Wilmington's Lie: The Murderous Coup of 1898 and the Rise of White Supremacy

David Zucchino reconstructs the events of November 10, 1898, in Wilmington, North Carolina, when a mob of roughly two thousand white men overthrew the city's legitimately elected, biracial government in what remains the only violent overthrow of an American municipal government in the country's history. Zucchino traces the campaign that led to that day, a coordinated political effort by white supremacist leaders, including the newspaper editor Josephus Daniels, who used his paper to stoke fear of Black political power in the months beforehand, and organized bands of armed men known as Red Shirts to intimidate Black voters ahead of the election that preceded the coup.

The book follows the violence itself, the destruction of the city's only Black owned newspaper, the Daily Record, whose editor had published an editorial the mob used as its pretext, and the killing of Black residents in numbers Zucchino shows official counts badly understated, with credible estimates running far higher than the handful of deaths local authorities acknowledged at the time. He follows the aftermath as well, the forced removal of elected Black and white Fusionist officials from office at gunpoint, and the decades of disenfranchisement and segregation that followed across North Carolina once white supremacist leaders proved a duly elected government could be violently removed with no real consequence.

Zucchino writes with a reporter's command of the timeline while keeping the moral weight of the events squarely in view, and it suits a reader who wants a single, tightly focused account of an episode still not widely known outside North Carolina, despite its direct role in shaping the disenfranchisement that followed across the American South.