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What occured doing the coup

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Think of a coup d'etat and images of a far-flung banana republic likely come to mind. So it might come as a surprise that it happened here in the United States - just once, in 1898.

A mob of white supremacists armed with rifles and pistols marched on City Hall in Wilmington, N.C., on Nov. 10 and overthrew the elected local government, forcing both black and white officials to resign and running many out of town. The coup was the culmination of a race riot in which whites torched the offices of a black newspaper and killed a number of black residents. No one is sure how many African-Americans died that day, but some estimates say as many as 90 were killed.

"Some of the elderly African-Americans told my stepfather that the Cape Fear River was running red with blood," Bertha Todd, a teacher, recalls in producer Alan Lipke's documentary series, "Between Civil War and Civil Rights."

Especially chilling was the fact that the insurgency had been carefully planned - a conspiracy by powerful white Democrats.

Southern Democrats lost their grip on power in North Carolina in 1894 and plotted to wrest control from the biracial Republican Party in 1898 elections. They campaigned on a platform of white supremacy and protecting their women from black men.

As the Nov. 8, 1898, vote approached, whites in Wilmington mobilized. They held supremacist rallies and parades and organized militias of "Red Shirts" to intimidate blacks from voting. The statewide election restored Democrats to power, and two days later, the white supremacists descended on Wilmington's City Hall.

Their leader, Col. Alfred Moore Waddell, had publicly threatened in a pre-election speech to "choke the current of the Cape Fear River" with black bodies, according to a 2006 report chronicling the events by the 1898 Wilmington Race Riot Commission. After the coup, Waddell was elected mayor of Wilmington.

North Carolina Democrats began passing a flurry of Jim Crow laws in 1899, and new voting restrictions further disenfranchised blacks through a poll tax and literacy test.

In "Between Civil War and Civil Rights," George Rountree III reads from the memoir of his grandfather, a white civic leader in Wilmington who feared competition from blacks:

"The obvious test for intelligence was reading and writing. It would exclude all those immigrants that were coming into our country, at the rate of a million a year, until they had qualified themselves, and it would exclude a large number of ignorant and stupid Negroes until they had qualified themselves."

But Southerners were careful to give the voting restrictions a veneer of legality, wrote William Everett Henderson, a Wilmington lawyer exiled by the coup. Henderson's great-granddaughter, Lisa Adams, also appears in the documentary series and reads from his papers:

"So now we have bold and unscrupulous legislative enactments in open defiance of the national Constitution. And that last earthly tribunal, the U.S. Supreme Court, well knows the intent."

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How The Only Coup D'Etat In U.S. History Unfolded

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In 1898, armed white supremacists overthrew the elected local government in Wilmington, N.C. The coup - the only one in U.S. history - was the culmination of a race riot and grew out of a conspiracy of powerful white Democrats.

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Men gather outside the charred remains of The Daily Record after the 1898 massacre

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Men gather outside the charred remains of The Daily Record after the 1898 massacre

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The Lost History of an American Coup D’État

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The Lost History of an American Coup D’État

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Library of Congress

By the time the fire started, Alexander Manly had vanished. That didn't stop the mob of 400 people who'd reached his newsroom from making good on their promise. The crowd, led by a former congressman, had given the editor-in-chief an ultimatum: Destroy your newspaper and leave town forever, or we will wreck it for you.

They burned The Daily Record to the ground.

It was the morning of November 10, 1898, in Wilmington, North Carolina, and the fire was the beginning of an assault that took place seven blocks east of the Cape Fear River, about 10 miles inland from the Atlantic Ocean. By sundown, Manly's newspaper had been torched, as many as 60 people had been murdered, and the local government that was elected two days prior had been overthrown and replaced by white supremacists.

For all the violent moments in United States history, the mob's gruesome attack was unique: It was the only coup d'état ever to take place on American soil.

What happened that day was nearly lost to history. For decades, the perpetrators were cast as heroes in American history textbooks. The black victims were wrongly described as instigators. It took nearly a century for the truth of what had really happened to begin to creep back into public awareness. Today, the old site of The Daily Record is a nondescript church parking lot-an ordinary-looking square of matted grass on a tree-lined street in historic Wilmington. The Wilmington Journal, a successor of sorts to the old Daily Record, stands in a white clapboard house across the street. But there's no evidence of what happened there in 1898.

