapers’ basic descriptions of the murder are correct, here’s what we learn about Frank Baker’s death. He was not boarding a train when he was killed. Rather, he was minding customers on a Saturday night at his grocery store near the railroad warehouse in Dudley. Shots rang out suddenly, and Baker was struck in the neck and spine at fairly close range, perhaps from someone standing on the porch. He died instantly. And a room full of people claimed to have seen nothing.

In an astonishing interview with an Argus reporter, Frank Baker’s brother and political rival (within the party) William B. Baker placed the responsibility for Frank’s death on his own head. Frank had made a great many enemies by his tongue, William said, and he had warned his brother many times that someone would kill him “for the way he run everybody down that disagreed with him.” Then, shockingly, William Baker said, “I am not prepared to say who did the killing, neither do I care to know. I am satisfied that his death was the result of some of his big brags, and if he had taken my advice and kept his mouth shut he would have been a living men to day.”

A month later, the wheels of justice were spinning uselessly, as local newspapers indignantly proclaimed the innocence of two white men implicated — but not actually charged — in the crime. A week after W.B. Bowden’s good name was cleared, J. Will Grady was released when the “facts of his innocence were established.” Months passed, and law enforcement identified no further suspects.

On May 27, 1897, the Headlight tersely noted that the governor of North Carolina had offered a reward for the capture of Frank Baker’s killers. An African-American newspaper in Raleigh printed the full text.

Shortly after her husband’s death, Mary Ann Aldridge Baker again assumed the duties of postmaster for Dudley, a position she held until 1911. She reared her children in Dudley, then moved to Greensboro, North Carolina, to live with her stepdaughter (and niece) Vera Baker Holt until her death in 1917. The family never received justice, and the assassination of John Frank Baker remains unsolved. 

Frank Baker was not a United States Congressman. He was not killed on his way to take office. Nonetheless, he died for his political beliefs, and it is impossible not to ask how his murder fit into the complex racial tensions that fed the rise of white supremacy in North Carolina and culminated in the Wilmington Massacre of 1898 and the 1899 suffrage amendment that stripped most African-Americans of the right to vote. Baker pursued his own goals, refusing to mute his voice or otherwise defer to others’ ambitions. Even as C.B. Aycock and others were scheming to crush voting rights for African Americans, Frank Baker forcefully championed an alternative vision of Black political engagement. We cannot know North Carolina history, or understand its present, without knowing the true stories of people like John Frank Baker.