Wilmington's Lie: The Murderous Coup of 1898 and the Rise of White Supremacy

by David Zucchino

WINNER OF THE 2021 PULITZER PRIZE FOR GENERAL NONFICTION

From Pulitzer Prize-winner David Zucchino comes a searing account of the Wilmington riot and coup of 1898, an extraordinary event unknown to most Americans



By the 1890s, Wilmington was North Carolina’s largest city and a shining example of a mixed-race community. It was a bustling port city with a burgeoning African American middle class and a Fusionist government of Republicans and Populists that included black aldermen, police officers and magistrates. There were successful black-owned businesses and an African American newspaper, The Record. But across the state—and the South—white supremacist Democrats were working to reverse the advances made by former slaves and their progeny.



In 1898, in response to a speech calling for white men to rise to the defense of Southern womanhood against the supposed threat of black predators, Alexander Manly, the outspoken young Record editor, wrote that some relationships between black men and white women were consensual. His editorial ignited outrage across the South, with calls to lynch Manly.



But North Carolina’s white supremacist Democrats had a different strategy. They were plotting to take back the state legislature in November “by the ballot or bullet or both,” and then use the Manly editorial to trigger a “race riot” to overthrow Wilmington’s multi-racial government. Led by prominent citizens including Josephus Daniels, publisher of the state’s largest newspaper, and former Confederate Colonel Alfred Moore Waddell, white supremacists rolled out a carefully orchestrated campaign that included raucous rallies, race-baiting editorials and newspaper cartoons, and sensational, fabricated news stories.



With intimidation and violence, the Democrats suppressed the black vote and stuffed ballot boxes (or threw them out), to win control of the state legislature on November eighth. Two days later, more than 2,000 heavily armed Red Shirts swarmed through Wilmington, torching the Record office, terrorizing women and children, and shooting at least sixty black men dead in the streets. The rioters forced city officials to resign at gunpoint and replaced them with mob leaders. Prominent blacks—and sympathetic whites—were banished. Hundreds of terrified black families took refuge in surrounding swamps and forests.



This brutal insurrection is a rare instance of a violent overthrow of an elected government in the U.S. It halted gains made by blacks and restored racism as official government policy, cementing white rule for another half century. It was not a “race riot,” as the events of November 1898 came to be known, but rather a racially motivated rebellion launched by white supremacists.



In Wilmington’s Lie, Pulitzer Prize-winner David Zucchino uses contemporary newspaper accounts, diaries, letters and official communications to create a gripping and compelling narrative that weaves together individual stories of hate and fear and brutality. This is a dramatic and definitive account of a remarkable but forgotten chapter of American history.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Politics, Race, American History, Audiobook, True Crime

565 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 7, 2020

Reviews

[Raymond · Rating 5 out of 5]

I first learned of the Wilmington Coup of 1898 when I wrote an English paper on the topic in undergrad. I developed a mild obsession with this historical event because I'm a NC native who grew up in a town 100 miles away from Wilmington and was never taught about the coup in public school. After writing the paper, I read two great novels based on the coup: The Marrow of Tradition by Charles Chesnutt and Cape Fear Rising by Philip Gerard. Wilmington's Lie is the first full length nonfiction treatment that I have read.

Zucchino's book does not just tell the story of the coup in 1898 but it also chronicles the rise of white supremacy in North Carolina after Reconstruction and in other Southern states. Zucchino effectively shows that the Alex Manly editorial was not the pivotal event that led to the coup. As you will learn in this book the coup was just one part of a concerted effort, a conspiracy, by racist White Democrats to take power away from the Fusion movement of White and Black Populists/Republicans. Propaganda, racist speeches, voter intimidation, and ballot stuffing were all a part of the campaign leading up to the coup.

Zucchino's work uses a variety of sources to tell this story. One of the most effective is his use of contemporary news articles not just from the local papers but national papers such as the New York Times and the Washington Post. This national coverage of the event struck me. Zucchino shows how the initial coverage was inaccurate because most of the sources were from the white supremacists who took over the government in Wilmington. On top of that he uncovers the myth-making that took place for a century until a commission's report revealed the truth. Lastly, the author makes a convincing connection between the voter disenfranchisement of yesteryear to the current disenfranchisement of today. The only big difference, that I don't think the author acknowledges, is the violence that was used back then is not being used now. Wilmington's Lie is definitely a must read book especially if you are unfamiliar with the events and want to know more about the first and only coup in the United States.

Thanks to NetGalley and Grove Atlantic for the free ARC copy in exchange for a honest review.

This review is also on Medium: https://medium.com/ballasts-for-the-m...

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

They didn't want mediation. They didn't want arbitration. They didn't want compromise. They did not value understanding. They showed up armed to peaceful opposition protests and menaced the people that they disagreed with.

They publicly embraced law and order until law and order became an obstacle to achieving their ends. They manufactured outrage on the flimsiest pretexts. They repeated and reprinted lies and innuendo to whip up outrage. They publicly stated that they would pursue their ends by fraud and violence if legal methods did not work.

They supported the formation of lawless mobs, and then pleaded ignorance when mob violence went out of control.

They were the white supremacists of 1898 in Wilmington, North Carolina.

The story of the race riot and successful electoral coup in Wilmington has been told before. This new history comes with the awareness that white supremacists are at it again in our time. In the light of this, the book does not make for cheerful reading, as the perpetrators of all outrages portrayed in this book achieved the political ends they wished and none were ever even brought anywhere close to justice. As for their victims, the lucky ones escaped with the clothes they stood up in and made it to other destinations that, while certainly not free of racism, were at least away from the drunken mob seeking to set fire to their homes and shoot their families.

I write this months before the book's scheduled release date, so the trolls and apologists for racism have not yet arrived to pollute this page on Goodreads. Enjoy it while you can – they are on their way. You will know them as they deploy phrases like “so-called white supremacists”, as they accuse the author of fomenting divisiveness for personal and political gain, as they attempt to link this book to present-day media personalities and political agendas that they disagree with.

The plain fact of 1898 Wilmington is that people attempted to peacefully exercise the rights that the law allowed them, and for their trouble a mob of racists killed them or ruined their lives. Still today, an apology without reservation or excuses is apparently too much to ask. It was a shameful episode then and continues to be shameful today. Don't forget it. Read about it.

Thank you to Netgalley and Atlantic Monthly Press for a free advance egalley copy of this book for review.