Recommended Reading

Conservatives in North Carolina don't often bring up the Wilmington Massacre. Even many of those North Carolinians who are now aware of it are still reluctant to talk about it. Those who do sometimes stumble over words like "insurrection" and "riot"-loaded terms, and imprecise ones.

Not only was it a coup, though, the massacre was arguably the nadir of post-slavery racial politics.

That's why it was so shocking when, on Monday, the state's GOP executive director, Dallas Woodhouse, openly acknowledged the massacre on Twitter. In response to a tweet from the North Carolina Democratic Party about the Voting Rights Act, Woodhouse criticized what he saw as hypocrisy. "The events of Nov. 10, 1898 were a result of the long-range campaign strategy by Democratic Party leaders to regain political control of Wilmington," he wrote, "at that time (the) state's most populous city - and North Carolina in the name of white supremacy."

Woodhouse may have been more interested in gaining political points than actually probing a painful memory in North Carolinian history. (He didn't respond to a request for an interview.) But Woodhouse's version is actually much closer to the truth of what transpired than many other accounts.

A capsule biography of Alfred Moore Waddell -the former member of Congress who led the massacre-from the website of the Cape Fear Historical Institute in Wilmington exemplifies what some students were long taught:

The Democrats and most white citizens of the State feared a return to the corrupt and financially devastating rule of Republicans as had been experienced during reconstruction in the late 1860s. Waddell led white Wilmingtonians in their effort to shut down a racially inflammatory black newspaper, and then became mayor of Wilmington after the unpopular Republican regime had resigned. As mayor, 'Waddell quickly restored sobriety and peace, demonstrating his capacity to act with courage in critical times.' He continued in this office until 1905, leading a responsible and honest government.

That passage was written by Bernhard Thuersam, who is a former chair both of the Cape Fear Museum board, and of the state chapter of the League of the South. While Thuersam's account diverges sharply from the documentary record, it is instructive in one regard: Thuersam clearly identifies 19th-century Republicans as liberals or "radicals," and in his writing often identifies 19th-century Democrats simply as "Conservatives."

According to the historian David S. Cecelski, presenting Waddell as a righteous campaigner for "sobriety and peace" was standard in Wilmington until the 1990s. "I grew up in a small town in eastern North Carolina 90 miles from Wilmington," Cecelski says. "I had a book in my middle-school classroom that listed the 12 greatest North Carolinians ever. It included the Wright brothers, Virginia Dare, and then it included three of the people who were the leaders of the white supremacy campaign."

"For something like Wilmington in 1898," Cecelski continues, "it's hard to describe the level of indoctrination. In the 1910s, 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, they bragged about [the coup]. After that, they backed off but it stayed in the history books and they talked about it as an unfortunate but necessary event."

In fact, part of how historians have pieced together the real story of the Wilmington massacre is by looking back at newspaper archives-from towns all across North Carolina, not just Wilmington-where similar violence was coordinated that day. "They burned down black newspapers all over the state," Cecelski says. "They shut down entry to the city from blacks and Republicans... It's important not to forget that this was a planned thing. This wasn't two people getting in a fight in a street corner and sparking underlying racial tensions or something like that."

But state officials solidified their grip on power by promoting that very fiction: They originally called the 1898 incident the " Wilmington Race Riot," with the implication that the event was instigated by a riot from blacks and quelled by Waddell's fighters.

After open celebration of white supremacist violence lost favor, a sort of bland sanitizing of history dominated recollections. That lasted until around the time of the centennial of the massacre, in 1998, when scholars and the descendants of the Wilmington black community that had been nearly destroyed in 1898 began to push for recognition of what really happened. The state's acknowledgement of its 70-year reign of white supremacy during the "Solid South" period followed the same pattern. Men like Charles B. Aycock, an agitator of the Wilmington riots who three years later was elected governor on a platform of white supremacy, were revered in the state until recently-and, in some cases, still are.

