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WHEN A MULTI-RACIAL DEMOCRACY WAS VIOLENTLY OVERTHROWN IN AMERICA  
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Ed Rempell
November 8, 2024
The Progressive
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_ A review of the new film 'American Coup: Wilmington 1898,' which
premieres November 12 on PBS. _

A mob outside burned officee of The Daily Record newspaper after it
was set on fire in November 1898, New Hanover County Public Library

 

In 1935, when fascism was rising globally, Sinclair Lewis wrote _It
Can’t Happen Here_
[[link removed]],
a novel warning Americans against homegrown threats of dictatorship.
Now, on the heels of a presidential race billed as an existential
struggle between freedom and authoritarianism, PBS is premiering a new
documentary film that reminds viewers that not only could autocracy
happen here, but that it once did. _American Coup: Wilmington 1898_
[[link removed]],
by award-winning filmmakers Brad Lichtenstein and Yoruba Richen,
chronicles the overthrow of a democratically elected government in the
land of the free.

The 112-minute documentary recounts what led up to the horrifying
end-of-century events in Wilmington, North Carolina. Lichtenstein and
Richen use historical records, documents, images, and animation to
vividly bring their historical subjects—voiced by performers
including three-time Emmy Award winner Keith David and North
Carolina-born Grammy Award-winning musician Rhiannon Giddens—back
to life. The film also includes original interviews with historians,
scholars, and living descendants of the perpetrators and victims of
the violent incident of regime change.

_American Coup_ skillfully recreates the real-life drama that befell
this prosperous port city on the (aptly named, as it turns out) Cape
Fear River, the seat of government for New Hanover County, which
housed North Carolina’s largest city at the time. About three
decades after the Civil War, following Reconstruction and the passage
of the Fifteenth Amendment giving Black men the right to vote, African
Americans made up 56 percent of Wilmington’s population, serving in
government and owning businesses. Like the better known Greenwood
District of Tulsa, Oklahoma (dubbed “Black Wall Street
[[link removed]]”),
Wilmington was a success story for formerly enslaved people, Black
people born after emancipation, and their families.

In 1898, Wilmington’s city government was run by
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a multi-racial alliance between Republicans—many Black people then
supported the “party of Lincoln”—and the Populist Party,
representing the interests of white workers and farmers. Railing
against “Negro Rule” and “Negro Domination,” the pro-Dixie
Democrats were backed by “the Secret Nine,” a clandestine group
composed of members of the white business elite, such as Hugh MacRae,
who co-created
[[link removed]] “the
White Man’s Declaration of Independence.” 

One of Wilmington’s African American enterprises was _The Daily
Record, _edited and published by Alex Manly, which ran white
businessmen’s advertisements but was resolutely pro-Black. At the
other end of the increasingly supercharged spectrum was
Raleigh’s _News & Observer_. Edited and published by Josephus
Daniels, a white man, it printed racially inflammatory editorials and
cartoons, helping to stir the pot of racial animosity.

Reactionary whites, including the Secret Nine and the white-owned
press, promoted false fears
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African American men sexually assaulting white Southern women.
Prominent ex-enslaver Rebecca Felton of Georgia declared
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an August 11, 1898, speech: “[I]f it needs lynching to protect
woman’s dearest possession from the ravening human beasts, then I
say lynch, a thousand times a week if necessary.” Manly virulently
rebutted
[[link removed]] Felton in
a strongly-worded, controversial editorial that helped trigger the
election-related events to come the following November.

In this increasingly tense atmosphere, Black ministers went to
Washington, D.C., to beseech President William McKinley to send in
federal troops; the commander-in-chief declined. On Election Day, an
armed white militia called “Red Shirts” (arguably the Proud Boys
of their day) blocked and intimidated
[[link removed].] Black
people from voting. White supremacists swept
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Carolina’s state legislature—but the multi-racial municipal
government remained in power.

Proclaiming their “White Declaration of Independence” and that
Southern whites would never again “be ruled by men of African
origin,” the racists forced
[[link removed]] Fusionist
officeholders at gunpoint  to resign, and installed their own
unelected rulers. According
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the publicist, the newly installed mayor, a former Confederate officer
named Alfred Waddell, “vow[ed] to end Negro rule even if it meant
choking ‘the current of the Cape Fear [River] with carcasses.’ ”
The Black politicians and other prominent African Americans were
forcibly exiled from Wilmington.

On November 10, a white mob burned
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offices and the printing press of _The Daily Record_, and Manly fled
Wilmington. Between forty and sixty Black people were massacred and
white supremacists took over the municipal government. _American
Coup_ grippingly reconstructs the terrifying tale. Shown in the
documentary are clips from D.W. Griffith’s 1915 racist epic _The
Birth of a Nation_ with UCLA professor Robin D.G. Kelley calling it a
“cinematic monumental version of Wilmington.”

_American Coup _also recounts the prominent positions that many of
the coup leaders subsequently held and how Wilmington’s tortured
past remained taboo to discuss and teach for about a century. Gazing
at one of only seven restored copies of his great-great-grandfather
Manly’s _Daily Record_, Kieran Haile ponders: “How many more
stories do we not get to read?” due to the destruction of the
newspaper’s office. 

White residents have had mixed reactions to the dredging up of the
uncomfortable history. “No one living today was involved in the
events” in 1898, a descendant of Hugh MacRae defensively states. On
the other hand, Lucy McCauley, whose great-grandfather William Berry
McKoy was an armed coup supporter, expresses regret over her
forebear’s role in the white supremacist overthrow, which led her
to co-found
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Howe Scholarship Endowment for Black youths.  

At a commemoration in a Wilmington cemetery, the Reverend William J.
Barber II, co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign
[[link removed]], asserts that the victims of
the 1898 massacre were “murdered by a system. It was not by insane
folk. It was very sane people who plotted and planned.”  

As the conflict between white supremacy and authoritarianism and
multi-racial democracy continues to play out,_ American Coup:
Wilmington 1898_ is a must-see film for 2024 America, so that what
did happen here may never happen again.

_American Coup: Wilmington 1898_ premieres Tuesday, November 12,
2024, on ”American Experience” on PBS television, PBS.org
[[link removed]] and
the PBS App
[[link removed]].

_ED RAMPELL is a Los Angeles-based film historian and critic who
contributes regularly to The Progressive; he created the Progie
Awards in 2007 to highlight the year’s best progressive films and
filmmakers. Rampell is the author of the 2005 book Progressive
Hollywood, A People’s Film History of the United States and the
coauthor of three other film history books, most recently The Hawaii
Movie and Television Book [[link removed]].  _

_A voice for peace, social justice, and the common good! Since
1909, THE PROGRESSIVE magazine has aimed to amplify voices of
dissent and voices under-represented in the mainstream, with a goal
of championing grassroots progressive politics._

_Subscribe [[link removed]] and/or Donate
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* Racism
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