The Wilmington coup and massacre

In 1898 Wilmington was North Carolina's largest city and a Black-majority one, governed by a Fusion coalition of Black Republicans and white Populists. Black residents held municipal offices, ran businesses, and published the Daily Record, one of very few Black-owned daily newspapers in the country.

The state Democratic Party ran an explicit white-supremacy campaign that autumn, organised around Red Shirt militias and a press campaign against "Negro domination". Two days after the election, on 10 November, Alfred Moore Waddell led as many as 2,000 armed white men to burn the Daily Record's offices; by late afternoon the mayor, aldermen and police chief had been forced to resign at gunpoint, and the new board of aldermen had elected Waddell mayor. Black residents were shot in the streets of the Brooklyn neighbourhood. No official count was ever made: at least fourteen men were killed, and perhaps as many as sixty, with bodies never recovered.

Black and white Fusion leaders were marched to the train station and banished. Within a few years Wilmington's Black majority was gone, and a state constitutional amendment had stripped Black North Carolinians of the vote. The state's own commission reported in 2006 that the violence was planned, that the city's leadership organised it, and that its effects on Black political life lasted generations.