When White Supremacists Staged the Only Successful Coup in U.S. History

On November 10, 1898, white supremacists in Wilmington, North Carolina, massacred upwards of 60 Black people and overthrew the city’s democratically elected government, instigating the only successful coup d’état in United States history. No one was brought to justice for the horrific violence, and over the next century, the event was largely ignored, whitewashed as a “race riot” if it was mentioned at all.

Though the perpetrators sought to blame Wilmington’s Black population for the unrest, the coup was actually planned in advance by a group of white vigilantes, who used newspapers and racist rhetoric to foment rage against the city’s newly elected coalition government, which included a handful of Black men.

“[It] just stunned me that white supremacists could openly stage a coup, murder people, appoint themselves to positions of power and not face any consequences at all,” says David Zucchino, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning 2020 book Wilmington’s Lie: The Murderous Coup of 1898 and the Rise of White Supremacy. “Many of the [leaders] of the coup … went on to long careers in politics and journalism.”

In recent years, scholars and locals have sought to publicize the real story behind the Wilmington coup. Now, PBS’s “American Experience” series is set to build on these efforts with a documentary titled “American Coup: Wilmington 1898.” Featuring interviews with experts and descendants of conspirators and victims alike, the show will premiere on both local PBS stations and online on the evening of November 12.

Trailer | AMERICAN COUP: WILMINGTON 1898 | AMERICAN EXPERIENCE | PBS

Wilmington’s coalition government

In the 1870s, the Democratic Party—then dominated by white supremacists and conservative Southerners—won control of North Carolina and began working to disenfranchise Black voters. During a recession in the early 1890s, however, white farmers and laborers who resented the Democrats’ support of big businesses like banks and railroads joined the Populist Party, which advocated for economic reform and a better education for working-class children.

In Wilmington, Populists, despite harboring many of the same racist views as Democrats, partnered with Republicans and Black voters, creating an alliance that was dubbed the Fusionist ticket. Fusionists gained a majority in the state’s legislature in 1894; by 1897, Wilmington had a Fusionist mayor, and party representatives held several offices in local government. The Fusionists’ electoral success also allowed Black men to occupy a handful of civic positions.

While these Black government officials were relatively few in number, with the vast majority of aldermen, police officers and magistrates remaining white, many Democrats viewed having even one Black man in power as too many. The Fusionists’ success infuriated white supremacists and created the kernel of rage that led their leaders in Wilmington to turn to violence.

“A broad swath of the population did not believe in a multiracial democracy, did not believe in the legitimacy of a multiracial democracy and believed that if it was a multiracial democracy, it really wasn’t American,” says Carol Anderson, a historian at Emory University who appears in the documentary. “It was a way to define ‘American’ as ‘white-only.’”

Anderson adds, “You had this massive disenfranchisement happening across the South. And to have this one viable government that’s standing there—the true beacon on the hill, [showing] this is what could be. Imagine how dangerous that was [in the minds of white supremacists].”

The press’ role in the Wilmington massacre

The coup and the massacre were planned months in advance, organized by individuals who were fueled by hatred and the desire to further their own social and political standing. One such self-serving agitator was Alfred Moore Waddell, a former Confederate soldier and congressman whose anti-Black screeds played a major role in keeping white rage in Wilmington burning hot.

“Here, in the most quiet and conservative of the original 13 states and at the end of the 19th century, we are reduced to the pitiful necessity of choosing whether we will live under the domination of Negroes led by a few unprincipled white men, and see the ruin of all that we hold dear—or prove ourselves worthy of the respect of mankind by restoring good government at all hazards or any cost,” Waddell said in an infamous October 24, 1898, speech at Wilmington’s Thalian Hall.

He ended with a shouted screed, his words almost drowned out by the crowd’s enthusiastic response: “Shall we surrender to a ragged rabble of Negroes, led by a handful of white cowards? … No! A thousand times no! … We will have no more of the intolerable conditions under which we live. We are resolved to change them if we have to choke the Cape Fear [region] with carcasses!”

Local newspapers also aided and abetted the coup. “For people living in 1898, the [newspaper was] the equivalent of social media,” says Brad Lichtenstein, who co-directed “American Coup” with fellow filmmaker Yoruba Richen. “It’s everywhere. It’s ubiquitous. It’s what people are clamoring to read. It shapes culture, society and, obviously, ends up also shaping motivations and, ultimately, violence.”

