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

by David Zucchino

Almost overnight, the coup transformed Wilmington from an American mecca for blacks to a bastion of white supremacy virulently hostile to its black citizens. Before the 1898 coup, Wilmington was 56 percent black. That percentage dropped precipitously in the years after 1898. The 1900 federal census listed Wilmington as 49 percent black. The rate continued to plunge—from 47 percent in 1910 to 40 percent in 1930, 35 percent in 1950, 33 percent in 1990, and just 18.3 percent by 2018.

Twenty-first-century white conservatives reprised another tactic of Wilmington’s white supremacists: they said the voter ID law was designed to eliminate widespread voter fraud, the same accusation leveled against the state’s black voters in the 1890s. But the 2016 federal court panel, noting that voter fraud was extremely rare, said voter ID restrictions “impose cures for problems that did not exist.”

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 privilege afforded them by the actions of their ancestors.