EP 56: Wilmington's Lie: The Murderous Coup of 1898 and the Rise of White Supremacy with WINNER OF THE 2021 PULITZER PRIZE David Zucchino

Sunni is away this week so Lisa is hosting solo.  Her guest
is David Zucchino is a contributing writer for the New York
Times. He has covered wars and civil conflicts in more than three
dozen countries and is a four-time Pulitzer Prize finalist for
his reporting in Iraq, Lebanon, Africa, and inner-city
Philadelphia. Zucchino won a Pulitzer Prize for his dispatches
from apartheid South Africa. He is the author of Thunder Run and
Myth of the Welfare Queen


Book description:

WINNER OF THE 2021 PULITZER PRIZE FOR GENERAL NONFICTION


From Pulitzer Prize-winner David Zucchino comes a searing
account of the Wilmington riot and coup of 1898, an extraordinary
event unknown to most Americans


By the 1890s, Wilmington was North Carolina’s largest city and a
shining example of a mixed-race community. It was a bustling port
city with a burgeoning African American middle class and a
Fusionist government of Republicans and Populists that included
black aldermen, police officers and magistrates. There were
successful black-owned businesses and an African American
newspaper, The Record. But across the state—and the South—white
supremacist Democrats were working to reverse the advances made
by former slaves and their progeny.


In 1898, in response to a speech calling for white men to rise to
the defense of Southern womanhood against the supposed threat of
black predators, Alexander Manly, the outspoken young Record
editor, wrote that some relationships between black men and white
women were consensual. His editorial ignited outrage across the
South, with calls to lynch Manly.


But North Carolina’s white supremacist Democrats had a different
strategy. They were plotting to take back the state legislature
in November “by the ballot or bullet or both,” and then use the
Manly editorial to trigger a “race riot” to overthrow
Wilmington’s multi-racial government. Led by prominent citizens
including Josephus Daniels, publisher of the state’s largest
newspaper, and former Confederate Colonel Alfred Moore Waddell,
white supremacists rolled out a carefully orchestrated campaign
that included raucous rallies, race-baiting editorials and
newspaper cartoons, and sensational, fabricated news stories.


With intimidation and violence, the Democrats suppressed the
black vote and stuffed ballot boxes (or threw them out), to win
control of the state legislature on November eighth. Two days
later, more than 2,000 heavily armed Red Shirts swarmed through
Wilmington, torching the Record office, terrorizing women and
children, and shooting at least sixty black men dead in the
streets. The rioters forced city officials to resign at gunpoint
and replaced them with mob leaders. Prominent blacks—and
sympathetic whites—were banished. Hundreds of terrified black
families took refuge in surrounding swamps and forests. 


This brutal insurrection is a rare instance of a violent
overthrow of an elected government in the U.S. It halted gains
made by blacks and restored racism as official government policy,
cementing white rule for another half century. It was not a “race
riot,” as the events of November 1898 came to be known, but
rather a racially motivated rebellion launched by white
supremacists.


In Wilmington’s Lie, Pulitzer Prize-winner David Zucchino uses
contemporary newspaper accounts, diaries, letters and official
communications to create a gripping and compelling narrative that
weaves together individual stories of hate and fear and
brutality. This is a dramatic and definitive account of a
remarkable but forgotten chapter of American history.