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january 6 insurrection
Why the History of the Wilmington Coup Can Help Make Sense of Our American Present
If people knew about the Wilmington Coup, they would understand that white supremacist violence has long been a feature—not a glitch—of the American political system.
Apr 18, 2025
In the wake of the 2020 uprising for racial justice, many Americans began learning the history of racial violence left out of their textbooks, as widespread protests of the murder of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and so many others demanded a reckoning with the country’s legacy of white supremacy. Black communities were finally able to force a discussion into the mainstream media about white supremacist violence and historical events like the Tulsa Massacre of 1921, in which a white mob attacked the prosperous Black community of Greenwood (known as Black Wall Street), burning homes and businesses, killing hundreds, and displacing thousands.
Yet, even as some long-buried histories came to light, others—such as the 1898 Wilmington Coup, when white supremacists violently overthrew a democratically elected, Reconstruction-era multiracial government in North Carolina—remain largely unknown. For a brief period, because of the unprecedented numbers of people marching in the streets, the nation began to confront its past with honesty. However, when the protests receded, so did the media’s focus on Black history. Many critical chapters in the struggle for racial justice remain buried beneath layers of denial and deliberate erasure.
That willful denial was on display in the narrative that emerged surrounding the events of January 6, 2021, when a mob violently stormed the U.S. Capitol building, waving Confederate flags, wearing clothing with fascist slogans like “Camp Auschwitz,” and carrying nooses and other symbols of racial violence. In the attack’s aftermath, many politicians condemned the violence and sought to reassure the nation. Then-President-elect Joe Biden stated, “The scenes of chaos at the Capitol do not reflect a true America, do not represent who we are.” Even Republican Rep. Mike Waltz of Florida, a staunch supporter of President Donald Trump, condemned the violence, writing, “This is not who we are as a people or as a country. This is wrong and condemnable.”
When we understand Wilmington, we see that January 6 was not an aberration; it was a continuation of a historical pattern where white supremacy reacts violently to challenges against its dominance.
But these statements ignore the long history of white supremacist assaults on democracy in the United States—a history so deeply embedded that during Reconstruction, amid mass Black political organizing and grassroots pressure, Congress was forced to act. In 1871, Congress passed the Klan Enforcement Act to give the federal government the power to protect constitutional rights from groups like the Ku Klux Klan that used “force, intimidation, or threat” to undermine Black political participation and overthrow democratic institutions. In fact, parts of this very law were cited in lawsuits and criminal prosecutions following the January 6 insurrection. If, as many claimed, “this is not who we are,” then why was a law to stop this kind of violence passed over 150 years ago?
Among the most significant examples of white supremacist political violence in the United States is the 1898 Wilmington Coup. It stands as one of the worst racist attacks in U.S. history, yet is absent from the lessons most students learn in school. The fact that the federal government didn’t invoke the Klan Act to prosecute the perpetrators of the Wilmington Coup demonstrates their complicity in using violence to maintain systemic racism. If people knew the history of the Wilmington Coup, they would understand that white supremacist violence has long been a feature—not a glitch—of the American political system.
Wilmington’s Democracy
In the late 19th century, Wilmington was a thriving majority-Black city where Black men held office, ran businesses, and participated in civic life. This progress was not an anomaly—it reflected the important gains that Black people fought for and won during Reconstruction. In the years following the Civil War, Black communities helped build a new vision for democracy in the South. They established public schools; elected Black representatives to local, state, and federal office; advocated for civil rights; and created thriving economic institutions such as mutual aid societies, churches, and newspapers. Wilmington’s multiracial government and Black political power were forged in this Reconstruction-era struggle.
But this progress was intolerable to those in the Democratic Party, which positioned itself as the party of white dominance in the South. In the years leading up to 1898, a political coalition known as “fusion” emerged, threatening the Democratic Party’s grip on power. As historian LeRae Umfleet explains, “Fusion took disaffected Democrats, which were the Populist Party, and Republican voters, who were the voters of Abraham Lincoln’s party—Black men and progressive white men—and it fused the voting power of those two blocks of voters.” This coalition successfully elected a Republican governor in 1896, marking a dramatic shift in political power that white Democrats sought to reverse at all costs.