[Brina · Rating 4 out of 5]

After a few year hiatus, I decided to recommit myself to my lifetime Pulitzer challenge. Nothing too daunting-reading a fiction and nonfiction Pulitzer each month that interests me. I never expect to read every winner, but at least I know that I will be reading a few quality written books each month. Wilmington’s Lie had been on my radar for awhile with reasons having nothing to do with the book. Those of you who have been goodreads friends for awhile know that my blood bleeds Chicago blue, and this is especially true of my allegiance to sports. Michael Jordan hails from Wilmington, North Carolina. In the documentary The Last Dance he noted of white Jordans and black Jordans and gave one of the filmmakers a tour of the black cemetery. There were, he noted, places his parents told him and his siblings not to visit because they were not safe for African American kids growing up in the 1960s. Wilmington’s Lie was published less than than two years later and won the Pulitzer for history. Knowing what little I did from Jordan’s mention of the city’s history, I knew that I would be intrigued to read it.

The real reason I selected Wilmington’s Lie is because the sports fan part of me thought that the author could not write about the city’s history without mentioning its most famous citizen. I was wrong; there is not a single mention of any Jordan white or black in this book and it is probably a good thing because it would take away from the impeccable research that went into this book, not the normal type of history I generally read. I believe that history is happening, and I love to immerse myself in lengthy history books and biographies that span the course of a subject’s life or decades of events that lead up to the central subject of a book. For the most part, these books include the author’s viewpoint on what happened, a central tenet in being a historian in the first place. David Zucchino chose to base his book around primary documents. Although these are tantamount in history, the usage resulted in tedious reading that could have been summarized in two thirds of the book. Had I known that going in, I might not have read it, denying myself insight in this buried historical event. Jordan or not, I chose to slog on.

Wilmington, North Carolina is a coastal city that thrived in importing and exporting natural resources such as cotton and tobacco since the nation’s inception. The state built its economy using slaves, and after the civil war, employed freed blacks to perform the jobs that they had always done as slaves, only now for a small fee. Between 1867 and 1898, freed blacks moved to Wilmington, seeking both employment and a better life for themselves. During the years of Reconstruction, blacks entered in the ranks of Wilmington’s middle class and made decent lives for themselves. Many also registered to vote and one man George Wright was a member of congress in 1898. Blacks voted Republican, the party of Lincoln, and formed a Fusion government with progressive whites who realized that they needed the black vote in order to maintain control of statewide and local politics. The city flourished but one group of citizens did not like this arrangement: Democrats who were for the most part old school confederates who believed in the superiority of the white race. Something would have to give in order to preserve the old way of life, and that something came to a head in 1898.

Zucchino lists a cast of characters throughout the book and provides readers with his list of key figures in order to help them through the book. Usually, I am good with an extended list of people, but in a book of this length, I feel that the author was trying to do too much. On November 10, 1898, white armed citizens known as the Red Shirts took to the streets and mobbed and killed innocent blacks. Upstanding blacks were terrorized into leaving the city and state, never to return. White members of the fusion government and carpet baggers were also told to leave the city, the majority of them returned to the north. Democrats and white supremacists had seized control of Wilmington by brute force, blamed the blacks, and enacted laws to cover up their crimes for the next hundred years. The narrative describing the events on November 10 took over one hundred pages, and I felt that this was too much. It could have been summed up in half that amount. Some of the Republicans sought an audience with President McKinley, who proceeded to shove it under the rug. He had bigger issues on his plate, including the aftermath of the Spanish-American War. Race relations in the south did not factor into his presidency until his assassination less than two years later. White supremacists now controlled North Carolina and would do so unchecked until the civil rights movement.

Perhaps it was the ugly subject matter or the gray skies outside but this book was a slow read for me. I laud Zucchino for digging up this event in history because it should be known to all. He conducted interviews with descendants of the key historical personae in 2018, seeking remorse, receiving none. The blacks he spoke with noted that their grandparents hid their family history and died embittered. In 1998, the one hundredth anniversary of the riot, blacks and whites of Wilmington met to draft a new, inclusive city charter. Missing was the city’s most famous son, and I believe that his presence would have gone a long way toward healing. In 1998, Jordan was winning the last of his basketball championships, and he has never been political by choice. This book isn’t about him. It is about uncovering an ugly event from history so it isn’t forgotten. Zucchino’s reporting earned him a Pulitzer, which could be debated; however, most awards are debated ad nauseam. I come away knowing more about the ugly side of North Carolina politics. I believe it could have been stated in one hundred less pages.

3.5 stars

[Judith E · Rating 5 out of 5]

Where to begin to describe this terror and injustice? Hate, duplicity, the blatant disregard of basic American human rights - there is so much to learn from this murderous event.

Reconstruction policy provided the blacks of Wilmington, North Carolina to prosper and lead in Republican political offices and government appointed positions. But the withdrawal of Federal troops at the end of Reconstruction allowed the Ku Klux Klan and multiple white supremacist groups to gain power. They purchased guns and artillery (blacks could not buy weapons), physically prevented blacks from voting, stuffed ballot boxes and took control of the fourth estate to print their lies and enflame the white man’s hysteria of black power.

I’m ashamed that the U.S. government and President McKinley were unwilling to take a stand against the white supremacists and allowed the murder of the Wilmington black population and their methodical exclusion from the city. The blatant violation of the 14th and 15th amendments to the U.S. Constitution is something we do not want to ever see again. Hopefully this detailed and documented account will remind us of what we need to do to protect everyone’s liberty and justice.

[Jill H. · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book made me so angry that I could have thrown it through the nearest window. The almost unknown uprising in Wilmington, NC in 1898, thirty years after the end of the US Civil War, reveals, as most of us know, that the South refused to recognize the "freedom" of the black population. North Carolina passed a Black Code which restored Blacks to near slave status and after the Plessy vs Ferguson case, the US Supreme Court ruled that the 14th Amendment applied only to political rights (voting) and not social rights (public accommodations,etc).

Wilmington was the home of white supremacy which had total control over the local and state governments and, although the Ku Klux Klan has somewhat faded into the background, other groups (the Redshirts, Secret Six, Secret Nine.) solidified and formed bands of vigilantes to address what they perceived to be an oncoming Black uprising which only existed in their minds. The beatings and jailing of Blacks didn't satisfy these groups and the killings and lynchings of individuals turned even more horrific, ending in the mass killing of men, women, and children in 1898.

There is much more in this book but the main thrust is the build-up to the coup of the white supremacists against the innocent people of color. It is an in-depth study of the mind-set of the prejudice that defies understanding The writing is clear, informative and chilling. I highly recommend this book, highly recommend it.

[Clif Hostetler · Rating 3 out of 5]

This history of of the Wilmington massacre of 1898 (a.k.a. Wilmington Insurrection) is painful reading. It consists of page after page of accounts of unfair, unjust, and criminal actions of white supremacists imposed on and against the African American population living in Wilmington, North Carolina in the late nineteenth century.

The description of the buildup up of tensions culminates in November 10, 1898 when Wilmington’s Whites mounted an armed overthrow of a legally elected municipal government. The murder of fourteen Black people was publicly documented at the time, but a later thorough study set the likely number at sixty (one source estimates 300). Afterward, no criminal indictments were issued for any of the killings, and many of the participants and their leaders later went on to be prominent leaders in North Carolina politics.

