We Have Taken A City: The Wilmington Racial Massacre and Coup of 1898
n November of 1898, North Carolina’s largest city exploded in violence that left local blacks disenfranchised, evicted, and in some cases dead. The riots in Wilmington marked the beginnings of Jim Crow in the South, and resulted in the only successful overthrow of a duly-elected government in the history of the United States. The events of those dark days remained shrouded in hearsay and innacuracies for more than a century. While in 2006 the state of North Carolina issued its “official” report on the riots, H. Leon Prather, Sr. wrote the first landmark account of what happened in Wilmington more than a decade before. Now back in print for the first time since 1998, We Have Taken A City remains one of the best sources for the real story of an event that changed not just the history of a city, but the history of the entire South for decades afterward.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR..
H. Leon Prather, Sr. (deceased) was a professor at Tennessee State University in Nashville, TN. In addition to We Have Taken A City, Prather also authored Resurgent Politics and Progressivism in the New South: North Carolina, 1890-1913. Prather was a recipient of the Distinguished Scholar Award from the American Historical Association.