In 1898, the mixed-race Fusion Party won several seats in an election held in the coastal town of Wilmington, NC. These victories put many Black citizens in positions of authority, representative of the town's 2/3 Black population. In response, the white supremacist southern Democrats staged a coup to overthrow the democratically-elected leaders and run several Black citizens out of town.
Newspapers around the country reported the event as a race riot, in which Black citizens incited violence. These reports reached author Charles W. Chesnutt, who was living in Ohio at the time but was born in North Carolina and had relatives in Wilmington. To raise attention to the real events in...