Central to their plan was the use of propaganda. As Yoruba Richen, filmmaker of a documentary on the Wilmington Coup, points out, “Josephus Daniels, the publisher of Raleigh’s News and Observer, was one of the architects of the coup. He had the very smart idea—since so many white people were also illiterate—to use cartoons to gin up this myth, this racist trope of the Black man raping white women and taking over government.”
At the same time, Alex Manly, editor of Wilmington’s Daily Record, was running one of the country’s only Black-owned daily newspapers. The Daily Record was a vital resource for Wilmington’s Black community, reporting on their achievements and providing a platform for challenging the era’s pervasive racism. Manly became a target of white supremacists after responding to a racist speech by Rebecca Felton, the wife of a Georgia senator, who claimed that Black men were raping white women and called for lynchings to stop this so-called epidemic.
As Richen explains, “Manly wrote a response saying this is basically BS. He pointed out that, as a man of mixed race himself, unions between Black men and white women often occurred freely because white women were attracted to Black men. He also emphasized that Black women had historically been the ones raped, and no one said anything about that.” This editorial enraged white supremacists and was used by Josephus Daniels and others to justify the coup.
On November 10, 1898, when the violence began, the mob first targeted the Daily Record. White men and boys burned the building to the ground, ensuring the destruction of a powerful voice for Wilmington’s Black community. Manly and his brother narrowly escaped, using their light skin to pass as white. Richen describes the chilling aftermath: “One of the few pictures that we have from the coup is of the Record being burned, with white men and boys surrounding it. It’s very reminiscent of the lynching photos we saw at the time and thereafter.”
The attack on the Daily Record was not only an act of physical violence, but also a deliberate effort to silence Black voices and destroy attempts at multiracial democracy.
The Erasure of the Wilmington Coup
The erasure of the Wilmington Coup from U.S. history textbooks was the result of a deliberate campaign to suppress the truth. White supremacist organizations like the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) played a central role in shaping the way history was taught in schools. UDC President Mrs. James A. Rounsaville, at their annual convening in 1909, made their goals plain: “It has ever been the cherished purpose of the Daughters of the Confederacy to secure greater educational opportunities for Confederate children, and by thorough training of their powers of mind, heart, and hand, render it possible for these representatives of our Southern race to retain for that race its supremacy in its own land.” As the PBS article “How to Cover up a Coup” explains, “For millions of students passing through North Carolina’s public schools, learning from textbooks that never mentioned the deadly 1898 coup d’etat in their state, it was as though that event never happened.”
Dr. Crystal Sanders, now a history professor at Emory University, reflected on this erasure: “I took several courses on North Carolina history throughout my middle school and high school career, and I never recall hearing about the Wilmington Insurrection.” This erasure continues today. I recently reviewed the History Alive! textbook, which makes no mention of the Wilmington Coup—deadening students’ understanding of Reconstruction and the white supremacist backlash that followed.
This lack of education is not an isolated issue. As the Zinn Education Project’s report Erasing the Black Freedom Struggle: How State Standards Fail to Teach the Truth About Reconstruction shows, “[I]n more than a dozen states, the Dunning School of false and distorted framing still influences standards and curricula.” The report goes on to explain, “Most state standards focus on government bodies and other elites as primary actors of Reconstruction, rather than the achievements and perspectives of ordinary Black people, whose unprecedented grassroots work in governing, education, labor, health, and more lies at the heart of the era. Most standards also fail to note white supremacy’s role in defeating Reconstruction or connections between that historic period and today.”
Why We Must Remember Wilmington
The Wilmington Coup reveals that white supremacist attacks on democracy are deeply embedded in U.S. history. Erasing this history allows the myth of American exceptionalism to persist, leaving us ill-equipped to recognize—and confront—the recurrence of such violence. When we understand Wilmington, we see that January 6 was not an aberration; it was a continuation of a historical pattern where white supremacy reacts violently to challenges against its dominance.
Learning these truths empowers us to create change. We can choose to struggle for a true multiracial democracy, one where history is taught honestly. When we teach students the truth, we equip them to dismantle the systems of injustice that have persisted for generations—and to build a future where democracy is not just an ideal, but a reality.
