Maya. The photograph shows a crowd outside a ruined building in Wilmington, North Carolina. Some men are standing up on what remains of the structure. It’s November tenth, eighteen ninety-eight. Hours earlier, this was a place where people worked on a daily newspaper. By the end of the day, Black Wilmingtonians would be dead, and the city would have a new mayor installed under threat of violence. I’m Maya, and this is the North Carolina True Crime Atlas.

Daniel. And I’m Daniel. Today we’re going to work through what happened before, during, and after the Wilmington massacre and coup. A warning that we discuss racist violence and killings. We’ll start before the photograph, because the people in front of that building had been brought together by a campaign that was already months in the making.

Maya. Wilmington was a major port city and had a Black majority. So what did political power actually look like there? The white supremacy campaign talked about Black rule. Who was really in office?

Daniel. There were Black and white officials, and the mayor, Silas Wright, was a white Republican. His city government came out of the political conditions created by Fusion, the alliance between Republicans and Populists. Black voters helped that coalition win. Black Wilmingtonians also had economic and civic influence through their businesses, churches, and professions. The campaign against Fusion tried to make sharing power sound like losing it.

Maya. And it used different ways to get that message across. There were newspapers and speeches. There were armed Red Shirts. By the election on November eighth, New Hanover County’s historical account describes intimidation and tampering with the returns. Democratic candidates were declared the winners. The offices the mob would seize two days later were a separate matter. The sitting mayor still held his office.

Daniel. That distinction changes how you read the rest of the week. The men at the armory were acting to take over a city government that was still in place. And they’d already singled out one institution where people could challenge their version of events, the Daily Record.

Maya. Alex Manly ran the Record with his brother Frank. I’d encourage listeners to look at a surviving front page, the one from March twenty-sixth, for example. It’s easy to meet Manly in the story only through the editorial his opponents picked out. He was also the editor of a newspaper with readers and deadlines and a place in the city’s daily life. You can get a sense of that from the surviving paper itself.

Daniel. In August, Manly responded to Rebecca Latimer Felton, a Georgia speaker who had defended lynching. He questioned the charges used to justify lynchings and said some interracial relationships described as assaults were consensual. His opponents reprinted the editorial and used it to inflame white voters. Three months later, the organized group demanding his removal treated the printing of those words as grounds for shutting down the paper.

Maya. The day after the election, white men met at the county courthouse. They adopted resolutions known as the White Declaration of Independence. They demanded that Manly leave and his paper stop publishing. A committee of Black residents was told to respond by seven thirty the next morning.

Daniel. The committee wrote a reply at a barber shop run by David Jacobs, who was also the county coroner. A lawyer named Armond Scott was meant to deliver the reply. With armed white men in the streets, he chose to mail it. White leaders said they hadn’t received it by the deadline.

Maya. It’s easy to hear that and think the attack turned on a letter arriving late. But the organizers had already gathered armed support and demanded the expulsion of the editor. Scott faced a real question about his own safety, and no one on his committee could guarantee what the armed men would do. Manly had already fled by the time they came for the newspaper.

Daniel. At about eight in the morning on November tenth, hundreds of armed white men gathered at the Wilmington Light Infantry armory. A former Confederate officer and congressman, Alfred Moore Waddell, led them to Love and Charity Hall on South Seventh Street. The mob ransacked the newspaper’s offices and set the building on fire. That brought us to the photograph we started with.

Maya. When you read across the timelines, the day spreads out across the city. Black workers and armed white men faced each other near a cotton compress. Then there was shooting around North Fourth and Harnett. Witnesses gave different accounts of who fired the first shot there. How do we talk about that disagreement without losing track of the sequence?

Daniel. We tell listeners where the disagreement is. It’s about the first shot at that location. The armed march and the burning of the newspaper had already happened. The violence on the Northside then hit Black residents at several sites. The Wilmington Light Infantry shot Black people near the Fourth Street Bridge. A rapid-fire gun was pointed at Saint Stephen A M E Church. Those events appear in the historical timeline, and the county map helps you see how close they were to places where people worked and worshiped.

Maya. The number killed remains unknown. There are much larger estimates than the coroner’s count, and the surviving evidence can’t support one exact figure. We do have some names. Gray Bizzell died at home after being shot. John L. Gregory was killed near North Third Street. Charles Lindsey was killed at Fourth and Harnett. Joshua Halsey was killed on Bladen Street. Each name tells us something about the reach of the attack.

Daniel. By late afternoon, the focus had also shifted to City Hall. Officials were forced to resign, some at gunpoint. The vacancies were filled by white Democrats, and Waddell became mayor. If you look only at the names of the officeholders before and after that day, you can miss the whole mechanism. The armed men and the killing in the streets are what give those resignations their meaning.

Maya. Then came banishments. The lawyer who mailed the reply, Armond Scott, got out that evening. The next day, Black businessman Thomas Miller and butcher Ari Bryant were among those forced out. White officials and Fusion supporters were also driven from town. Other families left in fear. Some went nearby, and some left North Carolina. Inside city government, Black police officers and firefighters lost their jobs.

Daniel. There was no prosecution for the violence. In March eighteen ninety-nine, Waddell and the aldermen were formally elected without Republican opposition. Then in nineteen hundred, North Carolina voters approved a suffrage amendment that used literacy rules and an exemption based on earlier voting eligibility. The men whose ancestors had been excluded from voting were the ones least able to use that exemption. Wilmington had shown what could be done by force. State law helped make political exclusion last.

Maya. Who gets to tell that story matters, too. Many white newspapers described it as a race riot and implied that Black residents were to blame. The Reverend J. Allen Kirk, the Black pastor of Central Baptist Church, escaped and wrote about his own experience. The Richmond Planet, a Black newspaper in Virginia, gave its readers a different account. When you read an old article, consider who published it and what they could actually know.

Daniel. North Carolina set up a commission in two thousand. Its final report appeared in two thousand six, drawing together records that had been scattered across many collections. Another strand of the work took researchers to Pine Forest Cemetery. They used burial records to find Joshua Halsey’s unmarked grave. In two thousand twenty-one, his family and members of the community gathered for a funeral, and his grave received a headstone.

Maya. That gives us somewhere to end. The exact number of people killed is still beyond the reach of the record. But the archive can sometimes return a name, or point a family to a place. The case page has the commission report, the original newspaper scans, and a map from the armory and the site of the fire to today’s memorial. Thanks for listening.