Lewin said he had no desire to spend time in Wilmington, except to visit his great-aunts. For him, the residue of 1898 is lasting and corrosive. In the late 1990s, he read news accounts of blacks and whites in Wilmington attempting to reconcile as the city prepared to commemorate the centennial in 1998. He said he did not believe true reconciliation was possible or that black descendants could ever recover from the crushing dislocation and racism stoked by the events of 1898. Nor did he believe that descendants of the white supremacists of 1898 would ever acknowledge the inherited status and
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