Seeking the truth: 'American Coup: Wilmington 1898' reveals an intentionally buried history

Decades later — history is still being uncovered.

This is what filmmakers Brad Lichtenstein and Yoruba Richen discovered while working on their latest project, “American Coup: Wilmington 1898.”

The documentary is part of the “American Experience” series which airs on PBS. It will air at 8 p.m. Tuesday, Nov. 12, on New Mexico PBS, channel 5.1. It will also be available to stream on the PBS app.

Seeking the truth: 'American Coup: Wilmington 1898' reveals an intentionally buried history

The documentary tells the little-known story of a deadly race massacre and carefully orchestrated insurrection in North Carolina’s largest city in 1898 — the only coup d’état in the history of the United States.

Stoking fears of “Negro Rule,” self-described white supremacists used intimidation and violence to destroy Black political and economic power and overthrow Wilmington’s democratically-elected, multi-racial government.

Black residents were murdered and thousands were banished.

The story of what happened in Wilmington was suppressed for decades until descendants and scholars began to investigate.

Today, many of those descendants — Black and white — seek the truth about this intentionally buried history.

“We didn’t know anything about this story when we started, and most of America has never heard about it,” said filmmakers Lichtenstein and Richen. “It’s important to tell the history of one of America’s most egregious racist and violent moments and also bring to light the stories of the descendants, Black and white, who are actively seeking truth and accountability more than 125 years after the coup and massacre.”

To create the documentary, the filmmakers interviewed leading scholars of the coup and its historical context.

The filmmakers say they also interviewed and followed the stories of descendants, both Black and white, who describe their ancestors’ connection to the coup and its enduring legacy in their lives.

The duo say it was important to transport viewers back to the 1890s Wilmington, North Carolina — when it was a thriving multi-racial community with a majority Black population.

During that time, it was a prosperous port city, and offered plenty of opportunity for newly freed Black citizens, who competed with whites for skilled labor jobs as brick masons, blacksmiths and carpenters.

There was a flourishing Black professional class of doctors, teachers and lawyers. Blacks owned property and businesses, invested in banks, served as police officers, and held public office in multiple levels of government, including the U.S. House of Representatives.

But as the multi-racial government expanded and the social and economic status of Black citizens increased, so did the resentment of a group of white elites. They took measures to thwart the combined political power of Blacks and working class whites, who had united to form a “Fusion” government. Their strategy was to divide Blacks and whites by promoting fear, using racist propaganda and running on a platform of white supremacy supported by the state’s largest newspaper.

One Black resident who rose to prominence was Alex Manly, editor and publisher of The Daily Record — Wilmington’s Black newspaper.

On August 18, 1898, Manly published a rebuttal to a speech by a Georgia congressman’s wife, who argued that lynching was justified to protect white women from a falsely claimed “epidemic” of assaults by Black men.

Manly’s editorial contended that relationships between Black men and white women were sometimes consensual, and that, for generations, white men had raped Black women with impunity.

The editorial was widely reprinted and angered whites across the South.

White businesses pulled ads, The Daily Record was evicted from its offices, and Manly received death threats.

Coup leaders promoted the falsehood that African Americans were arming themselves when, in fact, it was the white community that was preparing for war.

Fearful that violence would erupt at any moment, a delegation of Black ministers went to Washington to ask President William McKinley to intervene before tragedy struck, but worried about alienating white voters, he refused to send in federal troops.

On November 8, 1898, Election Day, armed white men were out in the Wilmington streets to prevent Black men from voting.

Through intimidation, voter suppression and outright fraud, the white supremacists took control of the state legislature in a landslide.

Too impatient to wait for the following year’s municipal election, architects of the coup issued what came to be known as the “White Declaration of Independence,” declaring that they would never again “be ruled by men of African origin.”

After being forced to resign their positions at gunpoint in a coup d’état, local government officials, along with prominent Black citizens, were told to get out of town and never return.

On November 10, vigilantes rode through Wilmington looking for Alex Manly to lynch him, but he had already escaped.

A growing mob burned the offices of The Daily Record, then posed for a photo in front of the ruins. Several dozen Black men were shot and killed, and Black women and children were terrorized, running into a nearby swamp and cemetery for refuge.

Following the white supremacist insurrection, many newspapers throughout the country reported the incident as a “race riot” and suggested that Black citizens were the aggressors. More than 2,000 African Americans fled the city.

Wilmington, which had a Black majority of 56% in the 1890s, became a majority-white city.

“What happened in Wilmington had the effect of putting the final nail in the coffin of democracy in North Carolina,” said historian Robin D.G. Kelley. “1898 was the culmination of a process that had begun in many states throughout the South. That is the end of Black voting rights, Black civil rights until the 1960s.”

Rachel Raney, PBS North Carolina executive producer, said when production started on the film, the crew discovered that North Carolinians weren’t aware of the history.

“That’s partly because it happened so long ago, but also because it was intentionally buried,” Raney said. “The more we learned, it became clear that all Americans need to understand what happened there. ‘American Coup: Wilmington 1898’ is a cautionary tale for our country, about a perilous breakdown of a cornerstone of our democracy: fair and free elections.”