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

Wilmington’s Lie: The Murderous Coup of 1898 and the Rise of White Supremacy (2020) is a nonfiction work by David Zucchino. The book is a history of the organized attack by white supremacists on the Black community of Wilmington, North Carolina. The attack resulted in the death of an estimated 60 Black men and the overthrow of the democratically-elected Fusionist government. The book explores the role of media in promoting racist propaganda and the nature of white supremacist beliefs. Zucchino is a journalist who won a Pulitzer for his reporting on Black life in South Africa, and previously wrote a book about the Myth of the Welfare Queen (1999). David Zucchino was awarded the North Carolina Award for his contribution to literature in 2022.

This guide uses the 2021 Grove Press paperback edition.

Content Warning: The source material features depictions of graphic racial violence and anti-Black racism, as well as allusions to sexual violence and torture. Additionally, the source material references outdated, offensive terms for Black people throughout, which is replicated in this guide only in direct quotes from the source material.

Summary

The Prologue describes the attack on the Black neighborhood in Wilmington, North Carolina, by a paramilitary group known as the Red Shirts on November 10th, 1898.

Book 1: “Days of Hope” then goes back in the chronology to illustrate the history of race and politics in North Carolina from just before the Civil War through the Reconstruction period. White residents of North Carolina panicked in response to Nat Turner’s rebellion in Southampton County, Virginia, in 1831. As a result, they tortured and killed a number of their enslaved people and fostered a paranoid fear in white residents that Black people could organize and kill them at any time. Following the Civil War, Black men were given the right to vote and overwhelmingly voted Republican. The Republican Party courted Black votes and formed a coalition with the white working-class Populists to win political control of North Carolina in 1896.

In Book 2: “Reckoning,” Zucchino describes how Democratic political operatives Josephus Daniels and Furnifold Simmons created the White Supremacy Campaign to regain control of North Carolina politics through the violent intimidation of Black communities in 1898. They had a three-fold strategy that relied on voter fraud, political and racial violence, and propaganda to achieve their goals. Daniels, a newspaper editor as well as a politician, used his “megaphone” to promote the Democratic white supremacist agenda. A particular target of their campaign was Black newspaper editor Alex Manly, who had written an editorial arguing that Black men did not rape white women but, rather, that white women were sometimes attracted to Black men.

On election day, November 8th, 1898, a white supremacist paramilitary known as the Red Shirts attempted to scare Black Wilmington voters away from the polls. They also engaged in ballot box stuffing to ensure that the Democrats would win the election. Following their electoral victory in the county, leading Democrats in Wilmington summoned Black leaders and insisted they banish Alex Manly from the city, along with other demands. They insisted on receiving a response in writing before the next morning, but the Black leaders’ written response was not delivered after the man tasked with delivering it was scared away by the Red Shirts.

In Book 3: “Line of Fire,” Zucchino describes the massacre and coup on November 10th, 1898, two days after the election. When the white supremacist leaders failed to receive a response from the Black leadership, they led a mob made up of the Red Shirts and the Wilmington Light Infantry to Alex Manly’s office. They burned the office down and then set out to terrorize other parts of the Black community of Wilmington. Approximately 60 men were shot, and hundreds of Black people fled the city to camp out in the nearby swamps.

The white supremacist mob also targeted Wilmington’s Fusionist city government. The leaders forced the Fusionist government to resign and appointed Democratic party members in their place. In the months following, thousands of Black residents fled permanently. The Democrats used their foothold in North Carolina politics to pass a state constitutional amendment that made it extremely difficult for Black people to vote. They would hold political power there until the passage of civil rights laws in the 1960s.

In the Epilogue, Zucchino describes how the history of the Wilmington massacre was typically presented as a “race riot” and a necessary response to a corrupt government. He details how recent historical research, including his own, has shown instead that it was an orchestrated plot to regain political power by white supremacists. Zucchino notes recent, mixed attempts by North Carolina and Wilmington officials to better memorialize the tragedy. He ends the book with interviews with descendants of those involved in the Wilmington massacre, both white and Black, illustrating the impact it continues to have on the city and its people.