A North Carolina city begins to reckon with the massacre in its white supremacist past
In 1898, a white supremacist mob burned the offices of Wilmington's Black-owned newspaper and gunned down scores of the city's African American residents. Now, the city is honoring some of the dead.
On Nov. 10, 1898, a mob descended on the offices of The Daily Record, a Black-owned newspaper in Wilmington, N.C. The armed men then moved into the streets and opened fire as Black men fled for their lives.
Finally, the rabble seized control of the racially mixed city government. It expelled Black aldermen, installed unelected whites belonging to the then-segregationist Democratic Party and published a "White Declaration of Independence." Historians have called it a coup d'etat. The number of people who died ranges from about 60 to as many as 250, according to some estimates.