The Raleigh-based News and Observer, headed by editor Josephus Daniels, was integral in stoking white fear. “Daniels’ manipulation of white readers through phony or misleading newspaper stories was perhaps the most daring and effective disinformation campaign of the era,” writes Zucchino in Wilmington’s Lie.

Many of the News and Observer’s stories, often accompanied by racist cartoons, portrayed Black men as insatiable monsters who raped white women. Even though Daniels later admitted that assaults of white women by Black men were “few in number,” his paper expressed outrage over a purported wave of such attacks in 1898.

Daniels’ claims frustrated Alexander Manly, the owner of a Wilmington-based Black paper called the Daily Record. On August 18, 1898, Manly published a rebuttal in which he suggested that white women “are not any more particular in the matter of clandestine meetings with colored men than are the white men with colored women.” He added, “Every Negro lynched is called a ‘big, burly, black brute,’ when in fact many of those who have thus been dealt with … were not only not ‘black’ and ‘burly’ but were sufficiently attractive for white girls of culture and refinement to fall in love with them.”

According to Anderson, “It was like [Manly] had blasphemed God when he said that. It was like he had defiled all that is sacred and holy in the world. And so [white supremacists] were like, ‘How dare you? How dare you besmirch the sanctity of white womanhood? How dare you?’”

Manly didn’t believe that his words would tip the scales into a massacre. As Anderson says, the editor “saw all [of] this violence swirling around. He heard the rhetoric, but he wrote this piece going, ‘They wouldn’t dare. … They’re talking a big game, but look, we’ve got this wonderful government in place, and it’s really working. They wouldn’t dare besmirch their own name, their own value system, to try to wipe us out.’”

Wilmington was quiet in the days immediately following Manly’s editorial. But the eerie calm only lasted because Democratic leaders had persuaded the like-minded to delay violence until after Election Day, when the political impact would be strongest.

“They knew that if they stuffed the ballot boxes and stole the election, they would be in a much better position to mount the coup,” says Zucchino. “They saw the coup months in advance and planned for it, and [they] carried it out perfectly.”

The massacre and coup of November 10, 1898

North Carolina held elections for federal, state and county positions on November 8, 1898. In the weeks leading up to Election Day, Democrats backed by the Red Shirts, a white supremacist militia that intimidated, threatened and in some cases beat up non-Democrats, suppressed the Black vote and resorted to ballot stuffing. The result was a landslide victory for the Democratic Party. Red Shirts roamed the streets that night, supposedly to protect the white population from fictious armed Black men.

Elections for offices in Wilmington itself, among them the mayor, the police chief, the sheriff and the board of aldermen, weren’t held on November 8. Those seats were scheduled for an election in March 1899—but the city’s white supremacists didn’t want to wait that long.

“The very existence of a viable, working, non-corrupt, multiracial democracy upended their whole belief system in terms of white supremacy,” says Anderson. “And so it had to be wiped off the face of this earth.”

On November 9, in an effort to tee up an excuse for violence, Democrats in Wilmington forced a group of local African American leaders to agree to a series of demands, including handing over many of their jobs to white men and banishing Manly from the city. The leaders agreed in writing and sent their response to Waddell.

The following morning, Waddell claimed he hadn’t received the letter, which was sent via mail after white patrols prevented a Black lawyer from hand-delivering it. Declaring that the Black community had failed to agree to the Democrats’ demands, Waddell went to the Wilmington Light Infantry Armory near his home just after 8 a.m., finding a mob of around 500 angry white men who were getting increasingly riled up. Though former Ku Klux Klan leader Roger Moore had planned to lead the vigilantes, he was elsewhere that morning, creating a power vacuum that Waddell eagerly stepped in to fill. Asserting his dominance over the mob, Waddell led the crowd to the Record’s office, intent on lynching Manly and destroying the newspaper’s press.

Manly, however, had fled the city after realizing his life was in danger. The crowd turned its attention to the Record building, setting it aflame and preventing the Black fire brigade from getting through until the office was in shambles. The rioters posed for photographs in front of the burned-out structure, smiling proudly before they went off to commit more atrocities.

The smoke from the fire at the Record office frightened the town’s Black population. A crowd of Black men formed around a street corner, soon to be joined by the white mob. While white newspapers claimed that a Black man had fired the first shot, other eyewitnesses blamed the armed white supremacists. Either way, writes Zucchino in Wilmington’s Lie, “It did not take long for the standoff to erupt in violence. Moments later, four white men unleashed a fusillade from a .44-caliber navy rifle, two 16-shot repeating rifles and a double-barreled shotgun loaded with buckshot.”

