The Wilmington massacre, also known as the Wilmington insurrection or the Wilmington coup, was a municipal-level coup d'état and a massacre that was carried out by white supremacists in Wilmington, North Carolina, United States, on Thursday, November 10, 1898. The white press in Wilmington originally described the event as a race riot perpetrated by a mob of black people. In studies beginning in 2016, the event has been characterized as terrorism and a violent overthrow of a duly elected government by white supremacists.
The state's white Southern Democrats conspired to lead a mob of 2,000 white men to overthrow the legitimately elected Fusionist biracial government in Wilmington. They expelled opposition black and white political leaders from the city, destroyed the property and businesses of black citizens built up since the American Civil War, including the only black newspaper in the city. They killed at least 14 black people; estimates of the actual toll run from 60 to more than 300. Many leaders of the coup remained important figures in North Carolina politics, some into the 1920s.
The Wilmington coup is considered a turning point in post-Reconstruction North Carolina politics. It was part of an era of more severe racial segregation and effective disenfranchisement of African Americans throughout the South, which had been underway since the passage of a new constitution in Mississippi in 1890 that raised barriers to the registration of black voters. Other states soon passed similar laws. Historian Laura F. Edwards writes, "What happened in Wilmington became an affirmation of white supremacy not just in that one city, but in the South and in the nation as a whole", as it affirmed that invoking "whiteness" eclipsed the legal citizenship, individual rights, and equal protection under the law that black Americans were guaranteed under the Fourteenth Amendment.
Background
In 1860, just before the start of the American Civil War, Wilmington was North Carolina's largest city, with a population of nearly 10,000, most of whom were black. Numerous slaves and freedmen worked at the city's port, in households as domestic servants, and in a variety of jobs as artisans and skilled workers.
With the end of the war in 1865, freedmen who lived in many states left plantations and rural areas and moved to towns and cities to seek work, and they also attempted to gain safety by creating black communities without white supervision. Tensions grew in Wilmington and other areas because of a shortage of supplies; Confederate currency suddenly had no value and the South was impoverished following the end of the long war.
In 1868, North Carolina ratified the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, resulting in the recognition of Reconstruction policies. The state legislature and governorship were dominated by Republican officials, with the governor a white man and the legislature made up of both white and black people. Freedmen were eager to vote and overwhelmingly supported the Republican Party that had emancipated them and given them citizenship and suffrage. However, conservative white Democrats, who had previously dominated politics in the state, greatly resented this "radical" change, which they deemed as being brought about by black residents, Unionist "carpetbaggers", and race traitors referred to as "scalawags".
Democrats developed a plan to subvert home rule, seeking to have local officials appointed by the state rather than elected by the people. They began circumventing legislation by taking over the state's judiciary and adopting 30 amendments to the state constitution, which effected widespread policy changes, including lowering the number of judges on the North Carolina Supreme Court, putting the lower courts and local governments under the control of the state legislature, rescinding the votes of certain types of criminals, mandating segregated public schools, outlawing interracial relationships, and granting the General Assembly the power to modify or nullify any local government. By adopting these elements, the Democrats became identified as would-be bastions for white Americans. However, their control was largely limited to the western part of the state, within counties where, demographically, there were relatively few black Americans.
As the Democrats chipped away at Republican rule, things came to a head with the 1876 gubernatorial campaign of Zebulon B. Vance, a former Confederate soldier and governor. Vance called the Republican Party "begotten by a scalawag out of a mulatto and born in an outhouse". Through Vance, the Democrats saw their biggest opening to begin implementing their agenda in the eastern part of the state.
However, in that region, poor white cotton farmers aligned themselves with the labor movement, with many of them joining the People's Party (also known as the Populists). In 1892, as the U.S. plunged into an economic depression, the Populists banded with black Republicans who shared their hardships, forming an interracial coalition with a platform of self-governance, free public education, and equal voting rights for black men, called the Fusion coalition. Republicans and Populists agreed jointly to support municipal candidates.
Wilmington
In the last decade of the 19th century, Wilmington, still the largest city in the state, continued to have a majority-black population, with 11,324 blacks and 8,731 whites in 1890. There were numerous black professionals and businessmen among them, and a rising middle class.
The Republican Party was biracial in membership. Unlike in many other jurisdictions, black people in Wilmington were elected to local office, and also gained prominent positions in the community. For example, three of the city's aldermen were black. Of the five members on the constituent board of audit and finance, one was black. Black people also served in the civic positions of justice of the peace, deputy clerk of court, and street superintendent, and as coroners, policemen, mail clerks, and mail carriers.
Blacks also held significant economic power in the city. Many former slaves had skills which they were able to use in the marketplace. For example, several became bakers, grocers, dyers, etc., making up nearly 35 percent of Wilmington's service positions.
Many black people began moving out of service jobs and into other types of employment. In Wilmington they accounted for over 30 percent of its skilled craftsmen, such as mechanics, carpenters, jewelers, watchmakers, plumbers, blacksmiths, masons, and so on. In addition, they owned ten of the city's 11 restaurants, a majority of the city's 22 barbershops, and one of the city's four fish and oyster dealerships. There were also more black bootmakers and shoemakers than white ones, one-third of the city's butchers were black, and half of the city's tailors were black. Two brothers, Alexander and Frank Manly, owned the Wilmington Daily Record, which was the only known black daily in the United States at the time. The paper described itself as "the only negro daily in the world".
