Wilmington's Lie: The Murderous Coup of 1898 and the Rise of White Supremacy

Wilmington’s Lie focuses on the role of the media in spreading falsehoods or sensational stories to generate public support for the Wilmington coup. Zucchino quotes extensively from news stories from 1898 to demonstrate how newspapers, and in particular Democratic operative Josephus Daniels’s Raleigh News and Observer, contributed to whipping up racism against Black politicians, the Black community, and the white Fusionist politicians who supported them. The highly partisan news environment, as well as the tendency for white Northern reporters to interview white sources rather than Black ones, not only enabled the Wilmington massacre but provided cover for white perpetrators afterward.

The quotes Zucchino provides from contemporaneous news sources lay bare the racist ideology that pervaded in the United States at the time. For example, the Wilmington Journal wrote an editorial that year that stated, “The true soldiers, whether they wore the gray or the blue [fought for the Confederacy or the Union], are now united in their opposition—call it conspiracy and resistance if you will—to negro government and NEGRO EQUALITY” (10). The white supremacist leaders used the newspapers to spread the message that Black political power was dangerous and had to be undermined.

This is especially true of Josephus Daniels’s newspapers.