Wilmington 1898: When white supremacists overthrew a US government
Source: BBC
By Toby Luckhurst
BBC News
17 January 2021
A violent mob, whipped into a frenzy by politicians, tearing apart a town to overthrow the elected government.
Following state elections in 1898, white supremacists moved into the US port of Wilmington, North Carolina, then the largest city in the state. They destroyed black-owned businesses, murdered black residents, and forced the elected local government - a coalition of white and black politicians - to resign en masse.
Historians have described it as the only coup in US history. Its ringleaders took power the same day as the insurrection and swiftly brought in laws to strip voting and civil rights from the state's black population. They faced no consequences.
Wilmington's story has been thrust into the spotlight after a violent mob assaulted the US Capitol on 6 January, seeking to stop the certification of November's presidential election result. More than 120 years after its insurrection, the city is still grappling with its violent past.
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"No one was held accountable for the 1898 insurrection. Therefore it opened up the floodgates, especially in the south, for them to... strip African Americans' civil rights," he told the BBC. "That's the first thing that came to my mind after the DC insurrection - you're opening the door for something else to happen, or even worse."
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Read more: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-55648011
The mob burned down the offices of the Wilmington Daily Record
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AUTHOR INTERVIEWS
'Wilmington's Lie' Author Traces The Rise Of White Supremacy In A Southern City
January 13, 20201:25 PM ET
Heard on Fresh Air
DAVE DAVIES
Pod Cast and transcript
https://www.npr.org/2020/01/13/795892582/wilmington-s-lie-author-traces-the-rise-of-white-supremacy-in-a-southern-city
Journalist David Zucchino says Wilmington, N.C., was once a mixed-race community with a thriving black middle class. Then, in 1898, white supremacists staged a murderous coup that changed everything.
Wilmington's Lie
The Murderous Coup of 1898 and the Rise of White Supremacy
by David Zucchino
Hardcover, 426 pages
From the transcript
This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. The American South in the post-Reconstruction era was a land of broken promises and brutal oppression for African Americans, as white leaders stripped former slaves of many of the civil and voting rights they'd won after the Civil War. But in the 1890s, the port city of Wilmington, N.C., was an exception. It had a thriving black middle class, a large black electorate and a local government that included black aldermen, police officers and magistrates.
That ended in 1898 with a bloody campaign of violence and intimidation by white supremacists, which our guest journalist David Zucchino calls America's first and only armed overthrow of a legally elected government. Zucchino chronicles the events in a new book called "Wilmington's Lie: The Murderous Coup Of 1898 And The Rise Of White Supremacy." David Zucchino is a contributing writer for The New York Times. He's covered war and civil conflicts in more than three dozen countries and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for his reporting from apartheid South Africa. He spoke with FRESH AIR's Dave Davies.
DAVE DAVIES, BYLINE: Well, David Zucchino, welcome to FRESH AIR. This is an amazing story. And it's set in Wilmington, N.C., in the 1890s. It's a coastal city, then the largest city in North Carolina - right? - and remarkable for the status that African Americans held at that city at a, you know - which was a city in the Deep South. Give us a sense of where black citizens stood in Wilmington then.
DAVID ZUCCHINO: Wilmington was really an outlier. It was really a unique city in the South at that time. It was - first of all, it was a majority black city, and it was probably one of the very, very few major cities in the South that had a black majority. It was 56% black. There was a multiracial government at the time, where blacks served in positions of power, and that was extremely rare in the South at that time. There were three black aldermen. There were 10 black policemen. There were black magistrates. There was a daily black newspaper, which was very unusual in the South. There weren't that many because the white media really dominated.
More at the link.
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