0:00 On November tenth, 1898, the United States experienced its only successful coup d'état.0:07 It didn't happen in Washington D.C., but in Wilmington, North Carolina, and it violently erased a legitimately elected, biracial government.0:19 Last week, in the files on those forgotten atrocities, we saw how crimes can fade through simple neglect.0:28 This is different.0:29 This wasn't forgotten.0:31 It was buried.0:33 Before the coup, Wilmington was a beacon.0:36 For the late 1890s, it was a genuine anomaly in the American South.0:42 A majority-Black city, prosperous, with a thriving Black middle class, Black-owned businesses, and a Black-owned newspaper, The Daily Record.0:54 The city government was a fusion of Black Republicans and white Populists who had found a way to share power.1:03 It was working.1:05 And because it was working, it had to be destroyed.1:09 The forces against it were led by men like Alfred Moore Waddell, a former Confederate officer.1:17 They called themselves the "Red Shirts"—a white supremacist paramilitary group acting as the armed wing of the Democratic Party.1:28 Their stated goal was to reclaim North Carolina for the white man.1:34 They found their excuse in the words of Alexander Manly, the editor of The Daily Record.1:41 Manly wrote a brave, defiant editorial pushing back against the racist caricatures of Black men.1:49 The Red Shirts seized on it, twisted it, and used it as a pretext for what they had already planned.1:58 They issued what they called a "White Declaration of Independence." It demanded that Alexander Manly be banished from the city and that his newspaper be shut down.2:12 It was an ultimatum.2:14 And when their demands were not met by the morning of November tenth, Waddell led a mob of nearly two thousand armed white men to The Daily Record's office.2:27 They broke in, smashed the printing press, and burned the building to the ground.2:34 Then, they turned on the city.2:36 They went door to door, hunting Black leaders and anyone who stood with them.2:43 The exact number is lost, but estimates say anywhere from sixty to three hundred Black citizens were murdered in the streets.2:54 By the afternoon, Waddell marched his mob to city hall.2:58 They held the elected mayor and the city's aldermen at gunpoint and forced them to resign, one by one.3:07 Then, Alfred Waddell was simply declared the new mayor.3:12 A violent, illegal overthrow of a democratic government, planned and executed in a single day.3:20 And here is the shape of the crime that followed the crime.3:25 For decades, this event was not called a coup.3:29 It was not called a massacre.3:31 It was officially recorded, taught, and remembered as the "Wilmington Race Riot." That single word—riot—places the blame on the victims.3:43 It creates a false equivalence, a sense that both sides were fighting.3:49 It was a fiction written by the men who held the guns.3:54 They didn't just seize power; they seized the story.3:58 And by renaming the crime, they buried it in plain sight.4:03 This week sets up a question that haunts every file in this archive: how many other coups are we calling riots?4:13 How many massacres are we calling disturbances?4:17 The real work isn't just finding the documents; it's learning to read the language of their burial.4:25 The files are sealed not with locks, but with words.
