African American
Related: About this forumA Buried Coup dtat in the United States
On November 10, 1898, a coup détat took place on United States soil. It was perpetrated by a gang of white-supremacist Democrats in Wilmington, North Carolina, who were intent on reclaiming power from the recently elected, biracial Republican government, even if, as one of the leaders vowed, we have to choke the Cape Fear River with carcasses. They had a Colt machine gun capable of firing four hundred and twenty .23-calibre bullets a minute. They had the local élite and the press on their side. By the end of the day, they had killed somewhere between fourteen and sixty black men and banished twenty more, meanwhile forcing the mayor, the police chief, and the members of the board of aldermen to resign.
The new government remained in control, of both the town and the story. Subsequent generations of white residents knew about the events of 1898 as a revolution or a race riot, if they knew about them at all. In the black community, the episode remained a suppressed trauma. It was just, like, something we talked about on the porch, like a folk thing, but it wasnt really in the mainstream, Christopher Everett, the director of Wilmington on Fire, a new documentary, said not long ago. Before Rosewood, before Tulsa, press materials for the film note, there was Wilmingtona massacre kept secret for over one hundred years.
Everett, who is thirty-three, was standing on Market Street in Wilmington, in front of a Greek Revival building that had served as an arsenal for the white conspirators. He had driven down from Laurinburg, North Carolina, where he was raised by his grandparents, a wire-plant worker and a nurse. In 2010, he was living in Atlanta, working in graphic design, when he saw a reference to the coup online. He got interested, and downloaded a report that the State of North Carolina had published several years earlier, to try, belatedly, to reckon with the legacy of the incident. That year, he was laid off. He moved back in with his grandparents, and put his unemployment money toward making the film.
I was, like, a hundred pounds lighter then, Everett said. I had done some acting and modellinghis first gig was a Japanese clothing commercial, starring Kate Mossso I had a network. After three years, he ran out of money. An N.B.A. player who prefers to remain anonymous, having seen a clip that Everett posted on Facebook, gave him the fifteen thousand dollars he needed to finish. (The film will be available, via Amazon, on November 10th.) Squinting in the sun, Everett said, Its not just about history. A lot of the disparities that African-Americans are going through right now are the result of things like the Wilmington massacre. This was meticulously planned, but for years it was branded as something that just spontaneously happened.
He faced the armory, where on the morning of November 10th a mob of several hundred white men had gathered with the intention of targeting the citys considerable black middle class. Then they walked to Manlys spot, he said. (Alexander Manly, the acknowledged descendant of a former North Carolina governor and a slave, was the proprietor of the Daily Record, in 1898 the citys only black-owned newspaper.) They went to burn down that joint, and, after that, they just dispersed to the Brooklyn neighborhood and started going wild.
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/09/19/a-buried-coup-detat-in-the-united-states?mbid=social_twitter
brer cat
(26,479 posts)needs to see the light of day....all of it, spread out in gory detail. Get it off of Black people's porches and into the faces of the people who benefited from our ancestors brutality. Denial of white privilege goes hand in glove with ignorance of our history as does waving a rebel flag and waxing poetical about a glorious "heritage" that was anything but.
I read Philip Gerard's fictional but historically accurate book Cape Fear Rising several years ago. Until then, I had spent my 70 years totally unaware of that massacre. I will look for this film next fall.