The Coup That Overthrew an American City: Wilmington 1898

In 1898, white supremacists overthrew Wilmington, North Carolina's elected biracial government in a single day — then spent a century teaching America to call it a race riot. This is the true story of the Wilmington coup and massacre of 1898. Wilmington was North Carolina's largest city: a Black-majority port with Black aldermen, a Black federal Collector of Customs, Black-owned businesses, and the only Black-owned daily newspaper in the United States — all built on the ballot box by a biracial “Fusion” government. To the state's Democratic leaders and Wilmington's business elite, a working multiracial democracy was intolerable. Over the better part of a year, the “Secret Nine” and party chairman Furnifold Simmons planned its overthrow, while editor Josephus Daniels manufactured a “Negro domination” panic and a Black editor's principled editorial was distorted into a pretext. On November 10, 1898, an armed mob of up to 2,000 burned the newspaper, killed an uncertain number of Black residents (the coroner counted about 14; the state's 2006 commission concluded as many as sixty; some estimates run higher), forced the elected mayor, aldermen, and police chief to resign at gunpoint, and installed the coup's leader as mayor by nightfall. Thousands of Black residents were banished or fled, and the coup became the template for disfranchisement across the state — collapsing North Carolina's registered Black electorate from roughly 126,000 to about 6,100 within four years. It is often described as the only successful coup d'état in American history. The perpetrators were rewarded with a governorship, a U.S. Senate seat, and a Cabinet post — and, for nearly a century, it was buried in the textbooks as a “race riot.” Told from primary sources and the 2006 North Carolina 1898 Commission report. A note on the record: the death toll is given as a range because it can no longer be precisely known; every documented victim was Black.