It was quite an unusual situation and, again, something that white supremacists were not going to allow to stand.ĭAVIES: Right. They had been in power in North Carolina since Reconstruction but had lost control of Wilmington and the state Legislature in 1894 through a combination of the Populist Party, which was made up of poor whites, abandoning the Democratic Party and going over to the Republican Party and aligning themselves with not only white republicans but black Republicans, and the blacks were the ones that had put the Republicans in power.Īnd so that's how they had reached this status in Wilmington with a burgeoning black middle class, with black doctors, black lawyers, black professionals. This was, really, more than the white supremacists could bear. There weren't that many because the white media really dominated. There was a daily black newspaper, which was very unusual in the South. There was a multiracial government at the time, where blacks served in positions of power, and that was extremely rare in the South at that time. It was - first of all, it was a majority black city, and it was probably one of the very, very few major cities in the South that had a black majority. It was really a unique city in the South at that time. Give us a sense of where black citizens stood in Wilmington then.ĭAVID ZUCCHINO: Wilmington was really an outlier. It's a coastal city, then the largest city in North Carolina - right? - and remarkable for the status that African Americans held at that city at a, you know - which was a city in the Deep South. And it's set in Wilmington, N.C., in the 1890s. He spoke with FRESH AIR's Dave Davies.ĭAVE DAVIES, BYLINE: Well, David Zucchino, welcome to FRESH AIR. He's covered war and civil conflicts in more than three dozen countries and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for his reporting from apartheid South Africa. Zucchino chronicles the events in a new book called "Wilmington's Lie: The Murderous Coup Of 1898 And The Rise Of White Supremacy." David Zucchino is a contributing writer for The New York Times. That ended in 1898 with a bloody campaign of violence and intimidation by white supremacists, which our guest journalist David Zucchino calls America's first and only armed overthrow of a legally elected government. It had a thriving black middle class, a large black electorate and a local government that included black aldermen, police officers and magistrates. But in the 1890s, the port city of Wilmington, N.C., was an exception. ![]() The American South in the post-Reconstruction era was a land of broken promises and brutal oppression for African Americans, as white leaders stripped former slaves of many of the civil and voting rights they'd won after the Civil War.
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