This book first introduces its readers to the leading characters that later play roles in the insurrection, then describes multiple tales of violence and forced exile, and then tells of happenings in the years since including the centennial remembrances one hundred years later. The politics at the time were such that the coalition of black Republicans and the People’s Party (a.k.a. Populists) had won a number of elected positions in the years prior to 1898 and in Wilmington they controlled the city government. A number of African Americans were on the council and a number of Blacks had been hired on the city staff.

There were many inflammatory speeches, articles, and propaganda publications distributed prior to the 1898 elections which created widespread calls for violent action to get rid of Black rule. Potential rioters were repeatedly told to wait until after the elections to vent their anger. In the election itself the use of intimidation to keep voters away together with widespread ballot box stuffing gave the white supremacists a victory. So it would seem that violence at that point was not needed because they had won the election, but the pent-up craving for violent insurrection couldn’t be stopped. Armed groups roamed the streets shooting at any Black who ran away. All municipal elected officials were forced to resign immediately, and a prepared list of influential black individuals and some white Republicans were summarily forced at gun point to leave Wilmington immediately.

It’s estimated that approximately 2,000 people were displaced by the violence, but most of these were people who left on their own volition because they no longer felt safe in Wilmington. I found the following excerpt located at the end of the book particularly poignant.

I asked whether he was prepared to forgive the white men who led the riot and drove his grandfather from Wilmington 120 years earlier.

Lewin thought for a moment, then said, “I’m not a very religious person, and I don't forgive.
If there's a hell, I hope they're burning in it. All of them!”

The apparent success of the Wilmington insurrection and the subsequent nonintervention of the Federal government gave the white supremacists the confidence to proceed with codifying Jim Crow laws and limiting black participation in voting. These restrictions stayed in place many decades until ended during the 50s and 60s Civil Rights era, and I hope such unapologetic expressions of white supremacy are a thing of the past (but I'm not so sure that it is).

[Colleen Browne · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a deeply researched, well written book about an event that most of us have never heard of. It is some of that history that should have been included in high school history books but has not been and it is time to correct that.

The coup that took place in Wilmington, NC in 1898 was audacious, violent, and something that we as Americans would like never to have happened. From the hate and racism of the average white people of the city, to the newspapers who egged it on, to the white politicians who used the event to steal offices to which they were never entitled to, it caste shame on the people, the city, the state, and the federal government who all failed to intervene.

Wilmington had been a city with an African American majority, who in cooperation with the Republicans and Populists, fused a coalition that was able to deliver public offices and decent jobs to blacks, many of whom had been slaves during the Antebellum period. It was a campaign to "redeem" Wilmington by any means necessary. The editor of a black newspaper wrote a column against the lynching that was so prevalent at the time and that served as the trigger that white supremacists were seeking. By distorting the editors words, they were able to rile racists up to the point that they carried guns through the streets of the city on election day, shooting indiscriminately at blacks, killing many, burning the newspaper office, breaking into homes killing people and forcing them to leave town. It was ethnic cleansing and far more horrendous than my very limited description here.

One of the players in the scheme was Josephus Daniels. I remembered reading that a man of the same name had been Sec. of the Navy under Wilson and FDR was his assistant. It turns out to have been one and the same man. Perhaps not surprisingly, when I googled his name, I found him referenced in several places but only one told about the shameful role he played in the coup. This fact demonstrates how far we as a country have to go to heal the wounds. Moreover, in his epilog, Zucchini gave updated information about the leaders of the coup. Almost to a person, they have refused to tell the truth, instead opting to write it off as ancient history. The University of North Carolina finally did a proper investigation in the recent past and set the record straight- as nearly as they could.

I urge everyone to read this book- consider it a chapter of history you were not taught in high school.

[George1st · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is such a powerful and moving examination of a deeply significant but disturbing episode in African American history that it was at times quite painful and difficult to read. To understand the present you need to have an appreciation of the past and this majestic, scholarly but always accessible account of the reasons and motivations of what was in effect a white supremacist armed and illegal seizure of power will undoubtedly help.

In 1898 Wilmington, North Carolina, was one of the most advanced (however limited) cities in the old Confederate South in terms of African American representation in civic society. They were represented in local law enforcement, the judiciary, the legislature, the fire department and commerce with a vibrant and expanding middle class. Although segregation was in existence it was was far less onerous than elsewhere in the South. However this situation was an anathema to the white supremacists who's views had remained unchanged since the Civil War and were much in evidence in the of the higher echelons of society.

Following their victory in the November 1898 mid-term elections by intimidation and ballot rigging the scene was set for them to go onto the streets two days later and embark on a day of killing and ethnic cleansing. This would result in at least sixty innocent African American dead and hundreds more fleeing the city some never to return. Things would never be the same again and white supremacy would be cemented later through African American disenfranchisement through changes in the system of voter registration (sound familiar) that would be copied throughout the South.

Personally there were several shocking things that I found in this narrative which included the fact that the white night riders known as Red Shirts would be assisted later on that fateful day by the local state militiamen who were supposed to be the upholders of law and order. Also the lack of action and the later reluctance of the Federal Government to take any action. Similarly the virulent racist propaganda of the local press owned by white supremacists could have been expected but the way the supremacists version of events and narrative was unquestioningly accepted by supposedly reputable journals such as the New York Times was not.

The book is extensively researched with quotations from the local press, publications and speeches made at the time. There are also present day interviews with the surviving relatives of some of the key players. In 1998 to mark the anniversary of the killings and after the previous accepted narrative that this was a black uprising or a race riot were challenged and demolished attempts were made at some kind of reconciliation but this proved far from successful. The scars are still there and the issue of Confederate statues and the flag is subject of deep controversy.

One thing is clear, the whole issue of race in modern America needs to be handled by all in civic society with much care and sensitivity and on no account should race be used for electoral advantage. (good luck with that one). I'm not an American but have always had a deep interest in its history, politics and culture and this book I would hope will find its way into many libraries and places of education. If I ever visit the USA I would certainly like to visit Wilmington as it forms an integral part of the nation's history. A very recommended read.

[Kathleen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction 2021. I knew beforehand that this book would depress me and it did. Unfortunately, there are elements of what happened in Wilmington, North Carolina in 1898 and the resulting efforts of Southern states to nullify the votes of Black Americans through voter intimidation/poll taxes/literacy tests, and what is happening today in State legislatures throughout the country.

Wilmington in 1898 was a majority black city with a healthy middle-class Black population that included Black aldermen, police officers and magistrates. This infuriated a significant portion of the white population and they systematically planned the overthrow of the City’s government. They planned to deprive Blacks of the vote and the ability to serve in elected or appointed office ever again. Josephus Daniels of The News & Observer in Raleigh orchestrated a disinformation campaign that denigrated Black public officials and scared white citizens with wild claims of prurient behavior with white women.

