The Rigged Election and the Massacre November 10, 1898

Abstract

White supremacists filled the newspapers with propaganda, then went to the polls to intimidate elections officials with violence at the polls to rig the elections throughout eastern North Carolina in 1898. Only one Black politician kept his office, George Henry White. Still the white supremacists wanted blood: Two days after the election, on November 10, 1898, white men led by Alfred Waddell staged the only successful coup on American soil in history. They killed at least 22 people that day, burned Manly’s newspaper to the ground, and forced Black people of Wilmington to flee along the Cape Fear River, into Bladen County and beyond. It is one of the darkest days in US history, one White described as “a miserable butchery of men, women and children.”