What sparked the Wilmington insurrection of 1898, a mass riot and insurrection carried out by whites in Wilmington, North Carolina?
In 1899, Henry Litchfield West (1859–1940) Political Editor of The Washington Post published a short 35-page book on the Wilmington Insurrection, titled "The Race War in North Carolina."
The Wilmington insurrection of 1898, also known as the Wilmington massacre of 1898 or the Wilmington coup of 1898, was a mass riot and insurrection carried out by whites in Wilmington, North Carolina, United States, on Thursday, November 10, 1898. The white press in Wilmington originally described the event as a race riot caused by black people, as was typical of such events. Since the late 20th century and further study, the insurrection has been characterized as a coup d'état, the violent overthrow of a duly elected government, by a group of white supremacists.
Multiple causes brought it about. The coup was the result of a group of the state's white Southern Democrats conspiring and leading a mob of 2,000 white men to overthrow the legitimately elected local Fusionist biracial government in Wilmington. They expelled opposition black and white political leaders from the city, destroyed the property and businesses of black citizens built up since the Civil War, including the only black newspaper in the city, and killed an estimated 60 to more than 300 people. It has been described as the only incident of its kind in American history, because other incidents of late-Reconstruction Era violence did not result in the direct removal and replacement of elected officials by unelected individuals.
The Wilmington coup is considered a turning point in post-Reconstruction North Carolina politics. It was part of an era of more severe racial segregation and effective disenfranchisement of African Americans throughout the South, which had been underway since the passage of a new constitution in Mississippi in 1890 which raised barriers to the registration of black voters. Other states soon passed similar laws. Laura Edwards wrote in Democracy Betrayed (2000): "What happened in Wilmington became an affirmation of white supremacy not just in that one city, but in the South and in the nation as a whole", as it affirmed that invoking "whiteness" eclipsed the legal citizenship, individual rights, and equal protection under the law that black Americans were guaranteed under the Fourteenth Amendment.
