On the 10th of November 1898, over 2,000 armed white people descended on Wilmington City Hall in the US state of North Carolina and forced Black and white elected officials to resign in a coup. At the time, Wilmington was home to a thriving community of Black doctors, lawyers, politicians, Black-owned banks and a Black newspaper.
The 20,000-person city’s 8,000 Black men were a political force, exercising their voting rights after the 15th amendment was added in 1870 to the US Constitution. In the 1890s, Black voters helped elect a rare biracial ‘fusion’ alliance of candidates. However, influential white leaders, including the Wilmington Cotton Mills Company’s president, the Raleigh News and Observer’s editor, and the state Democratic Party chairman, set out to topple what the newspaper editor labelled ‘Negro rule.’ These white leaders created what they called the ‘White Supremacy Campaign’ by printing falsehoods about Black men preying on white women and stockpiling guns. And, so, in the days leading up to the 1898 elections, white groups, galvanised by the propaganda, were infuriated with the mixed-race government and set out to intimidate Black voters, k*lling 60 Black men. The mob of 500 white men swelled to 2,000 as they marched across the city and became known as ‘Red Shirts,’ wreaking a wave of terror against Black residents. Colonel Alfred Moore Waddell, a white former Confederate officer and congressman, told a gun-waving white audience he would ‘choke the current of the Cape Fear River with Black bodies if he had to.’
Armed white rioters destroyed Black businesses, including the local Black newspaper office, and forced Black people to run into the woods. A 2006 study described the coup in detail, blaming all levels of government for not intervening, resulting in Black merchants and workers suffering losses ‘in terms of job status, income, and access to capital.’ Black businesses moved or closed, about 2,100 Black residents fled, and Black literacy rates plunged.
Historians and Equal Justice Initiative researchers have documented at least 34 instances of mass violence, when white mobs k*lled scores of Black people during the Reconstruction period (1865-77), during which the southern United States was re-built following the destruction of the US Civil War (1861-65).
Sources:
https://calendar.eji.org/racial-injustice/nov/10
https://www.dncr.nc.gov/1898-wilmington-coup
https://www.loc.gov/classroom-materials/elections/voters/african-americans