WILMINGTON — Descendants of the victims and perpetrators of the 1898 Wilmington coup share their views of the massacre’s historical legacy in a new documentary that will air as the 136th anniversary nears. Filmmakers and descendants featured in the film hope to spread awareness of the historic event and rectify lasting wounds inflicted on Wilmington’s African American community.
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Wilmington in 1898 was the largest city in North Carolina and one of the most prosperous in the post-Civil War South. A new PBS documentary — which airs on Nov. 12 but will have its debut at Thalian Hall on Thursday — details the role African American business and community leaders held in the city before a white supremacist mob carried out the only coup d’etat in United States history.
“Wilmington shows us the fragility of a few things,” filmmaker Yoruba Richen told Port City Daily. “The fragility of democracy.”
Before the coup, Wilmington was led by an alliance of a Populist and Republican leaders, or “Fusionist” government. African Americans held three seats on the city’s 10–member board of aldermen and served local positions as magistrates, firefighters, and police. Wilmington’s multiracial Fusionist government advocated greater public participation in elections, tightened railroad regulations, and adjusted taxes for stockholders and property owners.
Filmmakers and descendants told Port City Daily they sought to provide clarity and public awareness to a historical event that was suppressed and distorted for over a century.
“The goal was always to tell the story,” Inez Campbell-Eason, great, great granddaughter of African American businessman Isham Quick, said. “Tell it enough and hopefully things will come out. It was a slow turn of events coming to this culmination. We’ve come to a day where it’s a full feature film with access to great history, archives, and documents that can be received nationally and internationally. This is for the ancestors and now their story can’t continuously be buried.”
Campbell-Eason discovered her grandfather held leadership positions at three separate local financial institutions — the Homestead Building and Loan Association, the People’s Perpetual Building and Loan Association, and the Metropolitan Trust Company — during archival research for the documentary.
“Wilmington demonstrated how diversity could really work,” she said. “People who had money, who had access to money to build homes, to work, to create businesses for themselves and thrive.”
The city was closely racially integrated at the time. Quick’s banks lended to African American and white residents. He sold real estate to the Bellamy family and William McKoy — an attorney who would go on to play a leading role in the coup — and was on the Metropolitan Trust Company’s board of directors.
Frederick Sadgwar, a prominent African American carpenter and contractor, was neighbors with Wilmington Cotton Mills president Hugh MacRae. MacRae led the “Secret Nine” conspiracy, a group of local businessmen who plotted and orchestrated the violent toppling of Wilmington’s government.
“My understanding is that Wilmington at the time in 1898 was a Mecca of sorts,” MacRae’s granddaughter Anne MacRae said in the documentary. “African American businesses, white businesses, all thriving. [MacRae] was part of the population that didn’t so much like that.”
MacRae was part of a broader effort by the Democratic party to end “negro domination” in the 1898 elections. State Democratic Party Chair Furnifold Simmons, Raleigh News & Observer editor Josephus Daniels, and lawyer Charles Aycock strategized to use white supremacist propaganda and intimidation to sow racial division and splinter the Fusionist alliance.
“They used images to help stir up emotion,” Frank Daniels III, grandson of Josephus Daniels, said in the documentary.
He pointed to the “Incubus Cartoon” published in the Raleigh News & Observer as an example. An incubus is a male demon who rapes women while they are asleep; the image depicts a monstrous, Black winged man hovering over the state of North Carolina.
The cartoon was part of a broader propaganda campaign to depict African Americans as rapists and criminals.
“When they were brought here as slaves the trope was that they were docile and willing,” filmmaker Richen said. “And then as more resistance, slave revolts, and abolitionist movements [occurred], the trope shifted to danger and the threat to white women.”
Alexander Manly, owner of the African American-owned local newspaper the Daily Record, wrote an August 1898 editorial in response to a speech promoting lynching of African American men. He noted history of rape against African American women during slavery and disputed racially-charged fear mongering:
“Experience among poor white people in the country teaches us that women of that race are not more particular in the matter of clandestine meetings with colored men than are the white men with colored women. Meetings of this kind go on for some time until the womens’ infatuation or the man’s boldness brings attention to them. And the man is lynched for rape.”
White supremacist rallies raised outrage about the editorial in following months. Over two dozen local businessmen signed an October 26th editorial in the Wilmington Messenger titled “The Chamber of Commerce Declares Against Negro Domination.” It described Manly’s article as “an attack on the virtue of the womanhood of our Southland.”
Weeks later, hundreds of white men gathered at the county courthouse and issued the “White Declaration of Independence.” The document’s authors described Manly’s editorial as an “article so vile and slanderous that it would in most communities have resulted in lynching of the editor. We deprecate lynching, and yet there is no punishment provided by the laws adequate for the offense.”
