On November 10, 1898, just after Election Day, white supremacists overthrew the city government of Wilmington, North Carolina, forcing the resignation of the mayor, the aldermen, and the chief of police. A mob of white people burned down the office of an African-American newspaper and killed an unknown number of black townspeople. An eyewitness believed that more than a hundred died, and a state guardsman recalled, “I nearly stepped on negroes laying in the street dead.” In “Wilmington’s Lie” (Atlantic Monthly), a judicious and riveting new history of the coup, David Zucchino, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting from apartheid-era South Africa, estimates the number of deaths at more than sixty. The conspirators went on to expel prominent blacks from the city—by means of threats in some cases, and under armed guard in others—and also white politicians unsympathetic to the cause. The plan was hatched in secret, but the conspirators were remarkably open about the coup once it began. A reporter from out of town marvelled, “What they did was done in broad daylight.”

No conspirator was ever prosecuted, and white supremacists went on to alter state law so as to disenfranchise black people for more than two generations. There were more than a hundred and twenty-five thousand registered black voters in North Carolina in 1896, but only six thousand or so were still on the books by 1902. African-Americans fled Wilmington in large numbers, decimating what had been a large, thriving community. Before the coup, the city was majority black—at one point, it had the highest proportion of African-American residents of any large city in the South—and had several racially integrated neighborhoods. A visitor from Raleigh remembered black homes as having pianos, lace curtains, and servants. By the time of the 1900 census, a majority of its citizens were white.

In Plato’s Republic, Socrates proposes the concept of the “noble lie”—a fable that, though untrue, could inspire citizens to virtue, and “make them care more for the city and each other.” But what about the reverse—something all too true that might embolden bad actors to harm the state and their fellow-citizens? In Wilmington, the victory of racial prejudice over democratic principle and the rule of law was unnervingly complete. Within the lifetimes of those who experienced the coup, the arc of history that passed through Wilmington in 1898 didn’t bend toward anything close to justice.

“Up to but a few years ago, the best feeling among the races prevailed,” the black writer David Bryant Fulton wrote, in “Hanover; Or the Persecution of the Lowly,” his 1900 novel about the coup. Politically, however, tensions were rising, as the dominance that Democrats had enjoyed for decades waned. Since Reconstruction, the Party had won elections by harping on its history of thwarting federal attempts to grant rights to blacks, but, by the eighteen-nineties, white voters had other grievances on their minds. Farmers felt extorted by railroad companies and by creditors, and Democrats, cozy with corporate interests, opposed any government regulation of business. Voters defected to a new party, the Populists, which allied itself with the Republicans—at the time, still the party of Lincoln and committed to equal rights for blacks—to form the so-called Fusion ticket. In 1894, Fusionists swept state and county elections, and, two years later, North Carolina elected its first Republican governor since the end of Reconstruction.

Once in office, Fusionists restored political power to African-Americans by making elections more fair—decentralizing control over them and reducing obstacles to voter registration. In 1896, a black Republican, George Henry White, beat a Democratic incumbent to become the only African-American congressman at the time, and voters also sent black politicians to the State Assembly and the State Senate. The next year, Wilmington installed several black aldermen and a Republican mayor, and pretty soon the city had a black jailer, coroner, superintendent of streets, and cattle weigher; the county treasurer and a federal customs collector were also black. To forestall white resentment, Wilmington’s new police chief took the precaution of instructing the ten city police officers who were black never to arrest a white man. The proportion of officeholders who were black, compared with the proportion of Wilmington citizens who were, was tiny. Still, “Negro domination” became a powerful talking point for Democrats, because even progressive white politicians were not ready to make the case that it was desirable to have black people in office. The best defense that the Republican governor, Daniel Russell, was willing to offer was that, out of the more than eight hundred people he had appointed to office, only eight were black.

When the Democrats launched their 1898 campaign season, at the Party’s state convention, in May, they made so-called Negro domination “the burden of their song,” as Helen G. Edmonds put it in a pioneering history of black political participation in North Carolina and the backlash against it. She meant it metaphorically, but there really was a song. The lyrics, which Zucchino reprints, call on “Proud Caucasians” to “Rise and drive this Black despoiler from your state.” The state chairman of the Democratic Party tapped the editor of the Raleigh News & Observer, Josephus Daniels, to head an anti-black propaganda campaign. Daniels’s paper ran provocative headlines (“No Rape Committed; But a Lady Badly Frightened by a Worthless Negro”) and wrote luridly about a white woman who had died trying to abort the child of her black lover. In an editorial cartoon, a black vampire, its wings emblazoned with the words “Negro Rule,” extended claws toward fleeing whites.

“The Democrats would believe almost any piece of rascality,” Daniels later recalled, in a memoir. “We were never very careful about winnowing out the stories.” Newspapers across the state joined in, and a national magazine reported that a black man had fired into a trolley car and that black cooks were hinting they might poison their white employers. Sometimes a news item about a small misunderstanding between whites and blacks would hopscotch from paper to paper across the state, further exaggerated in each retelling, until it was reprinted in the paper where it started, unrecognized, as if it were a different story.

The Democrats issued a handbook identifying America as “a white man’s country” and organized more than eight hundred White Government Union clubs, whose constitution called for “the SUPREMACY OF THE WHITE RACE.” Come November, the clubs were to provide manpower for challenging black-voter registrations. When Wilmington’s Democratic Party chair, George Rountree, gave a speech to one of the clubs, even he was taken aback by the members’ racist zeal. “They were already willing to kill all of the office holders and all the negroes,” he recalled.

Statewide, Democrats were looking forward to a landslide in November, but in Wilmington the next municipal election wasn’t until the following year, and the city’s whites were impatient to regain power. So they planned a coup. “For a period of six to twelve months prior to November 10, 1898, the white citizens of Wilmington prepared quietly but effectively,” a Democratic newspaperman there later wrote. Preparations were directed by two networks of élite whites, the Secret Nine and Group Six. The groups are known to history only because, in the nineteen-thirties, Harry Hayden, an amateur historian with white-supremacist sympathies, interviewed surviving participants and recorded their side of the story in a self-published pamphlet. According to Hayden, the Secret Nine set up a system of nightly patrols run by volunteers. Each block was assigned a lieutenant, each of the city’s five wards was assigned a captain, and atop the chain of command stood a former Confederate colonel who had once led Wilmington’s branch of the Ku Klux Klan. “The city might have been preparing for a siege instead of an election,” a visiting reporter wrote, much impressed.