Four Histories of Race in America
On November 10, 1898, armed white supremacists took over the city of Wilmington, North Carolina, killing an unknown number of Black townspeople and ousting the multiracial, democratically elected municipal government—an act that is thought to be the only successful coup on American soil. The massacre devastated Wilmington’s flourishing Black middle class and sent a message of impunity to white vigilantes nationwide. Lauren Collins, a staff writer who grew up in Wilmington, writes about that day and its aftermath in her new book, “They Stole a City” (excerpted in The New Yorker), a multigenerational history that follows four families with members who were present at the massacre. I recently asked Collins which books she would recommend, from among those that she drew on to write hers. Her answers are below.
“The Warmth of Other Suns,” by Isabel Wilkerson I read Wilkerson’s game-changing chronicle of the Great Migration—which follows three Black Southerners on their journeys to Chicago, Harlem, and Los Angeles—over and over again while I was working on “They Stole a City.” I had to know how she did it. Then I found an interview with Wilkerson in which she compared her book’s overlapping structure to Robert Altman’s kaleidoscopic films. Like him, she wove the individual stories of each protagonist together. I did the same for the Wilmington families—two white families who perpetrated the violence of 1898, two Black families who came through it—whom I write about in my book.
“How the Word Is Passed,” by Clint Smith Smith’s history, a brilliant study of the way that the legacy of slavery is expressed through its physical sites, reminded me to pay attention to the places that shaped the Wilmington coup and massacre. I examine, for example, the Bellamy Mansion, a ten-thousand-square-foot Greek Revival and Italianate residence finished in 1861 by the socially ambitious, politically extremist John Dillard Bellamy. From its origins as a “secesh house”—a house for slavery and by slavery, its fourteen Corinthian columns shouting Southern nationalism—to its later incarnations as a mini-mall and a museum, the mansion articulates the ideals and fortunes of the family as clearly as any document. In my book, I write about how, in the nineteen-thirties, an octogenarian Ellen Bellamy—a literal Confederate in an attic, navigating a few upper-floor rooms in a high-backed wicker wheelchair—used it as a sort of Pompeii of the Lost Cause.
“Built from the Fire,” by Victor Luckerson Luckerson’s epic exploration of Tulsa’s Greenwood neighborhood—encompassing but not limited to the 1921 massacre in which white supremacists murdered hundreds of Black people and incinerated America’s “Black Wall Street”—is important for many reasons, but I’m particularly grateful for its sweeping perspective. The book examines the long lead-up to the violence, continuing all the way through to the event’s reverberations in the present, as a few living survivors and many descendants battle for the reparations they so clearly are due. I took a similar longitudinal, multigenerational approach in “They Stole a City,” expanding the timeline from 1898 into the past and the future, and focussing on families rather than on individual players. November 10, 1898, I argue, is a centuries-long day that isn’t over yet.
