MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
In recent years, we've been learning the truth about a series of ugly racial incidents in our country's history - incidents that were often characterized as riots but were, in fact, organized attacks by white mobs on striving Black communities, aimed at destroying their economic success and political advancement. But before Rosewood, Florida, in 1923 and Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1921, there was Wilmington, North Carolina in 1898, when a thousand-member mob of armed white men attacked the most prominent Black men of the city, killing some and banishing others, in order to destroy a flourishing interracial coalition then building the city.
Lauren Collins is a writer for The New Yorker. She grew up in Wilmington and has spent the last decade researching the story of November 10, 1898. Her new book is called "They Stole A City." Lauren Collins, thanks so much for joining us.
LAUREN COLLINS: Thank you for the invitation, Michel.
MARTIN: This is one of those books that made me feel embarrassed that I did not know more. You grew up in Wilmington, North Carolina. Do you remember how you found out?
COLLINS: I didn't know much about it until 2016 when I watched the documentary "Wilmington On Fire" by Christopher Everett. For a long time, it was really hard to even figure out what had happened, much less what it all meant.
MARTIN: Take me back to Wilmington before 1898.
COLLINS: In the years leading up to 1898 in North Carolina, there was a political movement called Fusion, which was a multiracial, working-class coalition. And so this was this unprecedented experiment in interracial political cooperation. And before the coup of 1898, Fusionists controlled Wilmington's city government, and Wilmington was known as a quote, "Mecca for Negroes," unquote. And there was political power for Black people, there was professional opportunity.
MARTIN: So then how did that backlash start?
COLLINS: Well, so Fusion sweeps the state elections in 1896, and the Democratic Party, which was then the party of states' rights and social conservatism, started to think, how can we get back in power? The next statewide elections were in 1898. The Democratic Party campaigned on an explicit campaign of white supremacy. And that's not an anachronism. That is what they called it then.
MARTIN: Some of their campaign slogans were literally white supremacy - a white Declaration of Independence.
COLLINS: Exactly. And they set up clubs all over the state. So as the elections - as the November elections are approaching in Wilmington, they're looking for a way to rile people up. And Alexander Manly, who is the editor of the Daily Record, the state's only Black daily newspaper, writes an editorial which is a response to this vile speech that a woman named Rebecca Felton had given, saying - and I quote - "lynch a thousand times if necessary." She said that Black men were threatening white women's sexual purity. So Alexander Manly writes an article saying this is complete nonsense.
MARTIN: So then what happened?
COLLINS: They sent a letter to the community's Black leaders and they said, we'll give you until 7:30 tomorrow morning to bring us a reply to this completely outrageous declaration that we've just issued.
MARTIN: So what happened on November 10, 1898?
COLLINS: About a thousand white men gathered in the morning, and because they had issued an ultimatum and they hadn't had a response, they used that as a pretext to march to the office of the newspaper and burn it down. There is this heavily armed, amped-up mob of white men wandering around town. And sometime before noon, a group of Black men and a group of white men run into each other and shooting starts. The accounts are often muddled, but the point is this - the white men planned the violence, they initiated it and they sustained it over a period of some hours, and Black people almost exclusively paid the price.
MARTIN: How many people were killed that day? Do you know?
COLLINS: No. We don't know, and I think we will never know, the exact number. A 2002 report put the number at 22 deaths. It is likely much higher.
MARTIN: You describe horrific scenes, not just of people being sort of murdered in broad daylight with no attempt to hide the identities of the perpetrators, but also their families being terrorized. And they're in hiding for days, but then, at some point, they have to come back. I found those sections almost harder to fathom.
COLLINS: There was a quote that I included in the book - something to the effect of, if you worked for Mrs. So-and-so, you just had to go back the next day and wash the clothes that held the traces of blood and dirt and gun oil. And some people decided to stay around and hang on. Others thought, no way. I'm out of here. And Black people left Wilmington in great numbers, preceding the Great Migration by about a decade.
MARTIN: One of the things that really struck me was how a lot of the white supremacists kind of reveled in reducing former Black professionals to a state of subjugation.
COLLINS: Yeah. John Dillard Jr. is a congressman, and he invites a colleague from Michigan down and he says to him, this man polishing your shoes was once a Republican magistrate. Isn't that so, Henry (ph)? And Henry confirms the tale. So this was just evidence of the fact that after enduring this traumatic experience, you would also have to be tough and swallow these taunts alongside everything else you had lost if you were going to stay in Wilmington.
MARTIN: Why was there never any political or legal response to what was clearly a crime?
COLLINS: So survivors, people who were stuck in Wilmington, looked to the federal government for help. McKinley was the president. They wrote to him. They said, please help us. One woman wrote and said, I'm an American citizen - she wrote anonymously - and she said, are we to die like rats in a trap? And McKinley did nothing. On sort of a technicality, he declined to send federal troops, and nobody was ever punished or prosecuted.
MARTIN: There's that famous quote from William Faulkner, "the past is never dead. It's not even past." That's kind of one of the central messages of your book. Say more about that.
COLLINS: What I want people to take away is that white supremacy was not a regression or a blip. It's a through line of American history, and the one that has persisted for a very long time into the present day. I've seen how damaging it can be to suppress our history, and also, more recently, I've seen how good it can be when we confront these things. And I think that's what we have to do to move forward. We have to heed the lessons of 1898, but we can channel the hope of 1897 as we think about what kind of country we want to be.
MARTIN: Lauren Collins is a staff writer for The New Yorker, and she's the author of "They Stole A City: Wilmington's White Supremacist Coup And The Families Who Live With Its Legacy." Lauren Collins, thanks so much for talking with us.
COLLINS: It was a pleasure. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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