The Intimate Legacies of a White-Supremacist Coup

Illustration by Matt Williams Save this story Save this story Save this story Save this story Cynthia Brown first heard about the terror of 1898 as a child in the mid-nineteen-sixties. Her parents had taken her to visit her great-grandmother Athalia Howe Whitfield (Grandma Thalia), a native of Wilmington, North Carolina, who by then was living in Pennsylvania. Brown remembered going into the bedroom where Grandma Thalia lay dying. She began speaking to Brown in an agitated, almost hallucinatory tone. “Never let it happen again,” Grandma Thalia said. Brown wasn’t sure what her great-grandmother meant. As her parents hustled her out of the room, Grandma Thalia caught her wrist and squeezed it: “You have to know,” she whispered. “If it ever happens—run.”

When Brown was older, she learned that Grandma Thalia was a teen-ager when it happened, living with her parents and sisters in the Wilmington neighborhood of Brooklyn, just a few wide, quiet blocks from the house where Brown spent part of her childhood. As Brown later wrote, memories of the violence that day tended to be “quietly kept and held by family historians.” Her father had imparted bits of knowledge over the years, describing how white men had rampaged through town, killing Black people and seizing the city government. But, in general, the subject elicited private reticence and public omertà. As a high-schooler, Brown had gone to the county library in search of more information. At the time, material regarding 1898 was literally kept under lock and key. White librarians meted out access sparingly, denying anyone they thought might “make a stink.” When Brown asked to see the cache of papers, the librarian grilled her about her motives. “What do you need it for?” she asked. Brown left empty-handed.

Another long-term consequence of the coup, a lack of professional opportunity for Black people in Wilmington, sent Brown packing after high school. A stylish dresser, with a honeysuckle voice and a smattering of freckles, she spent almost fifteen years in Chicago in high-flying jobs with the University of Illinois system and Illinois Bell. But she longed for “that cozy feeling” she got in Wilmington, where she could trace her line back seven generations, where her family worshipped in churches that their forebears, who founded a local construction dynasty, had raised with a protractor and parallel rule; where her grandmother had created a garden and taught her that a can of beer poured into strategically placed saucers would stop the slugs from destroying the azaleas. The front porch of Brown’s childhood home had been framed by a pair of live oaks, a reminder of the importance of perseverance and deep roots.