With the help of patronage and equitable hiring practices, some black people also held prominent business and leadership roles in the city, such as carpenter and school founder Frederick C. Sadgwar. Thomas C. Miller was one of the city's three real estate agents and auctioneers, and was also the only pawnbroker in the city, with many whites alleged to be indebted to him. In 1897, following the election of Republican President William McKinley, John C. Dancy was appointed to replace a prominent white Democrat as the U.S. collector of customs at the Port of Wilmington, at a salary of nearly US$4,000 (equivalent to $154,800 in 2025). The editor of the Wilmington Messenger often disparaged him by referring to Dancy as "Sambo of the Customs House". Black professionals increasingly supported each other. For example, of the more than 2,000 black professionals in North Carolina in that era, more than 95 percent were clergy or teachers, professions where they were not shut out from competing, unlike doctors and lawyers.
White resentment
As black people in the area rapidly emerged into their newfound social status and progressed economically, socially, and politically, racial tensions grew. Former slaves and their children had no inherited wealth. With the collapse of the Freedman's Bank, which had a Wilmington branch, in 1874, some black residents of Wilmington lost most of their savings and as a result, many distrusted banks. The debt-slave metaphor, well-known within the community, made many residents wary of debt. In addition, credit or loans available to them were marked up in price. The annual interest rate of credit charged to black people was nearly 15 percent, compared to under 7.5 percent for poor whites, and lenders refused to let African-Americans pay off their mortgages in installments. This practice, known as "principal or nothing", positioned lenders to take over black property and businesses through forced sales. The lack of inherited wealth, limitations of access to credit, and loss of savings through federal mismanagement and fraud, created a combined effect in which black people "could not save anything", or otherwise acquire the means to own taxable property.
Property ownership among black residents in Wilmington was rare, at less than ten per cent. Of nearly $6 million in real and personal property taxes, they paid less than $400,000 of this amount. And while the per capita wealth for whites in the city was around US$622 (equivalent to $24,071 in 2025), it was US$25.41 (equivalent to $983.37 in 2025) for black people.
Despite this, affluent whites believed that they were paying taxes in a disproportionate amount given the amount of property they owned, relative to the city's black residents, who now held the political power to prevent affluent whites from changing this ratio. Additionally, there was tension with poor, unskilled whites, who competed with African-Americans in the job market and found their services in less demand than skilled black labor. Black people were caught between not meeting the expectations of affluent whites and exceeding the expectations of poor whites, paradoxically progressing too fast and too slow at the same time in the eyes of white residents. An example of the view that blacks were "moving too slow" can be found in the following excerpt from an 1898 magazine article: "While thus numerically strong, the Negro is not a factor in the development of the city or section. With thirty years of freedom behind him and with an absolute equality of educational advantages with the whites, there is not today in Wilmington a single Negro savings bank or any other distinctively Negro educational or charitable institution; while the race has not produced a physician or lawyer of note. ... The Negro in North Carolina, ... is thriftless, improvident, does not accumulate money, and is not accounted a desirable citizen."
This sentiment was echoed even among whites who aligned politically with African-Americans, such as Republican governor Daniel L. Russell "An impression prevails that these colored people have grown greatly in wealth, that they have acquired homesteads, have become tax-payers and given great promise along these lines. It is not true. ... True, they may claim that this is all net gain as they started with no property. But they did not start with nothing. They started with enormous advantages over whites. They were accustomed to labor. The whites were not. They had been for generations the producers of the State and the whites the consumers. They were accustomed to hardship and privation and patient industry. They had the muscle. ...
Throughout the South, violence was perpetrated by portions of the white population against black citizens. This intimidation occurred after the Civil War and during Reconstruction in the midst of the post-war economic upheaval, when former slaves were competing with poorer white laborers.
Fusionist dominance
These dynamics continued with the elections of 1894 and 1896, in which the Republican-Populist Fusion ticket won every statewide office, including the governorship in the latter election, won by Daniel L. Russell. The Fusionists began dismantling the Democrats' political infrastructure, namely by reverting their appointed positions in local offices back to offices subject to popular elections. They also began trying to dismantle the Democratic stronghold in the less-populated western part of the state, which allowed the Democrats more political power through gerrymandering. The Fusionists also encouraged black citizens to vote, who constituted an estimated 120,000 Republican sympathizers.
By 1898, Wilmington's key political power was in the hands of "The Big Four", who were representative of the Fusion ticket: the mayor Dr. Silas P. Wright; the acting sheriff of New Hanover County, George Z. French; the postmaster, W. H. Chadbourn; and businessman, Flaviel W. Fosters, who wielded substantial support and influence with black voters. The "Big Four" worked in concert with a circle of patrons—made up of about 2,000 black voters and about 150 whites—known as "the Ring". The Ring included about 20 prominent businessmen, about six first- and second-generation New Englanders from families that had settled in the Cape Fear region before the War, and influential black families such as the Sampsons and the Howes. The Ring wielded political power using patronage, monetary support, and an effective press through the Wilmington Post and The Daily Record.