"Constitution and laws are not always right. They are often unendurable. When that is so and no other redress is possible men appeal to another right, as sacred as any other human right, the right of revolution. If they fail they take the consequences. If they succeed they are not rebels or revolutionists, but the principles they establish by force become thereby constitutional rights and are such before the act of formulation" (The Brooklyn Citizen, November 12, 1989).
Such a statement would have been widely embraced by most citizens of southern states prior to and during the Civil War. What is remarkable, though, is that those sentiments were still held by white supremacists thirty-four years after the war as justification for the staging of the 1898 Wilmington, North Carolina coup d'état.
If a subversive body attempted to undermine the agreed-upon form of government, and replace it with a dictatorship or fascism, such sentiments would be justified. However, in this case of the Wilmington coup, the abuses of power were trumped-up lies and racial at heart. What is more, the redresses white supremacists wanted were to deny recently emancipated African Americans the right to vote and to force them back into an, all-be-it-legal, state of servitude.
After the coup, only by word-of-mouth were rumors of the racial conflict passed down from one generation to the next. The inside-story of the insurrection was veiled in secrecy to protect the leaders from possible persecution.
The intent of this publication is to reveal in a short, concise, and informative way the story of the 1898 Wilmington, North Carolina coup d'état.
