The Wilmington massacre occurred on November 10, 1898, in Wilmington, North Carolina, as a result of white supremacist conspiracy to overthrow the legitimately elected Fusionist biracial government that was in power in the city. White Southern Democrats, opposed to the existing political structure, organized and led the violent action to remove the duly elected officials from office.
The event unfolded as a municipal-level coup d'état carried out by white supremacists who mobilized a mob of 2,000 white men. These conspirators expelled opposition black and white political leaders from the city and systematically destroyed the property and businesses of black citizens that had been built up since the American Civil War. Notably, they destroyed the only black newspaper in the city, eliminating an important voice in the community.
The Wilmington coup is considered a turning point in post-Reconstruction North Carolina politics and represented a violent reversal of the political gains made by African Americans and their white allies during Reconstruction. The immediate consequence was the violent overthrow of legitimate government authority. Many leaders of the coup remained important figures in North Carolina politics, some into the 1920s, indicating the lasting political dominance they achieved through this violent action. The massacre marked part of an era of white supremacist reassertion across the post-Reconstruction South.
The Indian Wars encompass more than three centuries of armed conflict between the United States government, American settlers, and Indigenous nations — from the Powhatan Wars of the 1620s through the final Plains campaigns of the late 19th century. The eastern conflicts — King Philip's War (1675–1676), the Tuscarora War (1711–1715), and the Creek and Seminole Wars — largely ended organized Indigenous resistance east of the Mississippi by the 1840s. On the Great Plains, the Sioux Wars (1854–1890), Red River War (1874–1875), and Nez Perce War (1877) followed the displacement wrought by the transcontinental railroad and the near-extinction of the American bison — an estimated 30 to 60 million animals reduced to fewer than 1,000 by 1890. The Ghost Dance religious movement and the massacre at Wounded Knee (December 29, 1890), in which US cavalry killed approximately 250 Lakota men, women, and children, marked the effective end of armed resistance. The Dawes Act (1887) allotted reservation land to individual families, opening millions of acres to white settlement and reducing Indigenous landholdings by about two-thirds over the following decades.
At least 14 Black people killed; estimates of the actual toll range from 60 to more than 300
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