Concurrently, whites armed themselves with shotguns and Winchesters while denying Blacks the ability to purchase guns. They coordinated control of two state militias, the Wilmington Light Infantry and the city’s naval reserves. They created the Red Shirt militia that threatened to kill Black men if they registered to vote. Fundamentally, they were going to restore white supremacy as official government policy.

In the November 8th election of 1898, the Red Shirts went to polling stations to discourage Blacks from voting, stuffed ballot boxes with phony Democratic ballots and destroyed Republican ballots. The result was a complete fraud, and the election was stolen.

On November 10th, the Red Shirts and the two state militias burned down Alex Manly’s Record newspaper, killed roughly 60 Black men and banned some 50 people, both Black and white, from ever residing in Wilmington again.

The formula for their success was to terrorize Black men from voting, ensure winning elections through fraud, and then legislate laws to ensure that White Supremacists would win future elections. They scoured the voter rolls and looked at every means available to do so. They legislated poll taxes, literacy tests, proof of residency and more while grandfathering in white voters so they were not subject to the same requirements. They gerrymandered districts. They spewed false narratives that Blacks weren’t capable of voting, that they weren’t intelligent enough to vote, and not capable of holding office.

Zucchino’s own research benefitted from the work that The University of North Carolina at Wilmington did to determine what really happened in Wilmington in 1898 and to educate people as to what they discovered. Highly recommend.

[Robert Sheard · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've lived in North Carolina twice, for a total of roughly 15 or 16 years so far. So I'm not a native and don't know the state's history well, but wow... I had no idea that this was the state's history. The 1898 white supremacist coup in Wilmington, which at the time was a major city for black Americans, is the culmination of the white South's Redemption and the death of Reconstruction. In short order, it opens the era of Jim Crow and served as a model for white supremacists across the South. And then for the next 120 years, history books (and textbooks) continued to sell the white narrative that it was a race riot incited by the black residents. It wasn't until the 21st Century before historians uncovered much of the truth of the bloody, and completely orchestrated, coup.

After what has happened in Washington, D.C. just this past week, reading this was surreal because IT'S THE SAME RACIST PLAYBOOK TODAY. The only thing that's changed is the parties involved. In 1898, it was the southern Democrats who were white supremacists and fought to intimidate, disenfranchise, and run off black residents in a city that was 56% black residents at the time. With the Civil Rights movement in the 1950s-1960s, the parties switched and today it is the Republicans who specialize in gerrymandering, voter suppression, and anti-democratic tactics to disenfranchise black voters. But the tactics, while perhaps more insidious and hidden from plain sight, are nevertheless the same.

Reading this will make you furious, and it should. The Epilogue covers North Carolina's continuing policies of racist treatment of black voters and is surreal. This is a vital read today. It will sadden and infuriate you, mostly because very little has changed.

[Porter Broyles · Rating 5 out of 5]

During Reconstruction blacks had finally gained the hope that the future might be better. Black owned businesses burst onto the scene. Over 600 black men were elected to state or local positions. Sixteen black men were elected to the US Congress. Former slaves were flexing their muscles at the voting booth.

Then with the election of Rutherford B Hayes, Reconstruction came to an end. Over the next couple of decades, the advancements made by black Americans, particularly in the South, were rolled back.

Many books talk about this period with the South as a generic entity. That the roll back in Virginia, Alabama, and Texas mirrored one another.

Stephen Hahn's book A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration provides a great resource in showing how white supremecy regained dominance at different states. Still Hahn's book provides high level overviews of each state, but not too much detail.

Zucchino's book takes that natural progression to a specific state/city. This book provides specific incidents, individuals, actions, etc that show how Wilmington went from having a thriving black community and elected black officials (including one to the US Senate) to having that neglible representation. The black voting population went from over 120,000 to just around 6,000 in a matter of years.

This book take the reader from Antebellum thru the origins of Jim Crowe and the early 1930s.

[Cinda · Rating 5 out of 5]

This story of the overthrow of a legitimately-elected government by white supremacists was new to me, being a recent transplant to North Carolina. Even had I grown up in NC, it's likely I wouldn't have heard about it. History is written by the victors, and school texts from the 40s and 50s presented an inaccurate and biased account of what happened. It is bone-chilling, considering some of the current efforts to prevent the teaching of this kind of history. Highly recommend.

[Diane S ☔ · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thoughts soon.

[Ionia · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have to admit, I'm actually a little embarrassed that I didn't know most of the events that this book relates before reading it. I'm now very glad that I read this book. These events are n important part of American history, although they are hard to digest and make you wonder about the senselessness of racism and the attitudes that sadly still appear in our modern society.

This is a very well-written work that is not only interesting and factual but emotionally provoking as well. I found as I was reading this that it made me want to learn more, and also made me question how I had missed so much of this in my education, especially as someone who makes a living studying various forms of persecution. Now that this is on my radar, I am interested in learning more about it, and I can thank the author for that.

This is an important book and should be read by all. I think it is important to know this history and to share the knowledge with others, to keep things like this from happening again. I thanks the author for doing such a lot of work to present this book in a manner that is accessible and readable for everyone, not just scholars.

This review is based on a complimentary copy from the publisher, provided through Netgalley, all opinions are my own.

[Tonstant Weader · Rating 4 out of 5]

Winston Churchill said, “History is written by the victors.” We in the United States know this is too simplistic. After all, the North won the Civil War and the South wrote the history with tales of happily enslaved people who loved their benevolent Scarletts and Melanies. They rewrote their war as a defense of federalism and limited government, not slavery. They erased their concerted domestic terrorism to drive Black people from the voting booth. Of course, if you consider white supremacy the victor, then Churchill’s words are right on point. Wilmington’s Lie is a valiant effort to uncover the truth behind the lies of the “victors.”

Wilmington, North Carolina, after the Civil War drew many recently freed enslaved people who found work in factories, fields, and even in government. There were powerful and effective Black leaders such as Abraham Galloway, a man who escaped slavery but risked going back to the South to spy for the Union, who recruited thousands of Black soldiers for the Union Army, and who organized a Black militia that sent the Klan running from Wilmington, protecting the right of Black people to vote for a generation. By the 1890s, there were many prosperous Black people, lawyers, doctors, business owners, elected leaders, and even a sheriff’s deputy.

That did not sit well with the white people of the state and the Democratic Party, developed a complex, multi-part strategy to take power back and called it the White Supremacy Campaign. That is what it was and included a media strategy of incitement in the newspapers, most notably the Raleigh News and Observer, a paper that continues to be a leading North Carolina paper to this day. It also included grassroots organizing with small cells meeting in people’s homes. There was a military component with militias including the Red Shirts, a terroristic paramilitary group. They were all focusing on blocking Black people from voting in the 1898 election.