Glenda Gilmore, a North Carolina native and a professor of history at Yale, refers to the whitewashed period as a "a 50-year black hole of information." According to Gilmore, the bloody history of white supremacy was largely unacknowledged in the state's educational system. "Someone like me, I had never heard the word 'lynching' until I was 21," she says. "This history was totally hidden from white children. And that was deliberate."

But now that history is being uncovered and spread. Aycock's legacy has been reconsidered, and the collection of buildings and landmarks named after him in the state has dwindled. The Wilmington Massacre is widely acknowledged as a coup and as a foundational moment in creating a white-supremacist state.

North Carolina Republicans have helped uncover that history as well, although some of their acknowledgments of the legacy of white supremacy have come with partisan strings attached. In 2007, back when he was a first-term state General Assembly representative, Senator Thom Tillis blocked a state resolution formally apologizing for the massacre. He'd supported the nonpartisan resolution with the caveat that it include an amendment from him that "would have acknowledged the historical fact that the white Republican government joined with black citizens to oppose the rioters." When that amendment failed, the resolution died with it.

Nationally, conservatives have often taken a similar tack; embracing long-suppressed bits of historical knowledge about the full scope of white supremacy, so long as they can use them to attack Democrats. The conservative American Civil Rights Union, which is run by members of President Donald Trump's voter-fraud commission, released a report in 2014 on " The Truth About Jim Crow." While the report is a cogent and relatively unglossed look at an era in which "we proved ourselves to be as capable of committing great evil as any nation on earth," the titular "truth" appears not to be the legacy of the era, but "that a great American political party is capable of subordinating the good of the nation and of humanity to its own selfish interest."

Of course, this kind of weaponization of history is most effective if the Republican and Democratic parties are viewed as unbroken ideological identities dating back to the days of Abraham Lincoln. North Carolina's own history obliterates that view. Like the rest of the South, the state experienced mass party realignment after the 1960s civil-rights movement, when southern whites began to abandon the Democratic Party.

Former Senator Jesse Helms, another Carolinian folk hero whose legacy is the subject of an ongoing controversy, was central to that realignment. Born and raised a Democrat in the Solid South, Helms switched parties in 1970, two years before his first Senate run. In 1974, Helms remarked of his decision:

The party veered so far to the left nationally, and was taken over by the people whom I'd describe as substantially left of center in North Carolina. And I think I felt, as many other Democrats felt and feel, that really I had no real faith in the party. But I didn't do anything about it. Changing parties, changing party registration, is like moving from a church. But President Nixon's speech at Kansas State, I think it was, persuaded me that maybe the Republican party in North Carolina and in the nation had a chance to restore the two party system.

After the New Deal, the Supreme Court's desegregation ruling in Brown v. Board in 1954, and the civil-rights movement, Helms shepherded white conservatives of the Solid South to the Republican Party, but continued the old Democratic Party's hard line against civil-rights reforms. And his legacy still reverberates within the North Carolina GOP that he helped build.

Partisanship didn't quite move along the exact same ideological lines in the past, and both parties' histories indicate a push and pull between North and South, social conservatism and liberalism, economic orientations, populism and authoritarianism, big government and states' rights, and races. And across those spectra, politicians of all stripes have contributed to enduring racial inequalities. But white social conservatism was undoubtedly the driving force of Democratic white-supremacist regimes in the South, and its reaction to the loss of the hegemony is part of what precipitated the rise of the modern Republican Party.

Whether he intends it or not, Woodhouse's acknowledgement of the Wilmington massacre is also acknowledgment of how that hegemony was created, and that the political movement to which he belongs can trace its roots back to the murder of black citizens and the violent overthrow of a government they elected. Lost in the fire that destroyed The Daily Record were the lives of black citizens and the spirit of a thriving black community, and also the most promising effort in the South to build racial solidarity. In wielding the memory of the massacre in an attack against the Democrats, Woodhouse runs the risk of implicating his own party in those losses.

