Wilmington massacre

On Thursday, November 10, 1898, a coordinated campaign of white supremacist politicians, businessmen, and armed vigilante groups in Wilmington, North Carolina, culminated in the violent overthrow of the city's legally elected Fusionist government — a biracial coalition of Republicans and Populists. The white press of the era described the events as a "race riot" instigated by Black residents; historians have since characterized it as a municipal coup d'état accompanied by a racial massacre.

Wilmington in the 1890s was North Carolina's largest city and majority-Black, with a substantial Black professional and business class, including three Black aldermen and the only Black-owned daily newspaper in the country, the Wilmington Daily Record, edited by Alexander Manly. Economic and political tensions grew as the Fusionist coalition — combining Republican and Populist voters — won state and local offices in 1894 and 1896, reversing Democratic-era policies on interest rates, taxation, and railroad regulation.

In late 1897, a group of nine prominent white Wilmington men, later called the "Secret Nine," began conspiring to retake the city government. State Democratic Party Chairman Furnifold Simmons built a statewide "White Supremacy Campaign" for the 1898 elections, recruiting orators such as Alfred Moore Waddell and enlisting propagandists, including editor Josephus Daniels. Following the August 1898 publication of an editorial by Alexander Manly rebutting a pro-lynching speech by Rebecca Latimer Felton, white supremacist agitation intensified. Armed groups known as the Red Shirts staged parades, intimidation campaigns, and attacks on Black communities in the weeks before the November 8 election, while white merchants refused to sell firearms to Black residents seeking to arm themselves in self-defense.

On November 10, two days after the election, the mob — estimated at 2,000 white men — expelled elected Black and white political leaders from the city, destroyed Black-owned property and businesses, and burned the offices of the Daily Record. At least 14 Black people were killed, with some estimates of the death toll ranging from 60 to more than 300. Many leaders of the coup, including Alfred Moore Waddell, went on to hold prominent positions in North Carolina politics for decades afterward.

The Wilmington massacre is regarded by historians as a pivotal turning point in post-Reconstruction Southern politics, reinforcing disenfranchisement of Black voters and entrenching white-supremacist political control across North Carolina and the broader South in the years that followed.