In 1898, armed white people stormed Wilmington, North Carolina, an affluent majority-Black city. The biracial Fusion Party had managed to win election to a number of city offices, enraging white supremacists in the area, who plotted a violent overthrow of the local government. The mob murdered dozens of Black residents and forced thousands of others to flee their homes in what remains, to this day, the only successful coup in U.S. history.
