An American Coup: Wilmington 1898 advertises itself as the story of “the only coup d’état in the history of the US.” Near the end of the 19th century, and 23 years before the more famous Tulsa Riots, White supremacists carefully orchestrated an insurrection and deadly race massacre that killed dozens and drove out thousands of Blacks from Wilmington, N.C. Wilmington resident and historian Cedric Harrison of WilmingtoNColor is featured in the documentary and has made it his life’s work to inform people about this tragic event. He hosts tours in his hometown to teach people about this heinous insurrection that ended America’s true first Black Wall Street before it even began. The doc is already streaming live on PBS and YouTube, and Harrison was in the rolling out studio to talk more about this historic tragedy.
What are some lasting effects that Wilmington’s Black community still suffers from to this day?
To this day, Wilmington has yet to have a Black mayor in 126 years since that government overthrow has happened. We’ve only had two Black county commissioners, a father and his son, and literally, he was just up for reelection this past November and didn’t get reelected. So now we’re back to no Black county commissioners. We have a few Black city councilmen on the city government, but other than that, nothing. It was a whole 90 years before North Carolina has a whole entire state of sending a Black person to Congress.
Harrison on suppression
Why do you think this history was suppressed and is just now coming out in full?
It’s being suppressed for all the reasons we could absolutely list out — control, power, trying to hide those stories. After government overthrow happened, those folks stayed in position, and they started to backtrack I believe, to cover everything up. And we’ve been having some conversations, we feel like it might have been somebody that was truly connected to not getting that story out there that might have finally passed away because we’re now talking about two or three generations down the line. And so, they probably have started to die off. And usually descendants are a lot more willing to acknowledge the sins of their ancestors.
How can Wilmington get back to the levels of Black excellence that it had prior to the overthrow?
As I got back home and started getting activated, doing the work, and I would be in different rooms and stuff like that, and having different conversations, the main thing that I would hear all the time is “I never knew, I never knew, I never knew, I never knew. I never heard this. I never heard this.” And so, I wanted to get in front of that problem, and so that’s why I created the tour business to start the education process. So, now we’re a part of the intro to college course at the local university. We’re a part of a lot of different Upward Bound programs at a lot of different universities around the state, and we’re now having conversations about being implemented into the general school system, so that everybody has to learn it and make it a fully intentional part of the curriculum. We hope that they will come back to Wilmington, learn more, and one special thing about what we do is we don’t we just don’t tell you about the history. We tell you about the current Black businesses that’s going on right now. We’ll tell you the ways that you can get involved and help, where you can put dollars at in the right spaces.
What is the main thing you want people to take away from this documentary?
The main thing that we hope people take away from the documentary is to understand that it’s not that long ago, and to really look at the signs of similarity between what happened then and what’s currently going on in today’s climate, I don’t want to expose Wilmington for just the issue of it happening, so that people can know that this happened as an issue, but exposing Wilmington because there was something happening for that to take place, and that right before that thing took place, there’s some things that we could have learned from how that operated that could benefit a lot of people, a lot of people, and a lot of different cities, states, and as I found out recently, in different countries too, as well.
