The First Great American Coup

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

On November 10th, 1898, just two days after rigging statewide elections by literally stuffing ballot boxes, White supremacists overthrew the government of Wilmington, North Carolina. They provoked a riot by claiming a Black journalist said something hurtful in a local newspaper. By the end of the day, the mob had decimated the local Black middle class, and driven the racially integrated city government out at gunpoint.

It remains the only time violence has overthrown a legally elected government in American history.

Veteran New York Times correspondent David Zucchino has built his career covering civil wars and apartheid-style governments. Importantly, like William L. Shirer, author of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, Zucchino is a journalist, not an historian. He specializes in context, facts, and nuance, delivered in terms which general audiences understand. This means his writing is copiously sourced, but written in plain English, without scholarly allusions.

White Wilmingtonians, including many who fought in the Civil War, thought themselves natural inheritors of power and prerogative. But as former slaves and their descendents migrated to Wilmington seeking work, they soon became the city’s majority. Wilmington became rich and populous, the largest city in the state, and the Governor of North Carolina was a Wilmington moderate. But despite the rewards, White Wilmingtonians nursed their grudges.

Zucchino describes the years before the insurrection, when former Confederates attempted to maintain White supremacist dominion. But swelling populations of Black Wilmingtonians began working hard, amassing savings, and owning their own homes. To the White population’s chagrin, Black Wilmingtonians (and, increasingly, their poor White allies) began voting their economic interests. This, the Confederates and Klan wizards agreed, must not stand.

Alex Manly, owner and editor of North Carolina’s only Black-owned daily newspaper, provided the trigger White supremacists needed. He wrote an editorial condemning myths of the oversexed Black man, a mandatory part of White justification. The White supremacists were outraged. How dare this Black entrepreneur refute our racialized paranoia! Why, let this go unchallenged, they suggested, and White dominion might have to change!

David Zucchino

The victors would later present events of November 10th as spontaneous, Black-caused, and unexpected. But Zucchino demonstrates, through the copious letters, diaries, and newspaper articles that the print-suffused era left behind, that Wilmington’s “race riot” was orchestrated for months in advance. White Wilmingtonians wanted this conflict to serve their political ends. Then they massaged the historical record afterward to maintain their positions of privilege.

History, Zucchino tacitly acknowledges, isn’t only about what happened. It’s also about us, the readers, trying to understand how we reached the moment we live in. As America has become more racially polarized than any time in the last three generations, as many progressives believe police persecute minorities and conservatives believe only vigilance protects against incipient anarchy, Zucchino pays attention to these themes in North Carolina’s history.

Explicitly racialized paranoia justified both aggressive policing and White vigilantes. (Rich Whites organized their working-class allies into a brute squad nicknamed the Red Shirts, whose tactics were every bit as autocratic as that name implies.) Whites stockpiled state-of-the-art weapons, many from the recent Spanish-American War, behind claims of “self-defense,” while Blacks were denied arms, owing to fears of crime. It starts to seem chillingly familiar.

Having ousted the city’s coalition government, Red Shirts began chasing prominent civil rights leaders from the city. They claimed they were removing the city’s lawless elements and malcontents. But the Blacks targeted for removal were overwhelmingly middle-class, and included several prominent entrepreneurs and business owners. Wilmington’s economy contracted following this racialized purge, and has never fully recovered its former dynamism and entrepreneurial vigor.

In the aftermath, White supremacists seized the state legislature, and an interracial coalition of progressives fled North Carolina, fearing the rifle or the noose. Legislators instituted measures designed to keep Blacks from voting, and admitted their motivations in doing so. Terrified of the spectre of “Negro rule” (Wilmington had sent America’s only Black Representative to Congress), the legislator strengthened Jim Crow laws and legalized racial crackdowns. These laws would stand for another seventy years.

History is never truly a dead letter, despite the lifeless lists of names and dates which state education standards expect students to memorize. The Wilmington insurrectionists provided a blueprint from which White supremacists continue to learn. Zucchino lays out the history of Wilmington’s violence with the breathless pace of a thriller novelist, and the scholarly research of an academic. But most importantly, he holds a mirror up where readers can see ourselves.

Because history is always, ultimately, about us.