In 1935, when fascism was rising globally, Sinclair Lewis wrote It Can’t Happen Here, 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, 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”), 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 “Fusionists,” 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 “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 about African American men sexually assaulting white Southern women. Prominent ex-enslaver Rebecca Felton of Georgia declared in 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 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 Black people from voting. White supremacists swept North 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 Fusionist officeholders at gunpoint to resign, and installed their own unelected rulers. According to press notes from 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 the 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 the 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, 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 and the PBS App.
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.
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