In the end, they staged a massacre and a political coup, killing around sixty Black men, driving the Black people of Wilmington from town, and forcing the existing mayor, sheriff, and city council to resign and appointing new leadership from among the conspirators. After the massacre was over they created the fiction that Black rioting led to the massacre, a lie that continued unchallenged for decades. This strategy was deployed throughout the South, successfully forcing out the Republicans and bringing the reign of terror and oppression called Jim Crow. Even in 1998, a hundred years after the massacre and more than thirty years after the Civil Rights Act, white people in Wilmington resisted telling the truth.



I think Wilmington’s Lie is an important history and we must learn the truth of how Reconstruction was cut short, not because of the corruption, scalawags, and carpetbaggers, but because of domestic terrorism in pursuit of white supremacy. There are inspiring stories of heroes such as Galloway and Alex Manly whose editorial combatting the lie that Black men were rapists. He said that white women sometimes fell in love with Black men and white men sometimes raped Black women and other home truths that were like kerosene on a fire.

However, sometimes the weight of detail overwhelmed the story. Zucchino goes through the events of the massacre and coup with step-by-step specificity. It reminded me of military histories that recount troop movements. I have never been drawn to military history for that very reason. While I understand that everything matters in a battle, I am content to know who carried the day. Sadly, white supremacy carried the day in Wilmington.

I am glad that Zucchino did not end his narrative in 1898 and brought us to the present. When interviewing the grandson of Josephus Daniels who wrote the incendiary hatemongering articles in his News and Observer, Zucchino asked his what he thought of the state commission report that criticized the paper for its role in the massacre. He was a newspaper publisher and he never read it. One way to keep a lie alive is to avoid reading the truth.

I received an e-galley of Wilmington’s Lie from the publisher through Edelweiss.

Wilmington’s Lie at Grove Atlantic

David Zucchino on Twitter


https://tonstantweaderreviews.wordpre...

[J Earl · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wilmington's Lie: The Murderous Coup of 1898 and the Rise of White Supremacy is a thoroughly researched account of the organized mass murders and the subsequent effects of this illegal, immoral, and pure evil strategy.

This book gives as detailed an account as possible of the events of the coup as well as the lies told before, during, and after the murder spree by the whites both in North Carolina and across the country, especially in the south. There will be some who find this to be part of their "southern heritage," and to an extent they are right. Immorality and illegality are indeed among the largest portions of that heritage. There will even be reviewers, as one I have already seen, who misstate or intentionally misunderstands the difference between "being responsible for what my ancestors did" and in making amends for the benefits denied to those murdered (and their descendants) that have been unfairly given to them. If the white supremacists who committed this and the many other crimes, who wrote the bigoted and unconstitutional legislation that denied and/or took away rights and opportunities, had been prosecuted and spent the necessary time in prison and possibly received the death penalty, then today's self-righteous little "it isn't my fault" bigots would not have all of the benefits they now unjustifiably enjoy.

This is a difficult book to read for a couple of reasons. First, the events and the inhumanity of those who committed and condoned these actions is appalling. Second, the fact that the basic playbook of the white supremacists of that period is being updated and used today in state legislatures as well as the executive branch of the federal government illustrates the extent to which those who can only achieve success through denying it to others will do whatever they have to do to continue that trend.

Make no mistake, any reviewer who claims not to be responsible because it happened so long ago is trying to cover their own pathetic bigotry with such empty logic. They enjoy the fruits of those actions but they want none of the responsibility. That isn't justice, that is immoral inhumanity.

I recommend this book to anyone who wants to know the extent to which people will go to maintain power that they cannot maintain through merit. It was true then and, with the election of Trumpenfuehrer, it is true today.

Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley.

[Gwen - Chew & Digest Books - · Rating 5 out of 5]

I cannot think of a book that has ever made me want to crawl under the table with shame for being a white person and what my peers have done, past & present, described in this book as painfully as Wilmington's Lie. And let's make it clear, it's not the book or the writing, it's the facts and Zucchino's skill at just laying it all out without really sharing an obvious opinion or judgment of his own.

I feel like giving a copy of this to everyone that I have even a wee inkling of bigotry, prejudice, or plain racism and after they read it say, "This is what your behavior and attitude is based on. BS. You and people as wrong-headed as you have been spreading these lies since the start of America."

The white citizens of the entire city of Wilmington, North Carolina and much of the South created and spread this idea of a mythical African American male as really a monster, an idiot, and a sexual predator. They bought the idea, lived by it, passed it on and added their own touches of negative sterotyping to cover each time period and events.

Our leaders, even if they don't agree, have condoned it by their unwillingness to speak out, legislate or act on these false beliefs that have been making complete evil idiots of ourselves and keeping an entire race, at a minimum, one or two levels below us white folks. Those beliefs are false, a lie, a sick man's confabulation and utter BS.

Right after getting this book yet prior to starting it, Wilmington again celebrated? Remembered? Solemnly recognized? and put up street sign commemorating the 1898 Massacre and bushel full of lies as a Coup. I had Zuccino's work in line to be read and remembered it as I closely followed the news stories. (for example https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/...)

Without diving in, I knew the story and was so very angry and disappointed and it was far from the only example of utter idiocy and evil that we continue to perpetrate in the news just the last year or so. It needs to stop, many of us need a comeupance.

I'd read it again, even cowering with embarrassment as well as hand sell it to anyone. You'd be a better human being if you did too. The secret is not to stop with reading about it, it's talking about it, calling out the racists, and acting upon humanistic motives, not fear and lies. We can do better, we need to.

[Raymond Maxwell · Rating 5 out of 5]

February 8, 2021 -- There is something I find slightly Moby Dick-ish about this book and I am only a quarter of the way through. Short chapters like Moby Dick that provide glimpses into the context of the history as it unfolds remind me of little packets of energy. The focus on the "obsession" in the narrative, zooming in and zooming out, provides additional context.

I am a NC native, so it all has special meaning for me. And so many of the surnames remain in "circulation," enhancing my own curiosity. I heard the story before in my youth, but as I mentioned to a friend, it was whispered about. Hushtones.

And there is a bit of irony in how i acquired the book. Our docent group (LOC) does "enrichment" visits and tours and one was to the NPR studio and offices just up from the UDC metro station. We ended the tour in a room that housed a library of books that writers and publishers donate to NPR. The tour guide told us to take whatever we wanted of the collection (I guess they needed the empty shelf space) and Wilmington's Lie was on the shelf right in front of me. So I grabbed it and it grabbed me almost simultaneously.

I am reading this book slowly at bedtime. A couple of chapters a night. Hope to be done by the end of the month. Will finish this review then. See ya!

