Lauren Collins is a staff writer at the New Yorker. Recently, she wrote a book called They Stole a City, about the startling events that occurred in Wilmington North Carolina which I visited a number of years ago as part of the North American Orchid Conference. It is a lovely city with a dark history that many want to keep dark. There are many Americans who want to keep the real history of America quiet so they can celebrate all the wonders of America without considering its warts.
Lauren was interviewed on CBS Sunday Morning, a television show that Christiane and I watch quite frequently. This episode was worth the watch.
Collins started by making an important point about history that MAGA cheerleaders don’t consider. She said, “Loving a place doesn’t mean lying about it or lying for it.”
Her book tells about the events that happened on November 10, 1898. As Jennifer Szalai said in a review of Collins’ book, “What happened in Wilmington on Nov. 10, 1898, has been variously called a riot, a massacre and — by the white people who perpetrated it — a revolution. Collins calls it both a massacre and a coup.” As Szalai said, “It would take more than half a century before a historian would dare to call what happened “a coup d’état.” In hindsight that seems remarkable because it was so obviously true. Colins called it “the only successful coup in American history.”
Until then Wilmington had been a model of black and white power sharing, but white supremacists don’t share well with others. It’s always their way or the highway. The supremacists really wanted to purge all black influence in the city.
White people got together in Wilmington North Carolina after a clarion call to “white men” to gather in that city to ensure that “business in the furtherance of White Supremacy will be transacted.” They did not hide their intentions. They were completely transparent. They wanted to take over. No more sharing power. They wanted a coup d’état and that is what they got. They gathered together under the banner of white supremacy because as Szalai said, “white Wilmingtonians were particularly resentful of Black success after the Civil War, complaining of “Negro domination” and “insolence.” The panic was so unhinged that it could border on parody, with unintentionally ridiculous headlines to match: “Negro on Train With Big Feet Behind White,” or “Stole Cheese: Negro Man Boldly Purloins a Cheese.”
Whenever people dominating another group of people feel that dominance slipping away it is painful to the dominators. They hate, and inevitably want to do whatever they need to in order to stop the slide. And they don’t care what explodes as a result. That is how resentment and hatred operate—with fire. They don’t want to be replaced. They want to continue in the driver’s seat. That’s what happened in ‘Wilmington.
As a result, the white men took over the local government, signed a new city charter that they called, grandly, “The White Declaration of Independence.” After that they attacked the Black newspaper in killed blacks in a rampage. No one knows how many blacks were killed. Numbers vary from low tens to more than a hundred. Collins believes higher numbers are more likely because the powerful white men tried to hide the true numbers. At the time 56% of the city was black. Today it is a mere 15%.
The next day, they attacked the offices of the Black newspaper that ran the offending editorial and proceeded to take over City Hall.
The granddaughter of one of the victims was interviewed by CBS and said, We need justice and we need healing and healing does not come with lies. Neither does justice. It comes with the ugly truth of things.” This is a woman with honour and genuine pride, entirely unlike the white supremacists who support the current Republicans in America who want to hide the truth from their families. They want their children to be proud of their ancestors whether they deserve the honour or not.
One of the white citizens of Wilmington put it well: “It is incumbent upon white people like me to consider their history and grapple with it and shoulder the full truth of it even when it is uncomfortable.” Only the truth will set you free.
And of course, the same steadfast devotion to the real truth is required of us Canadians as we confront the history of our country and its treatment of Indigenous people in Canada.