They Stole a City

Lauren Collins, a journalist born and raised in Wilmington, North Carolina, traces the white supremacist massacre and coup d'état of November 10, 1898, from its roots in colonial-era slavery through its reverberations into the 21st century. Rather than treating the event as a single day's violence, Collins argues that 1898 represents a centuries-long process that continues to shape American democracy. She follows four Wilmington families across generations: the Bellamy/MacRaes and the Moores, white families whose members helped orchestrate the violence, and the Howes and the Halseys, Black families who survived it.

The book opens with a 1993 prologue in which Cynthia Brown, a Howe descendant who had returned to Wilmington after years in Chicago, attended a formal luncheon organized by older Black women. They presented her with a family history tracing the Howe lineage to Anthony Walker Howe, a child from the Igbo people of West Africa kidnapped from Nigeria and enslaved on a Cape Fear River plantation in the 1770s. The booklet also described the 1898 massacre, which Brown first heard about from her great-grandmother Athalia Howe Whitfield, who grabbed Brown's wrist on her deathbed and warned her to run if it ever happened again.

Collins traces each family's origins. Anthony Howe demonstrated building skills after a hurricane, eventually becoming the plantation's general contractor. His descendants, including Fred Howe and Anthony Howe, established a construction dynasty that shaped Wilmington's architecture throughout the 19th century. The Moore family, colonial North Carolina's largest enslavers, arrived from Barbados around 1675 and accumulated land, military distinction, and a Supreme Court seat. Alfred Moore Waddell, born in 1834 at the family estate Moorefields, grew up obsessed with his family's legacy. Dr. John Dillard Bellamy built a 10,000-square-foot mansion on the labor of enslaved artisans, including Fred Howe, while agitating for secession. Joshua Halsey, born enslaved in 1852, and his future wife, Sallie Franklin-Jones, born enslaved in 1853, left far fewer documentary traces, though family oral tradition preserved details about both, including that Sallie's enslaver secretly taught her to read and write.

The Civil War devastated Wilmington's plantation economy but opened new possibilities for Black residents. After emancipation, Fred Howe recruited Black migrants to the city and served on state and city boards during Reconstruction. His brother Anthony became an alderman and justice of the peace. Colonel Roger Moore, a descendant of the colonial Moore dynasty, organized a Ku Klux Klan chapter in Wilmington, but Abraham Galloway, a formerly enslaved Union spy, mustered an armed Black militia that overpowered the night riders, effectively disbanding the local Klan. By the 1890s, a political coalition called Fusion, uniting white Populists and Black Republicans, controlled Wilmington's municipal government. Black people made up about 60 percent of the city's population and held positions as aldermen, police officers, and customs officials.

This Black political and economic success provoked intense white resentment. In 1898, North Carolina Democrats launched a statewide white supremacy campaign, using inflammatory newspaper coverage and paramilitary intimidation to reclaim power. In Wilmington, the industrialist Hugh MacRae convened the Secret Nine, a group of elite white men who divided the city into armed sectors. Alexander Manly, editor of the state's only Black daily newspaper, The Daily Record, published an editorial responding to a white woman's call for lynching by arguing that white women's sexual encounters with Black men were often consensual and confronting white men's sexual violence against Black women. Democratic papers reprinted the editorial just before the election to maximize white outrage.

On November 8, Democrats swept the state elections through voter suppression and fraud. The next day, Waddell read aloud the White Declaration of Independence before a crowd of over a thousand white men at the county courthouse. On the morning of November 10, a mob marched to The Daily Record's offices and burned them down. Manly had already fled. Violence erupted in the Black neighborhood of Brooklyn, where the Wilmington Light Infantry, a white militia, deployed a rapid-fire machine gun. White militias tracked Joshua Halsey to his home after he fled Manhattan Park and shot him in the back as he ran out his back door. At least a dozen Black men were killed, though estimates range into the hundreds. That afternoon, the Committee of Twenty-Five, a group of white coup organizers, forced the elected mayor and aldermen to resign at gunpoint and installed Waddell as mayor, completing the only successful coup d'état on American soil.

Black residents fled to Pine Forest Cemetery and surrounding swamps, sheltering in freezing rain. Athalia Howe, then about 18, witnessed a white man shoot a Black neighbor before fleeing with her mother and sister to the cemetery. The new regime banished more than 21 prominent Black men and white Republicans, forcing them onto northbound trains. President McKinley refused to intervene. In 1900, the state legislature passed a disenfranchisement amendment with a grandfather clause that effectively eliminated Black political participation.

Collins follows the long aftermath across the 20th century. Sallie Halsey, widowed and impoverished, faced repeated arrests before eventually moving north. White perpetrators faced no legal consequences and controlled the narrative, branding the massacre a justified revolution. Woodrow Wilson, who grew up in Wilmington, brought white supremacist ideology to the presidency, segregating the federal civil service and screening The Birth of a Nation at the White House.

In 1951, the historian Helen G. Edmonds published the first major revisionist account of 1898, calling the government takeover a coup d'état. Louis Toomer Moore, Colonel Roger Moore's son, campaigned to suppress Edmonds's work. The school board's 1968 decision to close Williston Senior High School, the center of Black community life, and bus its students to white schools devastated Black Wilmington. Botched desegregation produced violent conflict, culminating in a February 1971 siege at Gregory Congregational United Church of Christ, where boycotting Black students faced attacks from the Rights of White People Party, a white paramilitary group that explicitly invoked 1898. Two people died. Police arrested 17 people in connection with the violence; the case was narrowed to 11 defendants and then to 10 after one skipped bail, and the remaining defendants became known as the Wilmington Ten. Prosecutors secured convictions using coerced testimony from teenage witnesses, and the defendants received sentences totaling 282 years. Courts refused to grant a new trial despite an international campaign involving Amnesty International and Angela Davis. Governor Jim Hunt reduced the sentences but denied pardons. In 2013, Governor Beverly Perdue issued pardons of innocence, acknowledging that the convictions were tainted by prosecutorial racism.

Collins traces the slow emergence of 1898 into public consciousness. In 1994, University of North Carolina Wilmington professor Philip Gerard published Cape Fear Rising, a novel using the real names of perpetrators, provoking fierce backlash from white descendants. The 1998 centennial brought the first major public commemorations, and after a decade-long effort a memorial was built, though critics faulted its emphasis on reconciliation over justice. In 2017, Nate Brown, a retired New York City Transit worker and Joshua Halsey's great-great-grandson, discovered his ancestor's murder through Ancestry.com. In November 2021, Brown and his family traveled to Wilmington for a funeral and burial ceremony, 123 years after Halsey's death.

The book's final sections connect 1898 to contemporary politics. Collins draws explicit parallels between the Wilmington coup and the January 6, 2021, Capitol attack, noting shared patterns of white grievance and paramilitary violence. In the summer of 2020, activists successfully pushed to rename Hugh MacRae Park, with Meg MacRae, Hugh MacRae's great-granddaughter, publicly supporting the change. Collins examines the unfulfilled promise of reparations, noting that the state's 2006 recommendations remain unimplemented. She closes with Cynthia Brown's death from pancreatic cancer on Thanksgiving 2023, her son PJ's commitment to continuing her work, and the announcement of a museum dedicated to 1898. Collins argues that Wilmington reveals an enduring American pattern: every expansion of rights provokes revanchist backlash, and only an accurate understanding of history can prepare citizens for the battles ahead.