They Stole a City: Wilmington's White Supremacist Coup and the Families Who Live with Its Legacy
They Stole a City: Wilmington's White Supremacist Coup and the Families Who Live with Its Legacy
They Stole a City: Wilmington's White Supremacist Coup and the Families Who Live with Its Legacy
Description
Description
In this ambitious and groundbreaking history, Lauren Collins weaves together stories of four Wilmington, North Carolina, 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 10, 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 a mob 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, multiracial 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 and their white allies out of town. Folklore among 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 many of the details have been largely--and deliberately--forgotten. In collaboration with living descendants of Black and white families, Collins seeks to create a more complete 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.
About the Author
About the Author
Lauren Collins was born in Wilmington, North Carolina, in 1980. She is a staff writer at The New Yorker and the author of When in French: Love in a Second Language, which The New York Times named one of its 100 Notable Books of 2016. She lives in Paris with her family.
Critical Reviews
Critical Reviews
"A scathing history of an infamous act of racial violence . . . Collins' narrative takes [the 1898 coup and massacre], with 'dozens and perhaps hundreds of Black citizens' killed, and extends it to a larger legacy of racial oppression . . . An urgent work of reportage and historical research that lays bare structural racism past and present." --Kirkus (starred review) "With moral clarity and narrative precision, Lauren Collins has crafted a searing account of the 1898 Wilmington massacre that is as analytically rigorous as it is emotionally resonant. By centering the interwoven lives of four families, They Stole a City exposes the calculated architecture of white supremacist violence while illuminating the enduring strategies of Black resistance, survival, and community-making. Collins refuses the comfort of historical distance, instead insisting on the intimate and structural continuities between past and present. The result is a work that not only deepens our understanding of a singular American atrocity, but also sharpens our recognition of the forces that continue to threaten democratic life. This is essential reading for anyone committed to reckoning honestly with history--and to confronting its living legacies." --LeRhonda S. Manigault-Bryant, author of Talking to the Dead: Religion, Music, and Lived Memory among Gullah/Geechee People. "With startling directness and vivid prose based on original and deep research, journalist Lauren Collins retells the story of Wilmington, North Carolina's darkest period. This sweeping saga featuring four families across generations lays bare a long, horrid history of racial oppression and political violence, revealing not only how anti-democratic, white supremacist forces organized and leveraged brutality, but also how targeted individuals defended their humanity and communities. They Stole a City is an immersive yet sensitive account that reminds Americans we need not look to twentieth-century Europe for examples of electoral corruption and autocratic consolidation reinforced by racist ideology, roving thugs, economic elites, and immoral politicians. This is an urgent, unsettling history that we need now." --Tiya Miles, author of All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley's Sack, a Black Family Keepsake "Collins eloquently renders spellbinding tales of the 1898 Wilmington racial massacre and the families whose lives it changed forever. Her meticulous research juxtaposes its bloody history with profound interpretations of the legacies that shaped such diverse figures as Michael Jordan and Lara Trump. They Stole a City proves that past is always present. An indispensable read for all of us in these times." --Glenda Gilmore, Peter V. and C. Vann Woodward Professor of History Emerita at Yale University "Lauren Collins has written a deeply reported history and released it into this moment when history is dying, erased by lies and conspiracy, so that when reading I couldn't tell if this is a story of one city's lynch mob in 1898 or an entire nation's lynch mob in 2026. They Stole A City is at its core an investigation into one American mob, which makes it an investigation of all American mobs. This story happened 128 years ago. This story is happening now." --Wright Thompson, senior writer for ESPN and the New York Times bestselling author of The Barn, Pappyland, and The Cost of These Dreams "The brilliance of They Stole a City is not just that Lauren Collins grounds her sweeping, incendiary history of an infamous historical episode in the intimate lived experiences of four North Carolina families, but that she captures the 'prolific afterlife' of the massacre and coup in Wilmington, demonstrating in vivid, poignant, often painful detail the extent to which the past continues to shape and echo in our present day. An extraordinary book." --Patrick Radden Keefe, New York Times bestselling author of five books, including Empire of Pain "They Stole a City is a brilliant rendering of a history buried in a shallow grave. Lauren Collins has not only measured the weight of a specific and tragic chapter of our past, she has charted the Wilmington Massacre's bearing upon the present. The origins of our current crisis become more legible in these pages - as do the forces that would just as soon steal a nation." --Jelani Cobb, Dean of Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism, winner of the Peabody Award in 2020 and finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and author of Three or More Is a Riot "Lauren Collins's 1898 Wilmington race-riot masterpiece ends with Donald Trump's second coming, thus bookending Reconstruction's democratic promise with our hard-fought diversity, equity, and inclusion dangerously mocked. They Stole a City is required reading." --David Levering Lewis, two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize for W.E.B. Du Bois: A Biography 1868-1963
Publishing Information
Publishing Information
Publisher:
Penguin Press
Pub date:
2026-07-14
Length:
528 pages
The Allstora Membership
Membership Perks:
- Save 30% on all online store purchases
- Exclusive access to author's content
- You pay less, but authors still earn double
Membership Terms:
First Month:
$0.00
Monthly price:
$5.00
- To access membership discount simply log in and add to cart, discount applied automatically.
- One month free trial, cancel anytime. Membership renews on the 15th of each month.