Took me a while but after several interruptions I finished the book. Painful reading, very painful as I identified not with the victors, but with the slain, the humiliated, the disenfranchised. A lot of research went into this book, making the unpacking of events clear and intentional. Reputations were made in the effective execution of a coup against an elected government. Reputations were equally lost, destroyed. A narrative to explain the deeds of the victors was created, sustained by university scholarship, the state press, and the state education system. Fingerprints are everywhere and well preserved.

I have sided with thinkers who say blacks should have never left the south, but in the of 1898 Wilmington, what choice did people have? Stay and die, or flee and live? I wonder will I ever be able to return to North Carolina to live. After reading Wilmington's Lie, my heart may never be in returning, much less forgiving.

I do recommend reading this book, especially for present-day Democrats and leaders in the cancel culture.

[Bruce Katz · Rating 4 out of 5]

The summary above provides more than enough information to understand what the book is about. What it doesn't adequately capture is the experience of reading it. There is much I might say about "Wilmington's Lie," but in the end what it boils down to it this: What the hell is wrong with people?! How could they let themselves be twisted and unraveled by so much hate?

I found myself enraged again and again as I read. More, I found myself thinking how the racist forces that were expressed in 1898 are still with us today — not so transparently, of course (as a culture we've become more adept in disguising our uglier impulses, or a least we were until the past few years) but the same hatreds dressed in new robes. I can’t say how many times I said to myself, ‘They’re still doing the same thing today, and in the same way, using the same words, feeding the same fears. And it’s so often the same people.’ I do fear for this country.

The book won the Pulitzer the year it came out — deservedly so. It’s very well written, thoroughly researched, compulsively readable, and extremely powerful. Powerful to the point that at times it's almost more than one can bear to continue, to plumb the depths of what people are capable of. Two images that really struck me: preachers vomiting racist fantasies from the pulpit and then going out into the street with guns in their hands to shoot innocent men, women, and children because they were Black; and of White demagogues who are completely aware that what they're saying isn't true but continue anyway because they want power.

The events Zucchino describes here are not well known, certainly not in White America. (They’re not even unique in our history: cf, Colfax, Tulsa, Elaine AK, Rosewood FL, NYC in 1863...) But they should be known.

If it sounds like my reaction to the book was more visceral than "intellectual," that’s about right. It was. I greatly appreciated the depth of Zucchino's historical research but I found it difficult to get past my anger. This is one of the books about the past that should be widely read in order to understand present-day America.

[Stewart Sternberg · Rating 5 out of 5]

Growing up, I received a poor understanding of the African-American in America history. It wasn't taught. Nor the role of women. History during the sixties was a tribute to white male Christians. Too many people want to return it to that today.

I am seeking to correct my flaws as an historian. I am reading more about feminism and the role of women, and also about the role of African-Americans.

This book has me wanting to put on my boots and head down to North Carolina and shake people. What a horror. Why is this book not taught in college now? Why the events in Wilmington not taught in all schools.

This massacre, a plot by white supremists to reclaim their dominance after reconstruction is sickening. It is the beginning of Jim Crow, it plants the seeds for the horrors to come through the 1900s and is a sharp example of institutional racism. Hey, Barr, you stupid fuck, here...here is an example of institutional racism. And here is voter suppression that is being mirrored today by the same racist assholes. Sure, the Democrats are now the Republicans but they wear the same hoods and red shirts.

[Sonny · Rating 5 out of 5]

― “On Election Day, November 8th, 1898, gangs of white men threatened and intimidated black men attempting to vote. Only a fraction of registered blacks managed to cast ballots. Packs of white men overran polling places and stuffed ballot boxes with phony ballots. The result was a Democratic sweep of local races for statewide offices. But because municipal elections were not scheduled until the following March, city government remained under the control of Fusionists, both black and white.”
― David Zucchino, Wilmington's Lie: The Murderous Coup of 1898 and the Rise of White Supremacy

The murderous coup that took place in Wilmington, North Carolina in 1898 is a chapter in history that few, if any, want to celebrate, it is an episode that needs to be told. While some conservatives want to erase and rewrite history, I believe we need to teach all of our nation’s history, both good and bad. An honest examination of history makes it clear that the law has not been able to cleanse our nation of racism. I thank God for books like this that tell the unvarnished truth about America’s racist past and our racist present.

During the Reconstruction era following the American Civil War, three amendments were added to the United States Constitution to grant equal civil rights to the newly freed slaves. New state governments were established by a coalition of freedmen, supportive white Southerners, and Northern transplants. They were opposed by white supremacists who wanted control of both Southern governments and society. Violent groups, including the Ku Klux Klan and the “Red Shirts,” engaged in paramilitary insurgency and terrorism to disrupt the Reconstruction governments and drive out blacks who were in office. After Lincoln was assassinated, he was replaced by President Andrew Johnson, a Southerner from Tennessee. Johnson vetoed numerous bills, pardoned thousands of Confederate leaders, and allowed Southern states to pass draconian Black Codes that greatly restricted the rights of freedmen.

In 1898, Wilmington was North Carolina’s largest city. It was also a majority black city. A thriving port city, Wilmington had a growing black middle class and a Fusionist government that included black city council members, health inspectors, postmasters, police officers and magistrates. The city also had a black-owned newspaper, the Daily Record. This was more than the white supremacists could bear. White Supremacists plotted to take back the state legislature, by violence and intimidation if needed. But they wanted to accomplish more than to overthrow the government in Wilmington, they had a larger goal in mind, to deprive the blacks of the vote and deprive them of the ability to serve in elected or appointed office ever again. To accomplish their goals, they were not above spreading lies and making false accusations (sound familiar?). They told white voters that black public officials were incompetent and corrupt and utterly incapable of governing and utterly incapable of having the intelligence to vote.

― “White Supremacists had concocted spurious claims of Negro rule to incite whites to violence.”
― David Zucchino, Wilmington's Lie: The Murderous Coup of 1898 and the Rise of White Supremacy

In a speech, a White Supremacist claimed that black men were sexually insatiable predators on the prowl for white women. He called for white men to rise to the defense of Southern womanhood. In response to the speech, Alexander Manly, the outspoken young editor of the Record, wrote that some relationships between black men and white women were consensual. His editorial ignited outrage across the South, with calls to lynch Manly. When Manly fled, the leaders of the Supremacists kept it to themselves, wanting whites to be incensed.

― “Several members of the Secret Nine had been told that Manly had already fled Wilmington. But they realized that revealing the truth would cool the passions of the crowd . They wanted Wilmington's white men enraged and aggrieved and primed for violence.”
― David Zucchino, Wilmington's Lie: The Murderous Coup of 1898 and the Rise of White Supremacy

The leaders kept warning of a black revolution, of a black riot. They printed stories saying blacks were stockpiling weapons, when it was in fact it was the whites who were stockpiling weapons. White Supremacist leaders used their rhetoric to trigger a riot aimed at overthrowing Wilmington’s multi-racial government. Using intimidation and violence, the whites suppressed the black vote and stuffed ballot boxes (or threw them out altogether), to win control of the state legislature. Two days after the election, more than 2,000 heavily armed Red Shirts surged through Wilmington, burning the Daily Record office to the ground, terrorizing blacks, and shooting at least sixty black men dead in the streets. The rioters forced city officials to resign at gunpoint and replaced them with mob leaders. Hundreds of terrified black families took refuge in surrounding swamps and forests.

