On November 10, 1898, the city of Wilmington, North Carolina, was torn apart by the only successful coup d’état in American history. What began as a campaign of white supremacy ended in organized terror. Armed mobs burned The Daily Record, a Black-owned newspaper, and murdered scores of Black citizens while forcing the city’s elected officials to resign at gunpoint. By nightfall, Wilmington’s multiracial government was gone, replaced by a white supremacist regime that would usher in decades of Jim Crow rule across North Carolina.
For more than a century, the massacre was falsely described as a “race riot,” a distortion that hid the truth of a planned insurrection against democracy itself. In this episode, we uncover the real story of the Wilmington Massacre of 1898, explore the lives it destroyed, the power it secured, and the warning it still sends about the fragility of American freedom.
