Library Journal
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Zucchino (Thunder Run) explains a tragic story of denied civil rights. Just two years after the landmark Supreme Court case Plessy vs. Ferguson (1896), in which African Americans were considered to be separate but equal, emboldened white supremacists staged a governmental coup in Wilmington, NC in 1898, setting back civil rights for decades to come. Tactics included ballot stuffing and media manipulation. Zucchino uses personal diaries and testimonies from those present to engage readers. He also aims to illustrate the context of the coup and its repercussions on the following century of disenfranchisement; his account is extremely compelling and convincing. VERDICT Even astute readers of history and civil rights will be alarmed by this story, which is why it should be read. For fans of American history, politics, and civil rights. [See Prepub Alert, 8/5/19.]—Keith Klang, Port Washington P.L., NY

Library Journal
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

In the late 1890s, Wilmington, NC, was a successful mixed-race community with a strong African American middle class that actively participated in a government comprising Republicans and Populists. Then white supremacist Democrats used a black newspaper editorial to foment unrest aimed at overthrowing Wilmington's elected officials, eventually dispatching 2,000 armed night riders to terrorize the populace. At least 60 black men were killed and their families driven into the swamps in the infamous Wilmington Insurrection of 1898. Pulitzer Prize winner Zucchino resurrects a little-known incident wrongly called a race riot; it was in fact the violent subversion of government.

Choice
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.

The November 10, 1898, race riot in Wilmington, North Carolina, underscored the degree to which white North Carolinians were determined to regain hegemony over African Americans at the fin de siècle in what historians term the white supremacy campaign of that year. In August, Alexander Manly, the African American editor of Wilmington’s Daily Record, used what whites considered sexually inflammatory language to denounce the lynching of black men for allegedly raping white women. Outraged white Democrats, who had gained political control of the state legislature just days earlier, descended on Wilmington, a Republican bastion thanks to its large black voting population, to settle scores. Hundreds of white vigilantes ransacked and burned Manly’s office and then roamed Wilmington’s streets, terrorizing and murdering an unknown number of black people. Many fled the city. Alfred M. Waddell, the mob’s ringleader, took control of Wilmington’s municipal government, ushering in decades of Jim Crow rule that enveloped the state. Zucchino, a journalist, has written the most lucid, fast-paced, and accurate history of the “crushing dislocation and racism stoked by the events of 1898.” His book is an essential reminder of the long and bloody history of racial control and violence that has stained the fabric of American history. Summing Up: Essential. All levels. --John David Smith, University of North Carolina at Charlotte

Publishers Weekly
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Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Zucchino (Thunder Run) delivers a searing chronicle of the November 1898 white supremacist uprising in Wilmington, N.C., that overthrew the municipal government. At the time, Zucchino notes, Wilmington’s “thriving population of black professionals” made it, according to one contemporary source, “the freest town for a negro in the country.” Determined to end “Negro rule,” a cabal of white politicians and newspapermen launched a statewide campaign of voter suppression, intimidation, and ballot stuffing that flipped control of North Carolina’s state legislature from a Republican-Populist alliance to Democrats in the 1898 elections. The next day, the white supremacist leader Col. Alfred Waddell read a “White Declaration of Independence” in the Wilmington courthouse; among its seven resolutions was a demand for black newspaper owner Alexander Manly to be banished from the city for publishing an editorial that, Zucchino writes, “upended the core white conviction that any sex act between a black man and a white woman could only be rape.” When Waddell falsely claimed that Wilmington’s black leaders didn’t deliver their written response to the demands by 7:30 the next morning, as was required, nearly 2,000 armed white men burned down Manly’s newspaper offices, killed an estimated 60 African-Americans, and installed Waddell as mayor. Drawing on a wealth of primary sources, Zucchino paints a disturbing portrait of the massacre and how it was covered up by being described as a “race riot” sparked by African-Americans. This masterful account reveals a shameful chapter in American history. Agent: Philippa Brophy, Sterling Lord Literistic. (Jan.)