November Tenth, Eighteen Ninety-Eight, The Wilmington Coup

In the autumn of eighteen ninety-eight, Wilmington was the largest city in North Carolina and one of the most prosperous Black communities in the South. African American residents held elected office, ran businesses, published a daily newspaper, and served as magistrates and aldermen. It was the kind of multiracial municipal government that white supremacist Democrats in the state had been organizing for years to destroy.

They had a plan. Its architect was Alfred Moore Waddell, a former Confederate officer and congressman who delivered speeches openly calling for the overthrow of Wilmington's elected government. On November eighth, Democrats won statewide elections amid widespread fraud and intimidation.

Two days later, on November tenth, a mob of roughly two thousand white men marched to the offices of the Daily Record, the Black-owned newspaper, and burned it to the ground. They then moved through the city's Black neighborhoods. The number of people killed that day is disputed.

Contemporary coroners counted fourteen. State investigators working a century later concluded the toll was probably as many as sixty. Many bodies, historians believe, were removed and never recorded.

Hundreds of Black residents fled the city permanently. The legitimately elected mayor and aldermen were forced to resign at gunpoint and replaced by Waddell and his allies on the same day. It was the only successful municipal coup in American history.

The full scope of what happened was suppressed for decades. Wilmington newspapers at the time described the events as a Black uprising. It was not until two thousand six that a state-authorized commission published a five-hundred-page report documenting the coup for the official record.

The state designated November tenth a day of remembrance. The Daily Record's site in downtown Wilmington carries a historical marker. The story of Wilmington in eighteen ninety-eight is a statewide story: the machinery of the coup was built across North Carolina, and its consequences, the systematic disfranchisement that followed, reshaping the state's politics for generations.