Wilmington, North Carolina
Site of the only successful armed coup d'état in American history. On November 10, 1898, a white supremacist mob led by former Confederate officer Alfred Moore Waddell violently overthrew the multiracial, duly elected government of Wilmington, burned the offices of the city's Black-owned newspaper The Daily Record to the ground, killed an unknown number of Black residents — estimates range into the hundreds — and forced thousands of Black families to flee the city. The state of North Carolina did not formally acknowledge the coup until 2006.
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