Two days after a tightly contested election in the fall of 1898, a white supremacist mob descended on Wilmington, North Carolina — a Southern oasis of Black prosperity during the Reconstruction era — to take back the city from “Negro rule.”
The rioters razed long-standing Black businesses, burned down the city’s only Black newspaper, and overthrew a mixed-race, democratically elected city council in what is considered the only successful coup in American history.
