THEY STOLE A CITY

New Yorker staff writer Collins delivers a scathing history of an infamous act of racial violence.

The year 1898 saw a one-sided victory of U.S. military forces against Spain. In Wilmington, North Carolina, when troops returned that summer, led by a former Confederate and current Klansman, they were on hand to reinforce a white-supremacist movement that would erupt in horrific violence in the fall. Among the perpetrators were paramilitary vigilantes who, having gotten hold of a machine gun, murdered Black civilians, especially targeting community leaders among the city’s then-extensive Black middle class, and seized control of the city’s government, “completing what is thought to be the only successful coup d’état on American soil.” David Zucchino’s Wilmington’s Lie (2020) helped resurface a story that many white North Carolinians have since tried to downplay or forget. Collins’ narrative takes that bloody historical event, with “dozens and perhaps hundreds of Black citizens” killed, and extends it to a larger legacy of racial oppression. The first Black officeholders of the time, she writes, served with “an awareness that almost anything they did could incite resentment and even violence from their white constituents”; those who followed faced challenges of their own. Meanwhile, the city’s white power elite committed themselves to exclusion and segregation well into the time of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, which white North Carolinians resisted in outsize numbers, and on to the present. (“North Carolina is by far the most active state for the United Klans of America,” a Congressional committee held in 1965.) Collins concludes by recounting the difficult effort both to raise awareness of the 1898 massacre in curricula and public monuments as well as to secure some kind of belated justice, including possible reparations, in a time of a revanchist white-supremacist movement “spoiling to…bypass the democratic process with brute force.”

An urgent work of reportage and historical research that lays bare structural racism past and present.