On Nov. 10, 1898, a mob of 2,000 white men massacred between 40 to 300 African Americans, burned down Manly’s newspaper office, and forced democratically-elected municipal officials out of their positions. The coup forced the exodus of more than 2,000 African American residents from the city, shifting it to a white majority.
“That infamous photo of the burning of [The Daily Record] office building shows the animosity, the threat that the paper posed to white supremacy,” filmmaker Richen said.
During the documentary historian Carol Anderson and author David Zuchinno — of the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Wilmington’s Lie” — noted Manly published impactful local journalism covering the lack of public services and poor hospital conditions for African American residents at the time.
“His Daily Record was so vital to Wilmington,” Richen said. “But also to the state, being the only black newspaper at the time. It’s just a shame that we don’t have many copies at all.”
The film shows a moment where researchers of the Third Person Project — a nonprofit founded by local writers John Jeremiah Sullivan and Joel Finsel, dedicated to locating and preserving lost copies of The Daily Record — were able to restore a one-sheet of the paper from archives.
Manly’s great-great grandson Kieran Haile was able to hold a copy for the first time.
“That’s fantastic,” he said in the film, after hearing it would be 125 years since a Manly family member cradled the paper. “Part of me was afraid none of this would ever get seen by anybody and this would all exist in my mind. This is proof. … A part of me feels the tragedy of what we don’t hear. How many more stories do we not get to read or have to think about.”
Haile, from California, didn’t visit Wilmington until 2021 as part of New Hanover County Community Remembrance Project, which memorialized victims of 1898. He said the 1898 coup was rarely mentioned during his upbringing.
It also was barely recognized in history books or classrooms for 100 years. In 1998, a symposium was held at UNCW to commemorate the centennial event. But it wasn’t until two years later that the N.C. General Assembly authorized the creation of the 1898 Wilmington Race Riot Commission to study the happenings. Awareness has slowly but steadily grown since, with the 2008 establishment of the 1898 Memorial Park at Third and Davis streets.
The City of Wilmington and New Hanover County also hosts events annually near its anniversary to recognize the aftereffects 1898 had on the makeup and power in its community.
The White Declaration of Independence contained a provision stating the coup-leaders recognized government authority and would yield to it if exerted. But no power at the state or federal level challenged the new white supremacist government; a number of the most prominent coup leaders attained positions at the highest levels of state and federal government after the massacre.
“The entire city of Wilmington did not rise up and swallow him (Alexander Manly) whole,” Haile said. “It was largely being manipulated by outside forces who wanted to make an example out of someone like him.”
However, no reparations in the form of financial relief has been given to descendants who lost family members, property, businesses, and the opportunity to create generational wealth.
“Some action should be done for victims’ families,” Haile said. “We’re still just kind of grappling with the facts of what happened but I do think there is followup that could be done for all the parties.”
Filmmaker Brad Lichtenstein said he was particularly struck by the level of planning and orchestration involved in overthrowing Wilmington’s democratically elected government. He described the economic damages to the city’s African American community as “incalculable.”
“The terror changed Wilmington forever,” Lichtenstein said. “When you look at the level of institutional barriers and racism and gentrification it’s really pronounced in Wilmington today.”
Wilmington’s African American population declined from around 60% of the city’s population before the coup to 40% afterward. It is currently around 16.2%, according to the 2022 Census data. No African American from Wilmington served in public office after 1898 until 1972.
“I didn’t know about it like everybody else in Wilmington for a very long time,” Lucy McCauley, great-granddaughter of coup perpetrator William McKoy, said in the documentary. “When I was growing up here in high school and even into college, I was drinking the Kool-Aid. I learned all about this in 2018 and it was a physical blow to my body because it was such a departure from everything I’d been told about my family.”
McCauley advocated a broader restorative justice program for victims’ families but said it would not be possible without greater involvement from more descendants of 1898 perpetrators. Lichtenstein told Port City Daily filmmakers reached out to many heirs of coup plotters who refused to be interviewed.
The documentary described the centennial observances of 1998 as a pivotal event to open the conversation about the coup among city residents, but descendants expressed frustration that a full understanding of their losses has yet to be achieved. Campbell-Eason hopes education about the coup, including the film, will become part of the curriculum in North Carolina’s education system.
In New Hanover County, 1898 is now taught to elementary school students.
“We haven’t reckoned with our history,” Richen said. “As the saying goes, if you haven’t reckoned with your history, you’re doomed to repeat it.”
Thalian Hall will host a free screening of the documentary at 6:30 p.m. on Thursday, followed by a discussion and question and answer session with filmmakers. Advanced registration is required and seats can be reserved here. The documentary will stream at 9 p.m. on PBS NC on Nov. 12.
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