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If you think "It can't happen here"... Well, it already has,
The Wilmington Coup, Jim Crow, and "Stand Your
Ground"
By lynmiller-lachmann on 2012-09-02 12:41:54
In the early 1990s I reviewed a historical novel for young readers about a friendship between a black and a white 12-year-
old in Wilmington, North Carolina in 1898, part of a historical fiction series from an educational publisher. In the story, a
race riot by white citizens led to the overthrow of the local government, and the black child was forced to flee the city with
his family, thus ending the friendship. Although I gave the book a good review, other reviewers panned it for being
unrealistic and untrue—basically, things like that “didn’t happen here.” Except that it did.
Until 2000, the Wilmington race riot and coup remained a “hidden history,” talked about in family stories and covered in
obscure books that disappeared almost as soon as they were published. One of those books was H. Leon Prather, Sr.’s We
Have Taken a City: The Wilmington Racial Massacre and Coup of 1898, originally published in 1984. In the mid 1900s,
books and reports on similar massacres of black residents in the early twentieth century in Rosewood, Florida and Tulsa,
Oklahoma prompted soul searching among Wilmington’s white residents and in 2000 North Carolina’s legislature
established the Wilmington Race Riot Commission, which issued its report in 2006. Prather’s detailed and eye-opening book
was reprinted in the same year. Until 1898 Wilmington served as a model of interracial peace and cooperation in the South.
The city had a strong black middle class, and wealthy blacks lived alongside wealthy whites in the city’s poshest
neighborhood. Blacks served in the city’s government as elected officials and high-ranking administrators. The Wilmington
Daily Record was the state’s only black-owned daily, with a high circulation throughout the Carolinas. The violence in 1898
followed a state election that put white supremacists in power, leaders who would not stand in the way of Wilmington’s local
white supremacist group, the Red Shirts (the KKK was banned in the state), as they killed between 6 and 100 black residents
and drove more than 2000 out of town—in doing do, turning a majority-black city into a majority-white city. The mob
forced the elected leadership of the city—both blacks and whites—to resign and leave town. The new all-white government,
working hand in glove with the state government, imposed Jim Crow laws and measures such as literacy tests and poll taxes
to disenfranchise black voters. The substantial amount of property owned by blacks (including blacks who stayed in town)
was seized and redistributed to whites with connections to the new government. All of this is the historical context
surrounding Barbara Wright’s new novel for young readers, Crow (Random House, 2012).
Eleven-year-old Moses Thomas is the son of the Wilmington Daily Record’s managing editor, who has also been elected to
the city council. Jack Thomas is a strict parent—a graduate of historically-black Howard University—and Moses worries
that he is falling short of his father’s ambitions for him. Moses is also close to his mother’s mother, Boo Nanny, who grew
up in slavery and believes in the old traditions that Jack Thomas disparages. The beginning of the novel consists of a series
of vignettes that highlight the mishaps and victories of childhood. Moses squabbles with his best friend, initiates a secret
friendship with a white boy his age, and makes several efforts to obtain his heart’s desire—a bicycle. Along with his mother
and Boo Nanny, he also discovers a dark family secret from the time before his people were free. As the seasons change
from summer to fall, the narrative becomes more linear, and readers see that his parents’ effort to shelter Moses and give him
a normal childhood has in fact put the youngster in greater danger. Everywhere they go in the weeks before the election,
they see armed Red Shirts that include longtime white supremacists and displaced troops returning from the Spanish-
American War. As the coup and massacre take place before Moses’s eyes, he loses faith in the goodness of the world and
struggles to hold on to hope for his own future. The novel humanizes the experience of living under the system of racial
subjugation known as Jim Crow, and shows the terror and violence used to establish this system. Imposing Jim Crow
involved the murder of untold numbers of blacks and white allies and the taking away of people’s hard-earned property and
status solely on the basis of their race and, in the case of white allies, their political views. The author offers a vivid
portrayal of elections conducted under the threatening eye of armed militias—while Moses’s father says the then-
segregationist Democrats won “fair and square” he refuses to acknowledge to his son the intimidating presence of the
militias as well as the consequences of installing a state government that would not only fail to control the white supremacist
mobs but would actively encourage them. What I see in the Wilmington coup is a historical precedent that for a long time
our country forgot. What message is sent by “stand your ground” at polling places—that is, polls watched over by people
carrying deadly weapons? What message is sent when a large proportion of the population claims that our President is “not
American” because of his appearance? And then, what message is sent when a political party’s platform seeks to legalize
high capacity magazines for automatic weapons? Fears of mob violence against racial, religious, or cultural minorities may
seem like histrionics, but it’s hard to say, “it can’t happen here,” when it already has happened here.
