N.C. marker now refers to ‘coup’

Previous version called 1898 event ‘race riot’

RALEIGH, N.C. — The state of North Carolina is moving away from using the phrase “race riot” to describe the violent overthrow of the Wilmington government in 1898 and is instead using the word “coup” on the highway historical marker that will commemorate it.

The heading on the marker reads “Wilmington Coup,” but the originally approved text referred to a “race riot,” which eventually was deleted.

“You don’t call it that anymore because the African Americans weren’t rioting,” said Ansley Herring Wegner, administrator of the North Carolina Highway Historical Marker Program, said Thursday. “They were being massacred.”

In 1898, white Democrats violently overthrew the fusion government of legitimately elected blacks and white Republicans in Wilmington. The event is viewed as a flashpoint for the Jim Crow era and the only successful coup d’etat in American history.

The marker, which was dedicated at a ceremony Friday, stands outside the Wilmington Light Infantry building, where the mob of white supremacists gathered before they marched to The Daily Record, the African American newspaper, and burned it to the ground. Alfred

Moore Waddell, who led the march, took over as mayor.

The ceremony included a moment of silence for those killed in the coup, the StarNews of Wilmington reported. The names of the 10 people who were killed were read aloud, each accompanied by the chiming of bells.

The highway marker for the editor of the paper, Alex Manly, includes the phrase “race riot,” but it was dedicated 25 years ago.

The original text for the 1898 marker, approved in December 2017, included Waddell’s name and made other references that the public found offensive, Wegner said. The committee of historians that approves the language for markers went back to work and approved new text in the spring of 2018, Wegner said.

One of the people unhappy with the original text was Deborah Dicks Maxwell, president of the New Hanover County branch of the NAACP. She was especially upset that the original language said the “violence left up to 60 blacks dead” because it’s unclear how many black people died.

“We’ll never know how many people died,” she said. “Black lives didn’t matter at that time in terms of reporting or documentation.”

Maxwell hopes the marker will help “the world to understand that it wasn’t a riot,” she said.

Matt Born The Associated Press The new North Carolina highway historical marker about the 1898 “Wilmington Coup” is unveiled during a dedication ceremony Friday in Wilmington, N.C.