THEY STOLE A CITY

Lauren Collins reconstructs the November 10, 1898 white supremacist coup and massacre in Wilmington, North Carolina, when an armed mob overthrew a democratically elected multiracial government, murdered and banished Black citizens, and faced no punishment. Collins, a New Yorker writer raised in Wilmington who spent a decade researching the event, follows four families — two white (Bellamy/MacRae and Moore), two Black (Howe and Halsey) — across 125 years to show how the coup's consequences ripple through segregation, the Great Migration, school desegregation, and into the present. Her argument: white supremacy is a persistent through line of American history, not a regression, and honest reckoning with suppressed history is what breaks the cycle.

Confront suppressed history

1. Call the violence by its name. Calling the 1898 coup a 'race riot' recast planned political terror as spontaneous chaos and let the perpetrators off the hook. 'Coup' and 'massacre' are the accurate labels, and the label decides whether anyone is held accountable. (source, source)
2. Don't bury the suppressed past. Collins argues that suppressing history keeps causing damage, while honest reckoning heals and can actively fight injustice. Accurate historical memory is itself a form of resistance. (source, source)
3. Study the lead-up, not just the event. Collins insists on understanding the 1897 interracial Fusion coalition and what it accomplished, not only the day of violence. Seeing what was built and lost reveals systems and causes, not an isolated incident. (source, source)
4. Trace present inequality to specific causes. The voter suppression and the wealth, health, and education gaps Collins documents are aftershocks of 1898. Link today's outcomes to concrete events rather than treating them as abstract failure. (source, source)
5. Examine your own group's role. A white Southerner, Collins investigated her own community's ancestors and their part in the coup rather than staying comfortable. Personal reckoning breaks the generational amnesia that lets injustice repeat. (source, source)
6. Watch for 'civility' used to stall. Again and again, appeals to 'order' and 'good race relations' masked legal maneuvering that preserved an unjust status quo, from the literacy test to school desegregation. Notice when politeness defers justice instead of enabling it. (source)
7. Pair archives with oral history. Because records were destroyed or deliberately forgotten, Collins worked with living descendants to reconstruct what documents omit. Family memory fills the gaps official sources leave behind. (source, source)
8. Follow who benefited to understand impunity. Coup leaders went on to celebrated public careers — one a 30-year U.S. Senator — while no one was punished. The continuity of power and prestige shows why accountability never arrived. (source, source)
9. Don't accept the first version. Accounts of the massacre were muddled, and the self-serving framing is why the full story took Collins years to piece together. Verify against multiple sources. (source, source)