They Stole a City

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 success: Black cultural life flourished, 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.