eAudiobook
Libby
Wilmington's Lie
Summary
From Pulitzer Prize winner David Zucchino comes a searing account of the Wilmington riot andcoup of 1898, an extraordinary event unknown to most AmericansBy the 1890s, Wilmington was North Carolina's largest city and a shining example of a mixed-racecommunity. It was a bustling port city with a burgeoning African American middle class and a Fusionistgovernment of Republicans and Populists that included black aldermen, police officers, and magistrates.There were successful black-owned businesses and an African American newspaper, the Record. But acrossthe state—and the South—white supremacist Democrats were working to reverse the advances made byformer slaves and their progeny.In North Carolina, Democrats were plotting to take back the state legislature in November "by theballot or bullet or both," and then to trigger a "race riot" to overthrow Wilmington's multi-racial government.Led by prominent citizens including Josephus Daniels, publisher of the state's largest newspaper, andformer Confederate Colonel Alfred Moore Waddell, white supremacists rolled out a carefully orchestratedcampaign that included raucous rallies, race-baiting editorials and newspaper cartoons, and sensational,fabricated news stories.With intimidation and violence, the Democrats suppressed the black vote and stuffed ballot boxes (orthrew them out), to win control of the state legislature on November 8th. Two days later, more than 2,000heavily armed Red Shirts swarmed through Wilmington, torching the Record office, terrorizing womenand children, and shooting at least sixty black men dead in the streets. The rioters forced city officials toresign at gunpoint and replaced them with mob leaders. Prominent blacks—and sympathetic whites—werebanished. Hundreds of terrified black families took refuge in surrounding swamps and forests.This brutal insurrection is a rare instance of a violent overthrow of an elected government in the U.S.It halted gains made by blacks and restored racism as official government policy, cementing white rule foranother half century. It was not a "race riot," as the events of November 1898 came to be known, but rathera racially motivated rebellion launched by white supremacists.In Wilmington's Lie, Pulitzer Prize winner David Zucchino uses contemporary newspaper accounts,diaries, letters, and official communications to create a gripping and compelling narrative that weavestogether individual stories of hate and fear and brutality. This is a dramatic and definitive account of aremarkable but forgotten chapter of American history.