They Stole A City
Setting: North CarolinaGenres: History
Published on July 14, 2026
Pages: 523
Format: eBook Source: Library
In this ambitious and groundbreaking history, Lauren Collins weaves together stories of four Wilmington, NC families over 125 years to create a full accounting of the long-term effects of the 1898 white supremacist massacre and coup and its critical role in subverting American democracy
After the Civil War, Reconstruction ushered in an era of political equality and economic opportunity for Black people, and it lasted longer in Wilmington than almost anywhere else. In 1898, Wilmington was a bastion of Black cultural life, while a thriving Black middle class brimmed with lawyers, educators, and elected officials. The city became a symbol of Black hope—only for all of it to come to a violent end on November 10th, 1898.
In this epic, multigenerational narrative, Lauren Collins traces the fates of four Wilmington families, the Howes, the Halseys, the Moores, and the Bellamy/MacRaes, all of whom were present on the day when hundreds of white supremacists launched a murderous coup to “take the city.” After issuing a “White Declaration of Independence,” white men gunned down scores of Black men, chasing their families into hiding. Then they marched to City Hall, where they overthrew the democratically elected, biracial local government at gunpoint in what is thought to be the only successful coup d’état on American soil. No one knows exactly how many Black citizens they murdered—surely dozens, likely hundreds—while driving thousands of survivors out of town. Folklore amongst both Black and white Wilmingtonians holds that the Cape Fear River ran red. While the effects of this episode of racial terrorism would ricochet through the next century of our nation’s history, no one was ever prosecuted or punished, and most of the details have been largely—and deliberately—forgotten.
In collaboration with living descendants of Black and white families, Collins seeks to create a fuller understanding of 1898 than can be drawn solely from the archives. She follows these four families and their descendants through the eras of segregation and Jim Crow, the Great Migration, the Civil Rights movement, and school desegregation, all the way up to the Black Lives Matter and racial justice protests in 2020, emphasizing the lasting and consequential effects of 1898 on the city and people of Wilmington.
Weaving together each generation’s reckoning with their past and how it has imprinted on their present, They Stole a City is an ambitious and revelatory examination of American racial terror as it has played out in one Southern city, written in the conviction that the story of the 1898 Wilmington massacre and coup is, in fact, a story about America in 2025.
The Beginning:
Our understanding of history depends on where we place the parameters of an event, on when we believe it begins and ends. I started this book thinking I was writing about a massacre and coup d’état that white supremacists committed in Wilmington, North Carolina, on a Thursday near the end of the nineteenth century. I finished it understanding that November 10, 1898, is a centuries-long day that isn’t over yet.
This book was amazing. At the end of the 19th century, Wilmington North Carolina had a government in place that they referred to as Fusion. It was an intentionally multi-racial government at a time when Reconstruction was being deliberately turned back across the south. Then on one day in November 1898 it was all over.
A white mob ran the editor of the Black newspaper out of town, burned the paper and other buildings, murdered an unknown number of Black people, and forcibly removed the members of the Fusion government. This book follows four prominent families – some white and some Black – in the run up to the massacre and the 125 years that have followed.
I wasn’t familiar with story at all. I also didn’t know how many famous people were related in some way to Wilmington and the events there. I had to look it up on a map to be sure exactly where it was. Woodrow Wilson grew up here as friends with some of the instigators of the coup. Michael Jordan and Lara Trump went to the same high school. Stedman Graham’s family were from a town in New Jersey mostly made up of Wilmington massacre refugees.
This is a hard book to pick a few quotes from. I highlighted 42 sections.
This one hit hard.
What happened to a Black man who stayed in North Carolina and hoped to be treated as a man? What happened to a Black man who stayed in Wilmington and had to work for the very people who had murdered his neighbors, taken his job, and stripped him of the rights the Constitution guaranteed him? Brewington’s experience suggests he would have to be tough and persevere, swallowing taunts alongside loss of station.
At the cottage, John Dillard Jr. instructed Brewington to shine his and his guest’s lace-ups. “This man, polishing your shoes, was once a Republican magistrate,” John Dillard Jr. bragged to Wheeler. “I have tried many cases before him and always addressed him, ‘May it please Your Honor.’?” He prodded Brewington. “Isn’t that so, Henry?”
There was a general reluctance to ever discuss these events in Wilmington.
Another Black man likened this reticence to a science experiment in which “you put fleas in a jar, and you put a top on it, and you can remove the top and they never jump higher than the top.” He continued, “And similarly here in Wilmington, you have a conditioning that you just don’t talk about it. And if you look at 1898, and think about it, if you look at the names on the White Declaration of Independence, you can look in the Yellow Pages, they are here.”
Jordan’s great-grandfather Dawson Jordan, a lumberman and hunt club cook, was six years old in 1898, residing in the countryside near Wilmington; he lived until 1977, likely bestowing knowledge, explicit or implicit, of the terror to Michael alongside his famous habit of sticking out his tongue while concentrating. The scholar Imani Perry has suggested that Jordan’s famous reluctance, for much of his career, to speak about race, “avoiding every action that was overtly political, might have been a strategic effort shaped by the repressiveness of Wilmington.”
In the aftermath of January 6, many Americans wanted to believe that “this is not who we are,” but in fact, white supremacist violence is a through line of our country’s history, not a flashback or a regression. White supremacists will continue to try to take what they think is theirs until the consequences of such acts outweigh the spoils.
This one had me gobsmacked. You had to willfully not understand what was going on with grandpa.
His Klan activity, Sisson recalled, rated only “a passing mention” in conversations with family members, who downplayed the group’s raison d’être of upholding white supremacy through racial violence, claiming that the Klan “had to do with fighting the influence of the carpetbaggers more than anything else.” The way he learned the story, Sisson recalled, any “white-black issue” was strictly incidental.
Two hundred and fifty years of nationhood confirm an enduring American paradox: The closer we come to perfecting the union, to realizing its foundational promise of equality, the fiercer the opposition from the part of society that prefers its democracy partial and exclusive. Pursue Reconstruction, get Jim Crow. Desegregate, be met with massive resistance. Elect a Black president, endure a white nationalist one who denies that his predecessor was born a citizen.
This book was inspired by the author moving to Wilmington as a child and the documentary Wilmington on Fire, which is available on YouTube.