But history serves higher purposes than blame. It can be employed in understanding the remnants of that white-supremacist regime today, and learning how to truly defeat the ills of Jim Crow. In honoring the past and the victims of Wilmington, history places the responsibility of racial equality at the feet of all political parties, and all Americans.

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capsule biography of alfred moore waddell

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state chapter of the league of the south

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The Lost History of an American Coup D'État

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By the time the fire started, Alexander Manly had vanished. That didn't stop the mob of 400 people who'd reached his newsroom from making good on their promise. The crowd, led by a former congressman, had given the editor-in-chief an ultimatum: Destroy your newspaper and leave town forever, or we will wreck it for you.

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Public domain Collier's Weekly photo

A politically motivated attack by whites against the city's leading African American citizens, the Wilmington Race Riot of 1898 documents the lengths to which white Democrats went to regain political domination of the South after Reconstruction. The violence began on Thursday, November 10 in the predominantly African American city of Wilmington, North Carolina, at that time the state's largest metropolis. Statewide election returns had recently signaled a shift in power with Democrats taking over the North Carolina State Legislature. The city of Wilmington, however, remained in Republican hands, primarily because of its solid base of African American voters. On November 10, Alfred Moore Waddell, a former Confederate officer and a white supremacist, led a group of townsmen to force the ouster of Wilmington's city officials.

Waddell relied on an editorial printed in the African American-owned Wilmington Daily Record as the catalyst for the riot. Alex Manly, the editor of the Daily Record, had published an editorial in early November arguing that "poor white men are careless in the matter of protecting their women." Paraphrasing articles by Ida B. Wells on the subject of lynching, Manly opined that "our experiences 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." Manly's public discussion of the taboo subject of interracial sex exposed the reality of sexual exploitation of black women by white men and challenged the myth of pure-white womanhood.

Forty-eight hours after Manly's editorial ran, Waddell led 500 white men to the headquarters of the Daily Record on 7th Street. The mob broke out windows and set the building on fire. Manly and other high profile African Americans fled the city; however, at least fourteen African Americans were slain that day. An eyewitness later wrote that African Americans fled to the swamps or hid in the African American cemetery at the edge of town. When their criminal behavior resulted in neither federal sanctions nor condemnation from the state, Waddell and his men formalized their control of Wilmington. The posse forced the Republican members of the city council and the mayor to resign and Waddell assumed the mayoral seat. Over the next two years North Carolina passed the " grandfather clause," as one in a series of laws designed to limit the voting rights of African Americans.

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Public domain Collier's Weekly photo A politically motivated attack by whites against the city's leading African American citizens, the Wilmington Race Riot of 1898 documents the lengths to which white Democrats went to regain political domination of the South after Reconstruction.

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White supremacist escorting black residents to the train station.

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White supremacist escorting black residents to the train station.

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S ometimes history's greatest waves leave their most vivid traces on the most local of events. In "Wilmington's Lie," David Zucchino offers a gripping account of one of the most disturbing, though virtually unknown, political events in American history. He opens with a terse verbal jolt: "The killers came by streetcar." From this ominous beginning, the ruthless 1898 massacre of blacks in Wilmington, N.C., by the members of a white-supremacist conspiracy roars to its tragic conclusion. It is a grim but fascinating story, and an instructive one.

What happened in Wilmington was not the first deliberate massacre of black Americans. In the late 1860s, white race riots killed scores of blacks in Memphis, New Orleans and upcountry Louisiana. Nor was it the last. Dozens of blacks were systematically slaughtered in Tulsa, Okla., and Ocoee, Fla., in the 1920s. Thousands, too, were lynched or shot during the Jim Crow decades in individual incidents in small towns and rural areas. The Wilmington massacre stands out as the only coup against a stable, elected government in American history, a government that was objectionable for no other reason than that it was biracial.

Mr. Zucchino, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and a contributing writer for the New York Times, welds probing research and a crisp writing style into a dramatic rendering of events, and he goes on to show their ramifications for African-Americans across the South. The Wilmington coup, as he suggests, was a kind of coda to Reconstruction-a final episode in the failed effort to create a biracial politics in the former Confederacy.