Pulitzer Prize winning author David Zucchino used contemporary newspaper accounts, diaries, letters and official documentation of events to create a riveting account that weaves together individual stories of hate, fear and violence. He has produced an honest account of this violent part of Wilmington’s, and our nation’s, history.

[Matt · Rating 4 out of 5]

A couple of years ago, I read Blood at the Root by Patrick Phillips, which tells the harrowing story how whites in Forsyth County, Georgia drove out their entire black population through a terror campaign in 1912 and managed to enforce a policy that kept blacks from setting foot across the county line for much of the century. Somehow that book wasn't enough punishment, leading me to this very worthy companion. I was drawn to this book because my very white (and likely racist) great, great grandfather moved to Wilmington in 1900, just two years after the massacre. Great great grandpa was moving to the site of a genocide.

While the Wilmington campaign has a lot in common with that Georgia story, there's a lot that's very different. In 1898, the city of Wilmington was 60 percent black, with a black middle class, mixed representation in city and county government, blacks on the police force, and a white mayor that supported their community. And it wasn't a backwater. The city was the largest in the state. But the resentful white population in North Carolina did not fundamentally believe in the humanity of the blacks in their community, let alone the legitimacy of any government that would garner their support.

The tragic events that November began earlier with an intimidation and propaganda campaign by white supremacists, followed by widespread ballot fraud on election day, and finally an estimated 60 black citizens murdered in the streets and in their homes by vigilante forces. The remaining population was terrorized into either total submission or packing up and leaving. The ripples of the white supremacy campaign went far beyond the county line. The subsequent Governor of North Carolina would later declare, "When we say the negro is unfit to rule we carry it one step further and convey the idea that he is unfit to vote. ... To do this we must disenfranchise the negro." That same white supremacist governor had won the vote in Wilmington's black-majority county by a count of 2960 to 3.

The author summarizes the aftermath well:
The killings in Wilmington inspired whites in the South. The white supremacy campaign demonstrated that determined whites could whittle down the black vote and black officeholders, first through terror and violence and then by legislation. Wilmington's whites had proved that the federal government would reproach them but not stop them.

A strength of the book is it highlights how much of what happened to usher in the era of Jim Crow was done with widespread (white) public support. The imagery of Klansmen hiding their identities belies the reality that the terror and lynchings were overtly supported by respectable society.

Democratic principles require respect for and belief in the legitimacy of those that disagree with you. And so what one saw in 1898 Wilmington bears little resemblance to democracy. This is why it's so unsettling to read the bluster of the man who would become Wilmington's next mayor on the heels of his terror campaign.

The preamble of the 'Wilmington Declaration of Independence' said the United States Constitution envisioned a government of enlightened men and 'did not contemplate for their descendants a subjection to an inferior race.'

It is just, and right, and absolutely best and wisest for both races that the white people who settled this country, and civilized it ... and who have done more for the Negro race than all the other peoples who have ever lived upon the earth, should alone govern it ... It is their country and they have a right to rule it.

Shall we surrender to a ragged rabble of Negroes, led by a handful of white cowards ... No! A thousand times no! ... We will have no more of the intolerable conditions under which we live. We are resolved to change them if we have to choke the Cape Fear with carcasses.

But while so much of this rhetoric is incredibly painful to read now, the author seems to want to paint the era in such a manner as to still make it recognizable. One way he does this is with his focus on the use of propaganda campaigns to stir emotions in voters. Newspapers played up unfounded claims of voter fraud and corruption as well as "black rebellion" with the expressed aim of stirring up racist fears. Especially predominant was the stoking of fears that black men were out to rape white women.

"Daniels wrote in a memoir years later, 'The people on every side were at such a key of fighting and hate that the Democrats would believe almost any piece of rascality.' As a result he noted, 'The propaganda was having good effect and winning Populists.'"

"For years, those white men had used a crude phrase for the time-tested tactic of frightening white voters by warning of the twin menace of black suffrage and black beast rapists: 'Crying nigger.'"

Zucchino is dispassionate in most of his narrative, but he does a great job of providing depth to the handful of people at the center of the events. It's difficult to find fault with those blacks who only wanted to appease the mob. ("I was whipped out of politics.") And it's even easier to relate to those who wanted to speak truth to power. The story of Alex Manly, the newspaperman whose editorializing on the hypocrisy of white fears about miscegenation, is inspiring and heartbreaking.

And the whole history itself is a cautionary tale. Sometimes people are terrible. And sometimes those terrible people do terrible things and aren't held accountable. And sometimes it takes generations to recover.

And maybe America has never really been all that great.

[Bob H · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an important, well-researched and compelling account of the overthrow, by armed force, of a multiracial city government in Wilmington, NC, in November 1898. The author has placed this event in context: it followed years of racist pushback against black and white Republican and Republican-populist (Fusion) elected officials in eastern North Carolina, notably in the then-integrated city of Wilmington. White-supremacist newspapers in North Carolina, notably the Raleigh News & Observer, had agitated for years against black enfranchisement and civil rights, and night riders, first the KKK and later the Red Shirts, would enforce it, along with, we read here, local militias forming in the period of the Spanish-American war. Finally, in two days, an armed insurrection by white supremacists that would expel the mayor, sheriff, police chief and other officials, banish a number of prominent local black and white businessmen and civic leaders, chase hundreds of terrified black families out of the city and kill at least sixty black men.

The author also shows how this event would strengthen Jim Crow type segregation and voter suppression in North Carolina, and later, by example, throughout the South in the following years. Indeed, he shows how racially-weighted voter suppression continued from 1898 up to this very day in North Carolina and elsewhere, and this insurrection is one way to understand its origins and depth.

(Read in advance-reading copy via the Amazon Vine program).

[J.M. Hushour · Rating 5 out of 5]

"May God damn North Carolina, the state of my birth."

A fascinating and crucial history of an event cruelly familiar by now: racist psychopaths undermine democracy through fear-mongering and outright slaughter. There are parts of this harrowing tale of white supremacist violence in North Carolina that will turn your goddamn stomach, for its current relevance as much as its importance as a key moment in the post-Reconstruction South.
There are many elements here at work and Zucchino deftly weaves them into a tight narrative of one of our nation's darker episodes. Gun-toting white supremacists threatening blacks with violence if they dare vote, ballot-stuffing and outright election fraud on the part of these racist assholes to make sure their equally despicable candidates one (through early racist redistricting, too!). The overthrow and running out of town of black and white politicians and citizens of Wilmington alike. The murder of up to 60 black citizens of Wilmington after a months-long campaign of terror and incitement. And so on and so on. The story is quite depressing but should be required reading. The "white revolution" as these foul bastards called it will shock and horrify you with their outright prejudice and ignorance. Too bad little has changed it seems!
Highly recommended.

