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# An American City Government Was Overthrown at Gunpoint. For a Century, They Called It a Riot.
- URL: https://www.gottabekidding.me/an-american-city-government-was-overthrown-at-gunpoint-for-a-century-they-called-it-a-riot/
- Published: 2026-08-25T10:01:50.000Z
- Updated: 2026-08-25T10:01:49.000Z
- Description: One word says chaos happened. The other says someone planned it. Wilmington, 1898, was planned. What does it mean that the wrong word won for a hundred years?
- Author: Deep Time
- Tags: History

On November 10, 1898, an armed mob marched on City Hall in Wilmington, North Carolina, forced the city's legally elected, multiracial government to resign at gunpoint, burned down the office of its only Black-owned daily newspaper, and killed somewhere between 14 and 60 or more Black residents, depending on which count you trust and which era's accounting you're willing to accept. By nightfall, a former Confederate officer named Alfred Moore Waddell had been installed as mayor in place of the elected one.

Historians describe it as the only successful coup d'état against a sitting elected government in United States history.

For most of the 20th century, it was called a "race riot": a word that located the violence's origin in the people it destroyed. The relabeling was not accidental. The coup's own architects went on to long careers in North Carolina politics and journalism, which put them in an excellent position to shape how the event was remembered, or whether it was remembered at all.

North Carolina's General Assembly did not formally investigate what happened until 2000\. The commission's report, 500 pages, was published in 2006\. It settled on "as many as sixty" dead. After 1898, no Black representative sat on Wilmington's city council again until 1972\. No Black North Carolinian served in the U.S. Congress again until 1992.

The thing that was overthrown stayed overthrown for a very long time.

*A word's job, it turns out, is not always to describe. Sometimes it is to cover.*

**Read the full story at** [Smithsonian Magazine, November 8, 2024](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/when-white-supremacists-staged-the-only-successful-coup-in-us-history-180985400/?ref=gottabekidding.me)

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**Hot Take:** Every euphemism a government adopts for its own violence is a record of who controlled the newsroom afterward.