By the late 1870s, black and white Republicans had been ousted from power in most of the South. But as long as the federal government remained in Republican hands, as it did for almost all the rest of the 19th century, the Southern wing of the party was kept alive, mostly through federal patronage and the tenacious attempts of African-American voters (then virtually all Republican) to take part in elections. From time to time, Republicans managed to make common cause with populist reformers, as they did in North Carolina in the mid-1890s: A fusion ticket won sweeping victories across the state, putting many blacks into office in areas that, like Wilmington, were heavily populated by African-Americans.

In 1898, three of Wilmington's 10 aldermen were black; there were black health inspectors, black postmasters and black magistrates, as well as a black street superintendent and county treasurer-most drawn from an educated middle class that included lawyers, doctors and churchmen. Just months before the massacre, the American Baptist Publication Society had called Wilmington "the freest town for a negro in the country." Other key offices, such as those of the mayor and police chief, were held by white Republican or fusionist allies. Contrary to later racist propaganda, the city was well run. It was the very presence of blacks in positions of power that was intolerable to leading Democrats, who began railing against "Negro rule."

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'Wilmington's Lie' Review: An American Tragedy

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S ometimes history's greatest waves leave their most vivid traces on the most local of events. In "Wilmington's Lie," David Zucchino offers a gripping account of one of the most disturbing, though virtually unknown, political events in American history. He opens with a terse verbal jolt: "The killers came by streetcar."

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Wilmington coup and massacre, political coup and massacre in which the multiracial Fusionist (Republican and Populist) city government of Wilmington, North Carolina, was violently overthrown on November 10, 1898, and as many as 60 Black Americans were killed in a premeditated murder spree that was the culmination of an organized months-long statewide campaign by white supremacists to eliminate African American participation in government and permanently disenfranchise Black citizens of North Carolina. The coup followed on the heels of an election for the county, state, and federal governments that restored a Democratic majority in the state legislature, which set about enacting Jim Crow legislation that disenfranchised Black people in North Carolina for many decades to come.

Fusion politics

Federal Reconstruction (1865-77) legislation and enforcement brought the right to vote to Black Americans in North Carolina and throughout the South, leading to the participation of Black office holders in the Republican Southern state governments that dominated the period, but the end of Reconstruction resulted in the return of white Democratic-ruled "Redeemer" governments that quickly rolled back civil rights for Blacks. In the 1890s, however, the return to white dominance was challenged in North Carolina. A severe economic recession in the 1880s had been particularly hard on North Carolina farmers. Feeling that neither the Democrats nor the Republicans had been sympathetic to their plight, these farmers looked instead to the Populist (or People's) Party to advance their political goals in the 1892 election. Although few Populist candidates won office, the combined Populist and Republican vote was greater than that of the Democrats, who nonetheless constituted the majority in the state legislature.

Few of these white farmers likely cared much about the civil rights of Blacks, but they realized that by making common cause with the Republicans, they could advance their political and economic goals. By agreeing not to run competing candidates in the 1894 election, the "Fusion" coalition of Republicans and Populists took control of the state legislature and elected a Populist and a Republican to the U.S. Senate. Working together again in the 1896 election, the Fusionists retained control of the legislature and elected a Republican governor. They enacted reforms that benefited Blacks and working-class whites.

Wilmington in the Fusion era

In the 1890s Wilmington was North Carolina's most populous city, a busy commercial port with a strong economy. It was also an anomaly because a majority (56 percent) of its citizens were Black. By comparison, the Black populations of New Orleans and Louisville, Kentucky, two other cities with large nonwhite cohorts, were only 27 percent and 17 percent, respectively. Moreover, Wilmington had a thriving Black middle class made up of both professionals and entrepreneurs, and Black Wilmingtonians were employed as artisans, industrial workers, labourers, members of maritime crews, and domestic workers. Building on a strong foundation of Black schools, inherited status, and wealth, the Black community in Wilmington had created a cohesive social and cultural environment. The city also boasted a rarity for 19th-century America, a Black-owned daily newspaper, the Wilmington Record, operated by Alexander Manly. Perhaps most significantly, Blacks constituted a notable presence in local government. Three of the city's 10 aldermen and 10 of the city's 26 policemen were Black, and there were also Black magistrates.