[Matt · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the most sickening parts of this book is the life and work of Josephus Daniels. Daniels started the News & Observer and used the paper to fabricate tales of rape and violence by black people. He bragged that his newspaper was “the militant voice of White Supremacy.”

Using the N&O, Daniels helped enact Jim Crow laws to keep people of color from voting.
# of registered black voters in NC
1896: 126,000
1902: 6,100

Today, we continue to honor this man’s legacy in several ways, one of which is Daniels Middle School. This petition will hopefully see that changed. http://chng.it/qrjLVZWKgQ
Next, his statue needs to come down.

[Katy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Timely, important, and time for us to remember and do better.

[Cathy · Rating 5 out of 5]

A good subtitle for this review might be, "Things they never taught us in the New Hanover County Schools. . . but should have." I went to school in Wilmington from the 8th grade through high school graduation. Never once did a teacher utter a word about this coup d'etat that occurred in our town, in our school's attendance district.

If you grew up in Wilmington, you should read this book. You will recognize settings, places, and a few names. If you didn't grow up in Wilmington, you should still read this book. It is the history of North Carolina's -- or the United States' -- successful coup d'etat. The author carefully weaves together all of the pieces of the story from newspaper accounts and contemporaneously written letters of white supremacists violently overthrowing the duly-elected multiracial government of the City of Wilmington. At the time of this coup, Wilmington was the largest city in North Carolina, and it had a majority black population, and a rapidly growing middle class composed of black business people and professionals. White people from Wilmington and beyond grew more resentful, and this resentment fomented into a riotous massacre on November 10, 1898, when a heavily armed stampede of white men broke into the offices of the black-owned newspaper, The Daily Record, torched it to the ground, and attached black people all over town, but mostly in the neighborhood of The Daily Record (the Brooklyn area of Wilmington).

Other towns which appear in this book: Fayetteville, Laurinburg, Raleigh, New Bern, Weldon, Elizabeth City, and Scotland Neck.

The author won a Pulitzer Prize for writing this book in 2021 for general non-fiction. Everyone who ever went to school in Wilmington should read this book, and should seriously ponder this question: "Why didn't they teach this chapter of our history in our schools?" Our hometown's refusal and inability to face up to its horrid history was (and is) shameful, and perpetuated the racism that gave birth to this coup. Teach these lessons so that we won't repeat the mistakes.

[laurel [the suspected bibliophile] · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don't even know how to review this one. I've lived in North Carolina twice (for a total of six years, wtf even is time), and fairly close to Wilmington both times. Until this book hit my radar two years ago, I had never even heard of this event, much less its significance in US history.

It's a beautiful city with an insidious history that continues to ripple through to the present, and the coup of 1898 was a billowing flame in the rise of whyte supremacy in the United States and one of the larger deaths of the promise of reconstruction.

I did like how Zucchino succinctly breaks down the misleading term of "race riots" to describe this tragedy and others like it. "Race riot" is just such a shitty term, for a bunch of reasons, number one being it whitewashes what actually happened. The Wilmington Coup was an outright violent usurpation of a legally elected biracial government in a prosperous, majority Black city by a group of vicious, wealthy whyte people...and it had been boiled down to "race riot" in history books if it was mentioned at all.

Definitely one to read, although be warned there are copious descriptions of lynching, murder, house burning, KKK and whyte terrorism, racism, and use of the n-word.

[Allison Sesame · Rating 5 out of 5]

I did not know about the events detailed in this book. It was a powerful and moving account. The effects of what happened leading up to and in and after 1898 are still relevant and important today. I am glad I was able to learn.

[Donna Lewis · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very detailed and well-researched book about Wilmington, North Carolina. After the Civil War, the city enjoyed a prosperous black population with doctors, lawyers and politicians. However, by 1898, white supremacists felt that if blacks continued to vote and hold office, “black men would feel empowered to seize white jobs, dominate the courts and rape white women” — even though blacks held only a small percentage of appointed and elected offices.

Thus began a concerted effort by these conservative white men. They did not wear the white of the Ku Klux Klan, but red shirts, and they systematically went about terrorizing black communities and lynching innocent blacks for their accused rapes of white woman. They organized White Government Unions, also known as white supremacy clubs, to suppress the black vote. They even organized a Great White Man’s Rally and Basket Picnic, all designed to intimidate black people.

US Senator Ben Tillman of South Carolina said in 1900 that he was proud of his part in the Hamburg massacre (a shootout with local black militiamen). He “boasted on the Senate floor of his role in committing election fraud and assaulting black men who attempted to vote in 1876. ‘We stuffed ballot boxes. We shot them. We are not ashamed of it.’”

No attempt by black men to register to vote in the autumn of 1898 was successful. Armed bands of Red Shirts rode through black neighborhoods terrorizing residents. The black residents hoped for protection from a Republican Mayor, a Republican Sheriff, a supportive Governor and a Republican President. In addition they had black police officers and black deputy sheriffs. Yet the leaders of white supremacy campaign pressured the Governor to fire the “incompetent” black officers and replace them with white Democrats. President McKinley felt that “federal intervention would be a fatal mistake.”

In one black precinct that voted Republican, the office where the votes were being counted was set on fire, and when the workers ran, the ballot boxes were stuffed, leading to more Democratic votes than registered voters.

The Democrats snatched control of the state legislature. In the days that followed gangs of white men burned down the black-owned newspaper building, and attached a white-owned paper company that had a predominantly black work force. The Wilmington Light Infantry was called out...the Mayor and Sheriff ceded control of the city. Black people fled from Wilmington, black people were shot, and they were threatened with lynching. Bold successful men were banished. The black middle class, nurtured for decades, collapsed, and the multiracial City government was overthrown. On November, an estimated 60 black men were killed. At an inquest, no murderers were identified.

White ministers urged their congregations to minister to their poorer black neighbors, but “We will give the negro justice and will treat him kindly, but never again will we be ruled by him.” Across the state thousands of white men and women held a parade called Victory, White Supremacy and Good Government jubilee.

The success of the 1898 campaign in Wilmington energized the careers of the white supremacist politicians who helped direct it. In 1899 they passed the first formal Jim Crow laws. In 1868 there were 80,000 registered black voters in North Carolina. By 1900, white supremacy campaigns had whittled that number to just 15,000 and no black men were elected to the state legislature. The killings and coup in Wilmington inspired with supremacists across the South.

In wasn’t until 2016 that the voter ID laws in North Carolina were struck down, and gerrymandering violates the Fourteenth Amendment.