This week in 1898, white supremacist mobs overthrew the integrated, reconstruction era government of Wilmington, North Carolina in a coup d'etat, burned down a black newspaper building & hunted down and killed up to 100 blacks. 
The riots/coup took place in Wilmington, a racial integrated city with 3 out of 10 aldermen African Americans, & with blacks working as policemen, firemen, & magistrates, and it occurred just after state elections where Democrats were campaigning on a white supremacist platform.
The Democrats, the party of white supremacy at the time, ran for office partnering with the KKK and vowing to end “Negro domination” in the south.
In the run up to the election, Democrats held white supremacist rallies all over the state. Former Confederate colonel Alfred Waddell gave a speech telling white citizens to “choke the Cape Fear River with carcasses” to keep blacks from the polls.
Also at this time, an editorial in Wilimington’s black newspaper criticized a speech by a Georgia socialite promoting in lynching. The editorial also criticized the racist stereotype of black men posing a "rape threat" to white women. This outraged white supremacists.
On election day, armed, white supremacist gangs called the Red Shirts patrolled black neighborhoods. Democrats won every seat in North Carolina’s in the state legislature; however, blacks were still part of Wilmington’s city government.
800 whites led by Waddell met at a courthouse and produced a “White Declaration of Independence” which stated: “We, the undersigned citizens… do hereby declare that we will no longer be ruled, and will never again be ruled by men of African origin.”
The following day Waddell led a mob of 2,000 armed men to the black paper, which penned the editorial condemning lynching, and burned the building to the ground. Then Waddell’s men turned their attention on the black population of Wilmington.
Unarmed black men scattered in all directions and were gunned down. Violence quickly spread. The Wilmington Light Infantry, the White Government Union, and the Red Shirts poured into the black neighborhoods with rifles, revolvers, and a Gatling gun, opening fire.
Waddell took advantage of the riot to throw out the democratically-elected aldermen and installed his own in a coup d’état. The hand-picked men then “elected” Waddell mayor.
Many black leaders were jailed “for their own safety” and then forcibly marched to the train station under military escort and sent out of town; blacks and Republicans were barred from entering the city.
After the riot, thousands of black citizens fled. In 1900, the North Carolina legislature effectively stripped African Americans of the vote through the grandfather clause and ushered in the worst of the Jim Crow laws.
Similar things happened all over North Carolina, black newspapers were burned down all over the state. The violence was coordinated state-wide with help of the Democratic Party.
Charles B. Aycock, an agitator of the Wilmington riots, who three years later was elected governor on a platform of white supremacy, is still revered in the state by white supremacists. There are still many buildings and monuments dedicated to him across the state.