The white supremacy campaign

Black participation and prominence in North Carolina's politics and government humiliated and enraged many whites. Two men who had powerful roles in the state's political life- Josephus Daniels, publisher of the Raleigh News and Observer, North Carolina's most influential paper, and Furnifold Simmons, chairman of the state's Democratic Party-met and decided to do something about the political situation: namely, to eliminate forever, by ballot or bullet, voting and office-holding by Blacks. Theirs was not a covert operation. They openly professed their intentions, bold-facedly labeling the project the "white supremacy campaign." The plan called for stealing the upcoming 1898 federal and state election by exploiting the inherent racism of white Populist supporters and political differences between them and Black and white Republicans as well as by employing terrorist intimidation and violence.

Daniels used his influential paper (abetted by the Charlotte Observer, Wilmington Messenger, and Wilmington Morning Star) to conduct a campaign of virulent racist propaganda. Because some 20 percent of white North Carolinians were illiterate, much of the white supremacist message was conveyed through heavy-handed, outrageously offensive political cartoons. Republican government was depicted as wildly corrupt, grossly incompetent, and controlled by grotesque, dim-witted Black people. Among the favourite tropes was the alleged threat posed to Southern white women by supposedly sex-starved, bestial Black men. In a widely reported speech during the summer of 1898, a Georgia woman, Rebecca Ann Felton, openly called for lynching as the appropriate response to the threat she claimed Black men posed to white women. Alexander Manly answered her speech with an editorial in the Wilmington Record in which he noted the historical prevalence of the rape of Black women by Southern white men and pointed out that many white women were attracted to and fell in love with Black men whom they associated with by choice. The response to Manly's editorial, reprinted in newspapers across North Carolina, was volcanic; a widespread demand that he be lynched was tamped down by leaders of the white supremacist campaign with the argument that it would be disadvantageous to lynch Manly before the election but that his time would come.

The terrorist component of the campaign was provided by the Red Shirts, effectively the paramilitary extension of the Southern Democratic Party and basically the Ku Klux Klan in a different uniform. The heavily armed Red Shirts borrowed their loose red tunics and tactics from a white supremacist faction in South Carolina led by Wade Hampton and Sen. Benjamin R. Tillman, the latter of whom had addressed Democratic gatherings in North Carolina on more than one occasion. In the run-up to the election, Red Shirts prowled the nighttime landscape, bursting into homes of Black people and white Republicans to threaten them with violence should they vote or simply beating them as a prophylactic measure, as well as compelling Populists to vote for Democrats. This was the context for the 1898 election.

The 1898 election in North Carolina

When it came time for the November 1898 election, the Red Shirts were an ominous armed presence at polling places frequented by Blacks and Republicans. On election eve, at a meeting in Wilmington sponsored by the white supremacist campaign, Alfred M. Waddell, a former congressman and Confederate general, provided marching orders for the more than 1,000 men gathered:

You are the sons of noble ancestry. You are Anglo-Saxons. You are armed and prepared and you will do your duty....Go to the polls tomorrow and if you find the negro out voting, tell him to leave the polls. If he refuses, kill him. Shoot him down in his tracks.

On election day some Black and white Republicans braved the polls, but many more stayed away, enough that the Democrats retook the North Carolina legislature, recaptured county governments, and monopolized the state's congressional delegation. Just to make sure the count went their way, Red Shirts had also attacked the polls and stuffed the ballot boxes, in some cases producing Democratic margins of victory that exceeded the number of registered voters in the districts in question.

