Wilmington's Lie: The Murderous Coup of 1898 and the Rise of White Supremacy
By: David Zucchino / Narrated By: Victor Bevine
Length: 11 hrs and 26 mins
How come this isn’t widely known? A disgustingly successful coup on American soil
Were you like me on Jan. 6, 2021: Glued to streaming video of a white mob shattering windows, breaking through doors, beating Capitol police with poles bearing the American flag, a Trump flag?
What… too soon…?
It can’t happen here?
It DID happen here, and it was successful in Wilmington, NC in 1898. Pulitzer Prize winning journalist David Zucchino takes us all the way back to early after the Civil War when freedmen were starting to feel free, and like they might be human and have rights to breathe, maybe even have rights to dignity. Right away we hear of both educated and uneducated freedmen, all who spoke eloquently and with fire of their rights in the new landscape of Reconstruction.
Wilmington became what COULD’ve been a paradise for whites and Blacks alike (And you’ll excuse me if I never capitalize “white”—it’s just that I’ve seen it with a capital only in relation to White Supremacy…), with a sharing of duly voted-in power in government, with prosperity for most. Heavily Black, it had a government of Fusionists and Republicans (Back in the days when Republicans supported rights for freedmen and were about inclusivity), but this was too much for Democrats, especially Southern Democrats who refused to concede loss in the Civil War. Everything miiiiiight be okay: IF freedmen kept their place, were subservient and docile, ceded way to whites. But even with that, violence against Blacks was rampant. When one took into consideration that many Blacks were governing and even in the police force?
Too much.
And so Wilmington’s Lie gives us this true tale of violence and mayhem that started after a comment in the Black-run newspaper suggested that sometimes intimate unions between Blacks and whites were not rape but consensual. This started a firestorm of whites demanding that the honor of fragile Southern womanhood be upheld, but it was really white men fearing and hating. Mobs descended and Black men were gunned down in cold blood with even ministers running home to get their firearms and weapons on that Nov. 10th. Always was it said afterward that those Blacks (Tho’ NATurally a harsher more derogatory term is used) shot first, but examinations after the fact showed wounds from back to front. And such arguments were upheld even though white neighbors stated facts as witnesses.
The book starts with the sense of dignity, the coming together of communities, and then it begins to seethe with white frustration, white anger, culminating in insane and drunken white rage. Some Blacks are kept in jail to protect them from mobs looking to lynch. Banishment is instantaneous with Blacks and outspokenly sympathetic whites being tossed onto trains going north, no food, no money, nothing. And that was a good banishment. Many Red Shirts (As the mobs were called for their intimidating clothing) rode the trains, and Black men were found dead in ditches alongside the tracks, bodies riddled with bullet holes. There was arson, looting, destruction galore.
Mostly there was savagery, pure and simple, with a white mob threatening office holders with deadly violence and then voting themselves in—making this the will of the people. As the majority of Blacks were killed, banished, or driven to hide out in the swamps, this also became a complete and thorough cleansing, leaving a white-majority township. I read one reviewer say that this was a tough listen as they were from Wilmington, their ancestors took part in the coup, and were NOT the good guys.
I can’t even imagine what THAT must feel like as I had a pretty gosh danged time feeling okay with myself being an American and listening with shame and horror.
Another reviewer quibbled about the ending where parallels are drawn between today’s current voter disenfranchisement and what happened then after the successful coup (And I discovered that the term Grandfather clause was coined back then for Southern states saying anyone could vote without taking a literacy test or paying the steep poll taxes… as long as their ancestors/fathers and grandfathers had been able to vote prior to the Civil War, thus ensuring that poor and illiterate whites could vote… but Blacks descended from slaves could not. Usually I love learning new things; THIS I was disgusted to learn). But I dunno, I think the parallels speak plainly for themselves. Is is too soon to talk about the 2020 election also? Where my state governor limited voting drop boxes for an enTIRe county to ONE?!
But I rage and digress… hard not to…
My only quibble comes with veteran narrator Victor Bevine. No, he admirably handles all of this well, capturing the horror and the outrage and delivering it with no problem. It’s just that he has such a comforting rumble to his voice that, angry tho’ I was, I danged well dozed off SEVeral times. No, no—not his fault his is an avuncular voice. More likely, avuncular makes me sleepy.
You up for 11 1/2 hours of a horror show in our nation’s history?
Well here you go, dear friend. Guaranteed to give a person nightmares; guaranteed to make you hear the word “gerrymandering” with a quaking and dissatisfied heart.
Guaranteed to make you never hear Grandfather Clause again without feeling a semblance of disgust…
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