The Only Coup on American Soil: The Wilmington Massacre of 1898

On the morning of November tenth, eighteen ninety-eight, a mob of more than fifteen hundred armed white men marched through Wilmington and burned a newspaper office to the ground. What followed was the only successful coup d'état in the history of the United States.

To understand that morning, you have to understand what Wilmington was in the years before it. During Reconstruction and into the eighteen nineties, Wilmington was a majority-Black city. African Americans held elected and appointed positions throughout city government. A political alliance called Fusion, joining Black and white Republicans with white Populists, had built a genuinely multiracial governing coalition. The city had a Black alderman, a Black sheriff's deputy, and a thriving Black professional class.

Alexander Manly was the editor of the Daily Record, the state's only Black-owned daily newspaper, and possibly the only Black-owned daily in the country. In August eighteen ninety-eight, Manly published an editorial pushing back against the white supremacist tropes used to justify lynching. The editorial infuriated white Democratic leaders, who had been orchestrating a statewide campaign of terror and propaganda designed to take back political power under the banner of white supremacy.

Two days after the November elections, the mob struck. They burned the Daily Record offices. They spread through the Black neighborhood of Brooklyn, shooting men in the streets. The state's two thousand and six official report settled on, quote, as many as sixty killed. All of the victims were Black.

The elected city government was forced to resign at gunpoint and replaced by white supremacist leaders. Some two thousand one hundred Black residents fled Wilmington permanently. The city went from majority Black to majority white in a matter of days. The coup was complete.

For nearly a century the event was called a riot, a framing that suggested spontaneous chaos rather than premeditated political violence. North Carolina did not issue an official state report acknowledging the coup until two thousand six. The state followed with formal recognition in two thousand eighteen. A historical marker near the site of the Daily Record office, at seventh and Nun streets, now stands where the paper burned.

This is Wilmington's most important and most painful history. It is, by any measure, American history.