The coup and massacre in Wilmington

In Wilmington the election was the same story as in the rest of the state but with tragic differences. As the site of unparalleled Black economic and political empowerment and success, Wilmington was the focus of especially heightened white supremacist enmity. Moreover, Wilmington's multiracial city government remained in place after the November 8 election, its local government elections not due to be held until March 1899. Not about to wait until March, white supremacists in Wilmington, including Red Shirts, the White Government Union, and a group of leading white businessmen known as the "Secret Nine," had a different fate in mind for Wilmington. In the days before the election, the plotters made sure that local merchants stopped selling ammunition to Black customers. Conveniently, the segregated regiment of the local Black militia that had been called up to serve in the Spanish-American War was still deployed in Georgia. On the other hand, two white militia units, including the Wilmington Light Infantry, were present in Wilmington, ready to augment the Red Shirts. Finally, having made little attempt to hide their plans to retake the government of Wilmington, the white supremacist campaign had drawn a number of reporters from national newspapers to town, whom they entertained and filled with fabricated reports of an imminent race riot they claimed had been planned by the Black community.

On November 9, the day after the election, the Wilmington Messenger published the "White Declaration of Independence," a list of resolutions promising that whites would never again be ruled by "men of African origin," that Blacks would no longer be allowed to vote, and that white men would be given "a large part of the employment heretofore given to negroes." It demanded that Manly leave the city within 24 hours. Fearing for his life, he likely had already fled. The resolutions also demanded the resignations of the mayor and chief of police. A committee led by Waddell presented the demands to a group of prominent Black citizens, mandating compliance by the next morning.

On the morning of November 10, Waddell led some 2,000 white men in an attack on the office of the Wilmington Record, which was vandalized and razed. By 11:00 am violence had begun erupting across the city, with Red Shirts, militiamen, and white vigilantes turning their guns on Blacks, some of whom returned fire. As the deadly melee ensued, Waddell engineered the forced resignation of elected officials (he was subsequently elevated to the office of mayor). Black Wilmingtonians, especially women and children, fled, hiding for three days and two nights in the swamps around the city and in the Black cemetery. The next morning, prominent Black and white Republican citizens were marched to the train station, commanded to leave, and told that they would be killed if they returned. In the coming weeks some 2,100 Black Wilmingtonians abandoned the city. It is not known for certain how many Black people perished in the massacre, but it is generally believed that as many as 60 Blacks were killed.

Legacy of the Wilmington coup and massacre

The coup that toppled Wilmington's elected municipal government was solidified by elections in March, and the city became a model for other places that sought to impose Jim Crow laws that robbed Black citizens of the vote and other fundamental civil rights for many decades to come. It would take nearly a century for accurate accounts of the events of November 1898 in Wilmington to replace the depictions of the incident which appeared in history books as the Wilmington Race Riot. Those depictions initially echoed the white supremacy campaign's version of the story, then watered it down some, still characterizing the incident as a riot by Black Americans that had to be quelled and that resulted in the reestablishment of good government. As they hid the truth, these accounts also buried the aspect of the occurrence that distinguished it from other racial massacres, such as those in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1921 and Rosewood, Florida, in 1923: the bloodshed in Wilmington was not in any way spontaneous. It was premeditated.

As the centennial of the massacre approached, Black American descendants of those who had suffered through it as well as some academics called for reexamination of what really happened, and in 1998 a symposium was held at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. In 2000 North Carolina's General Assembly established the 1898 Wilmington Race Riot Commission, which leveraged earlier scholarly investigation, conducted public hearings, and undertook detailed analyses of primary and secondary sources. The 500-page report that resulted examined the history of the coup and massacre. It also provided recommendations to "repair the moral, economic, civic and political damage wrought by the violence and discrimination resulting from a conspiracy to re-take control of city, county, and state governments by the Democratic Party's white supremacy campaign."

Jeff Wallenfeldt

Learn More in these related Britannica articles:

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Wilmington coup and massacre | History & Facts

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Wilmington coup and massacre, event in which the multiracial city government of Wilmington, North Carolina, was violently overthrown on November 10, 1898, and as many as 60 Black Americans were killed in a premeditated murder spree that culminated a white supremacist campaign to disenfranchise Blacks.

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The 1898 Wilmington Massacre Is an Essential Lesson in How State Violence Has Targeted Black Americans

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A coup by white supremacists in 1898 is a vital and sadly enduring lesson in how the state has long used violence against Black Americans.

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Col. Alfred Moore Waddell led the white supremacists who descended on Wilmington's City Hall on Nov. 10, 1898.