Wilmington Massacre and Coup: Armed White Supremacists Overthrow Elected Government, Murder Black Citizens

Armed white supremacists in Wilmington, North Carolina launched the only successful coup d’etat in American history, overthrowing the legally elected biracial government, murdering an estimated 60-300 Black citizens, and establishing one-party white Democratic rule that would persist for decades. The Wilmington Massacre demonstrated that Reconstruction’s promise of Black political participation would be crushed through organized violence when other disenfranchisement methods proved insufficient.

The 1898 coup was a planned operation, not a spontaneous riot. Democratic Party leaders including Furnifold Simmons developed a coordinated “White Supremacy Campaign” combining propaganda, economic intimidation, and paramilitary violence. Newspapers published fabricated stories of Black criminality. Employers threatened to fire Black workers who voted. The Red Shirts—armed white militiamen—paraded through Black neighborhoods in shows of force.

On November 10, two days after Democrats declared victory in rigged elections, armed mobs of up to 2,000 white men marched through Wilmington. They burned the offices of the Daily Record, the only Black-owned newspaper in the state, whose editor Alexander Manly had challenged white supremacist propaganda. They then moved through Black neighborhoods, shooting citizens in the streets. Bodies floated in the Cape Fear River.

Former Confederate officer Alfred Moore Waddell led the coup’s political phase. Mobs forced the legally elected Republican mayor, board of aldermen, and police chief to resign at gunpoint. Waddell installed himself as mayor. Prominent Black businessmen were marched to the train station and exiled. An estimated 2,100 Black residents permanently fled Wilmington, destroying what had been North Carolina’s largest city and most prosperous Black community.

The coup received national attention but no federal response. President McKinley, dependent on Southern white support, took no action. The perpetrators were never prosecuted. Waddell served as mayor until 1905. Simmons became a U.S. Senator. The lesson was clear: organized white violence against Black political participation would face no consequences.

The Wilmington coup accelerated disenfranchisement across the South. North Carolina amended its constitution in 1900 to add poll taxes and literacy tests. Other states followed. By 1908, every former Confederate state had rewritten its constitution to eliminate Black voting. The coup demonstrated that when legal disenfranchisement methods faced resistance, white supremacists would simply kill their way to power—and the federal government would look away.