In 1898, a group of white supremacists in Wilmington, North Carolina overthrew a democratically elected multiracial government, murdered Black residents in the street, and faced exactly zero federal consequences for doing it. A new book argues we have never actually stopped living in the wreckage of that day.
What Actually Happened in Wilmington
On November 10, 1898, white supremacists staged a coup against Wilmington's multiracial Fusionist government, burned down a Black-owned newspaper, and drove elected officials out of office at gunpoint. The McKinley administration, when asked to intervene, declined. That was it. No troops. No accountability. White terrorists had just successfully overthrown an American city government and Washington shrugged.
Lauren Collins, a writer for The New Yorker, has spent years following this story to its roots and its residue. Her book, 'They Stole a City: Wilmington's White Supremacist Coup and the Families Who Live With Its Legacy,' publishes July 14 via Penguin Press. According to a CBS News excerpt published ahead of release, Collins argues that the standard historical framing of 1898 as a discrete, bracketed event has always been a way of containing something that was never actually contained.
By 1900, North Carolina had passed voting restrictions complete with a grandfather clause exempting anyone whose ancestor could vote before 1867. Translation: almost every white man in the state. The coup wasn't just a violent spasm. It was the opening move of a long, deliberate campaign to remove Black people from political life entirely.
The Families Left Holding the Wreckage
Collins structures the book around four Wilmington families, two white and two Black, tracking their trajectories across 125 years. The white families, the Bellamy/MacRaes and the Moores, contributed to the violence and helped build its aftermath into the social fabric of the city. The Black families, the Howes and the Halseys, survived it and carried it forward in ways that are harder to quantify and far more costly.
This is where the book gets genuinely uncomfortable, and it's also what makes it essential. As Collins writes in the CBS News excerpt, statistics are enlightening but insufficient. Wilmington's Black population and Black-owned businesses declined in the immediate aftermath of 1898. North Carolina did not elect another Black person to national office until 1992. Those numbers tell part of the story. They do not tell you what happened to people's sense of safety, their willingness to invest in property, their ability to trust institutions, their capacity to hope.
The question Collins is really asking is: what does generational trauma actually look like in accounting terms? Not the emotional language of it, but the hard material math. Who got the house? Who got the business loan? Who got the school that stayed open?
The Grandfather Clause's Grandchildren Are Still Writing Laws
Here is where Collins stops being a historian and starts making an argument that will make certain people deeply uncomfortable at their book clubs. The North Carolina legislature's recent gerrymandering efforts and voter identification laws, she writes, are nothing if not the grandchildren of the grandfather clause. That is not a metaphor offered loosely. That is a documented lineage.
The throughline from the 1898 disenfranchisement playbook to modern voter suppression legislation is not subtle if you are willing to look at it. The tools change. The goal does not. Collins is essentially arguing that we keep treating 1898 as history when it is more accurately described as infrastructure, a system that was built in blood and has been quietly maintained ever since.
She also points to what she calls the qualitative fallout: the 1950s and '60s desegregation chaos, the 1968 closure of Williston Senior High School (Wilmington's anchor institution of Black education), and the 1971 wrongful convictions of the Wilmington Ten for arson and conspiracy. Each of those events has its own Wikipedia page. Collins is arguing they share a parent.
Hidden History? Not Exactly
One thing Collins is careful to push back on is the framing of 1898 as some kind of buried secret that brave researchers are only now uncovering. That narrative is convenient for people who prefer to treat racial violence as an archaeological dig rather than a living condition. The truth, as she lays it out, is messier.
Plenty of people have always known what happened. They knew because of the antique gun in the closet, or the New York address on the birth certificate of someone who fled, or the deathbed story someone told and no one ever forgot. The knowledge was there. What was suppressed was the public accounting of it, the willingness of institutions and textbooks and local governments to say out loud what happened and whose fault it was.
Interest in 1898 spiked, Collins notes, after the murder of George Floyd and the January 6 Capitol attack. Both events made Americans more willing to look at what happens when democratic institutions fail and no one is punished for breaking them. The coup in Wilmington, it turned out, was a case study sitting in the archive the whole time, waiting for a country ready to read it.
What a Coup Looks Like 125 Years Later
Collins cites historian Glenda Gilmore's line that 'murder's best work is done after the fact, when terror lives on in memory.' It is the kind of sentence that stops you cold because it is both beautifully written and completely true. The men who orchestrated 1898 are dead. Their work is not.
In Wilmington today, according to the book, Black voter participation, homeownership, and business ownership remain persistently low. Among white residents, there is what Collins describes as intergenerational wealth, a monopolization of public memory, and an enduring chauvinism. Both of those sets of conditions, she argues, trace directly back to November 10, 1898, and the century of policy that followed it.
Twenty thousand people lived in Wilmington that day. Their choices, and the choices made for them, rippled outward into hundreds of thousands of lives. That is the scope Collins is working at. Not the event. The event's children, and their children, and their children's children.
The Dingo Take
Here is the thing about American coups: we are very comfortable discussing them when they happen somewhere else. When it is a banana republic or a Cold War proxy state, we have all the vocabulary we need. When it is Wilmington, North Carolina in 1898, or the Capitol building on January 6, 2021, the vocabulary gets slippery fast. Suddenly it is 'complicated.' Suddenly context is required. Suddenly the real problem is that people are being too divisive by bringing it up.
Collins is not letting that happen. She tracked down the actual descendants of the people who did this and the people it was done to, and she sat with them and asked them what they know and how they carry it. That is not divisive. That is the bare minimum of intellectual honesty a country owes itself. The fact that it reads as radical in 2026 tells you everything about how successfully the story was managed for the past century.
The timing of this book, dropping in the middle of an administration that has spent eighteen months trying to erase any federal acknowledgment of racial history from schools, museums, and government websites, is not lost on anyone paying attention. They Stole a City is an argument in book form that the past is not past. It is also, whether it intends to be or not, a warning. Coups that face no consequences do not stay in the history books. They become the template.