According to Thomas Clawson, the editor of a local white newspaper, a “volley tore off the top of a [Black] man’s head, and he fell dead.” Two other Black men soon joined him. After the initial barrage of gunfire, a white supremacist leader declared martial law. The mob, accompanied by members of the federal Naval Reserves and the local Wilmington Light Infantry militia, which boasted a Colt rapid-fire machine gun, marched into the predominantly Black neighborhood of Brooklyn via the Fourth Street Bridge. There, a militia leader said, “Now boys, I want to tell you right now, I want you all to load, and when I give the command to shoot, I want you to shoot to kill.” The horde killed as many as 25 Black men in the area surrounding the bridge. Shooting continued throughout the day, and the white instigators ultimately killed dozens more.

Around 4 p.m., the coup’s leaders marched on City Hall and forced Fusionist officials, both white and Black, to resign at gunpoint in favor of hand-picked Democratic replacements. Waddell was declared Wilmington’s new mayor.

The city hospital treated 14 victims of the massacre, the majority of them Black. As a doctor on call noted, “All [of the patients] except the two white men were shot in the back.” While a handful of white men were injured, all of the people who died that day were African American.

“I’ll tell you, things are stirred up, and I am glad to say I am still living, but we have not killed enough Negroes,” wrote Wilmington Light Infantry member Jack Metts in a November 12 letter. “Two or three white men were wounded, and we have not gotten enough to make up for it.”

Estimates of the death toll vary widely, from 9 to 300. But a 2006 report compiled by the 1898 Wilmington Race Riot Commission concluded that armed white vigilantes massacred as many as 60 African Americans. Thousands of other Black Wilmington residents fled their homes, seeking refuge in nearby swamps and cemeteries.

Over the days that followed, the white supremacists intimidated prominent members of the Black community, as well as former white Fusionist officeholders, into leaving Wilmington. Zucchino’s research suggests that none of these exiles ever returned. The threat to their lives remained long after the massacre.

The legacy of the Wilmington massacre

No one was ever charged for the murders that took place in Wilmington on November 10, 1898. The federal government failed to intervene on the day itself and took no action after the fact. The New York Times minimized the violence, reporting that the Board of Aldermen had “resigned in response to public sentiment” rather than the threat of bloodshed. “The entire board was changed legally,” the national newspaper added.

As the 20th century began, Jim Crow laws enacted repressive restrictions on Black North Carolinians. In 1896, 126,000 Black men were registered to vote in the state. In 1902, four years after the coup, that number fell to 6,100.

The perpetrators faced no real consequences for their actions. In addition to Waddell usurping the position of mayor, newspaper editor Daniels went on to become secretary of the Navy under President Woodrow Wilson. Furnifold Simmons, another leader of the coup, was elected to the Senate, where he served for 30 years.

The Wilmington Massacre, which occurred #OTD in 1898 violently unseated over 100 Black officials, leaving between 60-250 Black residents dead and forcing 100,000 to flee.

Black Americans would not hold office again until 1972. #ANationsStory pic.twitter.com/QVxv2T4Tn5

— Smithsonian’s NMAAHC (@NMAAHC) November 10, 2023

In the aftermath of the coup, no Black representatives sat on Wilmington’s City Council until 1972, and no Black citizen from North Carolina served in Congress until 1992, when Eva Clayton was elected to the House of Representatives.

The scars from the events of November 10 still run deep in Wilmington. Some descendants of those involved in the massacre, both as perpetrators and victims, regularly take part in Coming to the Table discussions, where they work together toward racial healing. Several appear in the “American Coup” documentary.

One such participant is Kieran Haile, Manly’s great-great-grandson. Haile’s father and uncle told him about Manly when he was a child, and he later started reaching out to colleges and historical societies to learn more and connect with other descendants. “It’s been affirming to meet other people who have had a similar experience,” Haile says. His father and uncle are slowly becoming more involved in these efforts, too: A native of Southern California, Haile has encouraged his relatives to visit Wilmington with him, and he hopes they will attend the documentary premiere there.

Featuring living descendants, both white and Black, in “American Coup” was important to the documentary’s co-directors.

“We felt that if we’re telling this story, we cannot just tell it from the perspectives of the descendants of the victims,” says Richen. “We need to know what stories were told by the ancestors of the perpetrators—what had they been told or not told about what happened in Wilmington, about the wealth that they inherited, about what this town was.” She adds, “Quite frankly … until we start doing that countrywide, we’re [never] really going to grapple with the history of racism.”

The Wilmington Massacre of 1898