Tracy Smith explores Wilmington coup legacy, Trump’s Washington plans and Gracie Abrams

Tracy Smith opens CBS News Sunday Morning with a reminder that history can be hidden in plain sight: many Americans were never taught that Wilmington, North Carolina, was the site of the only successful coup in U.S. history. The broadcast uses that 1898 violence to connect race, political power, and the fight over whose version of the past survives, while also moving through television, pop culture, presidential power, and old-world tradition.

Wilmington and the violence of forgetting

The cover story returns to November 10, 1898, when white supremacists violently overthrew Wilmington’s multiracial Fusionist government. Britannica places the death toll at as many as 60 Black Americans, while other accounts describe the killings as ranging from dozens to hundreds. The aftermath was not just bloodshed but political destruction: Black political power in the city was effectively wiped out.

That history sits at the center of New Yorker journalist Lauren Collins’s book, They Stole a City: Wilmington's White Supremacist Coup and the Families Who Live with the Legacy. The title captures the core tension of the story: the coup was not a side chapter or regional footnote, but an assault on democratic government whose consequences still shape how the city is remembered.

The episode’s choice to lead with Wilmington matters because the massacre was both local and national. It shows how racial terror can be organized to seize power, and how public memory can soften or omit the scale of that violence. Revisiting Wilmington changes the frame around race and political violence today, not as an abstraction but as a documented American precedent.

A medical drama built around one shift

The broadcast also goes behind the scenes of The Pitt, the Max Original drama created by R. Scott Gemmill and executive produced by John Wells and Noah Wyle. Max launched the series as a 15-episode drama that debuted on January 9, 2025, and built its premise around emergency-room staff in a Pittsburgh hospital over the course of a single 15-hour shift.

That structure gives the show a compressed, high-pressure timeline, with each episode anchored in the urgency of the ER. The setting in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and the single-shift format help the series focus on the strain that hospital workers carry hour by hour, a useful contrast to the historical stories in the hour that deal with violence, institutions, and public consequence.

Trump’s redesign of Washington and the politics of space

Another segment turns to Donald Trump’s monumental reimagining of Washington, D.C., a plan already drawing lawsuits and sharp public debate. The ideas under discussion include a 250-foot arch and the demolition of the White House East Wing to make room for a ballroom.

Those proposals are not just architectural. They raise questions about who gets to reshape the symbolic center of American power, how much alteration the nation’s most recognizable civic spaces can absorb, and what it means when redesign becomes an argument over legacy. In the context of the Wilmington story, the segment lands with extra force: public space is never neutral when power is trying to define itself through stone, scale, and ceremony.

Gracie Abrams in a year of breakthrough attention

Tracy Smith also speaks with singer-songwriter Gracie Abrams, whose second studio album, The Secret of Us, was released on June 21, 2024. The album includes the Taylor Swift collaboration “Us,” and Abrams followed its release with a tour in 2024 that helped push her further into the center of pop’s conversation.

The profile places Abrams in the middle of a modern pop ascent that has moved quickly but not carelessly. Her work sits at the intersection of intimate songwriting and large-scale attention, which makes her an apt counterpoint to the program’s heavier historical material: the hour moves from state violence and public memory to the way a younger artist builds a voice that can hold an audience without losing specificity.

Why “Country Roads” still lands

The broadcast also revisits John Denver’s “Take Me Home, Country Roads,” first released in 1971 and long linked with West Virginia. Its endurance comes from a kind of immediate emotional geography: the song turns place into feeling, and feeling into memory.

That nostalgia matters because Sunday Morning uses it as more than a familiar melody. In a lineup shaped by massacre, political theater, and modern stardom, the song becomes another example of how American culture preserves what it repeats. A tune can carry regional identity for decades, just as a historical event can disappear from classrooms for generations if institutions stop teaching it.

Bravìo delle Botti and the spectacle of tradition

The hour closes its cultural arc in Montepulciano, Tuscany, with the Bravìo delle Botti, the city’s barrel-racing festival. The tradition traces back to a 1373 city charter, and its modern form began in 1974, when the race was revived as a contest through the old town streets.

Eight districts compete in the event, turning a local ritual into a public display of stamina, rivalry, and civic pride. The race is a reminder that communities preserve history not only through books and museums, but through motion, competition, and annual performance. In that sense, the festival fits neatly alongside the Wilmington story: both ask what a community chooses to carry forward, and what it leaves at risk of being forgotten.

Across the hour, Tracy Smith threads these pieces together around one central tension: history is not secure just because it happened. It survives only when it is told, challenged, and placed where the public can no longer ignore it.