Book revisits Wilmington coup, America’s only successful insurrection

Wilmington’s coup was not a burst of chaos. It was a planned seizure of power, carried out on November 10, 1898, in North Carolina’s most populous city, and it ended with a multiracial government forced to resign at gunpoint. A new book by Lauren Collins revisits that attack to show how white supremacists used propaganda, armed violence, and political coordination to overturn democracy in plain sight.

A coup, not a riot

The events in Wilmington are often flattened into a local tragedy, but the historical record points to something more deliberate: an organized overthrow of elected by men intent on restoring white supremacy. Democratic Party leaders led a long campaign to recapture political control from the Fusionist coalition of Populists and Republicans, turning racial fear into a political strategy and making Black political power the central target. The result was a coup d’état in which as many as 60 Black Americans were killed, the offices of the Wilmington Daily Record were burned, and the city’s multiracial leadership was driven out.

That framing matters because it clarifies what happened to the people who lived through it. This was not an isolated outburst or a spontaneous mob action. It was the violent culmination of a campaign to erase a governing coalition that had included Black political influence, and it succeeded in stripping Wilmington of that power for nearly a century.

The newspaper that became the target

At the center of the attack was Alexander L. Manly, the Black editor of the Wilmington Daily Record. His August 18, 1898 editorial was seized on by white supremacists and used as a political weapon in the drive to inflame white voters and justify violence. Manly and his family were forced to flee Wilmington before the attack, a detail that underscores how fully the campaign had already turned against Black leadership before the first shots and fires of November 10.

The Daily Record was not just another paper in a political fight. It was a Black newspaper with a Black editor in a city where Black civic and economic life had become a visible force, and that made it a target. When the white mob of about 2,000 armed men moved against the city, they burned the paper’s offices along with the broader promise that Black journalism could help shape local power on equal terms.

How white supremacy was organized into politics

The coup did not emerge from nowhere. North Carolina had already entered a volatile period in which Daniel Russell, elected governor in 1896, became the state’s first Republican governor since Reconstruction. That shift alarmed Democratic Party leaders, who treated the Fusionist alliance of Populists and Republicans as a threat to the racial order they wanted to restore. In Wilmington, that broader struggle hardened into a coordinated anti-Black campaign that linked electioneering, media attacks, and street violence.

Josephus Daniels, publisher of The News & Observer, helped orchestrate that campaign. His role matters because it shows how power traveled through institutions that appeared respectable on the surface. The political pressure was amplified by newspaper attacks, party organizing, and a deliberate effort to cast Black civic participation as illegitimate, setting the stage for the armed overthrow that followed.

Why this history still lands now

Penguin Random House describes Lauren Collins’s book, They Stole a City, as an ambitious and revelatory examination of American racial terror, and it places Wilmington in direct conversation with the United States in 2025. That framing is hard to ignore because the core issues in Wilmington are still visible in contemporary debates over democratic backsliding, voter suppression, political intimidation, and the use of racial fear as a weapon. The coup shows how quickly democratic institutions can be hollowed out when one group decides that power should not be shared.

The violence also exposes how racialized political violence reaches beyond the ballot box. When the city government was forced to resign at gunpoint, Black political representation was not the only casualty. The destruction of the Daily Record and the expulsion of Manly’s family signaled that Black public life, Black journalism, and Black safety could all be attacked together. That pattern, in which civic participation is punished through terror, remains relevant to anyone trying to understand how fragile democracy becomes when racism is organized into policy and force.

What readers should take from Wilmington

The Wilmington coup endures as a warning because it combined every element that makes democratic collapse so dangerous: propaganda, coordinated party strategy, armed mobs, and the silencing of Black institutions. The city’s multiracial government was not merely defeated in an election. It was removed by violence, and the damage lasted for generations as Black political and economic power in Wilmington was shattered.

The history is not distant enough to feel harmless, and it is not local enough to stay in North Carolina. Wilmington shows how a democratic system can be sabotaged from within when racial terror is treated as a political tool, and why any serious discussion of American democracy has to include the people who were excluded from it by force.