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 halted gains made by blacks and restored racism as official government policy, cementing White ru.
This brutal insurrection is a rare instance of a violent overthrow of an elected government in the U.
S.
Hundreds of terrified black families took refuge in surrounding swamps and forests.
Prominent blacks--and sympathetic whites--were banished.
The rioters forced city officials to resign at gunpoint and replaced them with mob leaders.
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.
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.
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.
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.
But North Carolina\'s White supremacist Democrats had a different strategy.
His editorial ignited outrage across the South, with calls to lynch Manly.
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.
But across the state--and the South--White supremacist Democrats were working to reverse the advances made by former slaves and their progeny.
There were successful black-owned businesses and an African American newspaper, The Record.
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.
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