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When Fascism Comes to America
The list of common characteristics in the study of 20th-century fascist dictators and their regimes includes 14 categories in all, and Trump and his MAGA disciples have already exhibited characteristics in most of these categories.
Apr 03, 2025
There's a relatively obscure quotation, sometimes attributed to the 20th-century American author Sinclair Lewis, that reads, "When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross."
Although no one’s actually sure that Sinclair Lewis ever wrote or said this, his 1935 novel, It Can't Happen Here, centers around a flag-hugging, Bible-thumping politician named Berzelius (”Buzz”) Windrip. Despite having no particular leadership skills other than the ability to mesmerize large audiences by appealing to their baser instincts (and to bully those people who aren’t so easily mesmerized), Windrip is elected President of the United States. Shortly after Windrip takes office, through a flurry of executive orders, appointments of unqualified cronies to key governmental positions, and then a declaration of martial law, Windrip quickly makes the transition from a democratically elected president to a brutal, fascist dictator. The novel’s title, It Can’t Happen Here, refers to the mindset of key characters in the novel who fail to recognize Windrip’s fascist agenda before it’s too late.
The question now is whether the people of the United States have the necessary critical thinking skills, moral compass, and political courage to reverse the rise of fascism in our country before further harm is done.
Written almost a century ago during the rise of fascism in Europe prior to World War II, It Can’t Happen Here is disturbingly prescient today. Buzz Windrip’s personal traits, his rhetoric, and the path through which he initially becomes the democratically elected U.S. president, and soon afterward, the country’s first full-fledged fascist dictator, bear an uncanny resemblance to the personality traits and rhetoric of Donald Trump and the path through which he has come thus far to be the 47th President of the United States, and through which he appears to be on course to become our country’s first full-fledged…. But no! It can’t happen here! Or can it?
Trump’s uncanny resemblance to the fictional dictator in Sinclair Lewis’s 1935 novel is disconcerting. The far more important concern, though, is the degree to which Trump resembles real-life fascist dictators, past and present. A study of notorious 20th- century fascist dictators, including Hitler and Mussolini, concluded that they and their regimes all had several characteristics in common. (The current regimes of Vladimir Putin in Russia, Xi Jinping in China, and Kim Jong Un in North Korea also share these characteristics.)
Fascist Dictators Encourage and Condone Violence Against Their Political Enemies
After losing the 2020 presidential election, Trump urged a large crowd of supporters on the morning of January 6, 2021 to march to the Capitol and “fight like hell.” After the violent assault on the Capitol had been going on for more than three hours, when Trump finally posted a video message urging the rioters to go home, he told them, “We love you, you’re very special.” On his first day back in office in 2025, he granted clemency to the more than 1,500 rioters who were charged with crimes related to the attack on the Capitol, including rioters convicted of assaulting police officers and rioters with past convictions for other violent crimes, including sexual assault.
Fascist Dictators Blur the Distinction Between Private Business Interests and the Public Good and Put Wealthy Business Leaders in High Governmental Positions
At the beginning of his second term, Trump appointed Elon Musk, reportedly the world’s richest man and the CEO of companies that have received tens of billions of dollars in federal funding, to head the ad hoc “Department of Government Efficiency,” with the power to summarily fire vast numbers of federal employees without cause and to potentially steer federal funding away from other companies and toward his own.
Fascist Dictators Promote Bold-Faced Lies and Other Propaganda
Some of Trump’s most notorious lies include his claims that he won the 2020 presidential election; that the January 6, 2021 insurrectionist attack on the Capitol was a “day of love;” and that the Ukrainians themselves, not the Russian invaders, are responsible for starting the war in Ukraine. The Washington Post catalogued more than 30,000 other demonstrably false or misleading statements that Trump made during his first term as president. Currently, a special team within the Trump administration is spewing out pro-Trump propaganda at a prodigious rate on social media, including a portrait of Trump wearing a golden crown with the caption, “Long Live the King,” via Elon Musk’s “X” platform.
Fascist Dictators Promote the Myth That Their Citizens Are Being Threatened by Scapegoats
Trump’s favorite scapegoats are undocumented immigrants whom he frequently refers to as “criminals,” “gang members,” and “killers,”and who he claims are stealing jobs and benefits from U.S. citizens. In fact, undocumented immigrants do the work that most U.S. citizens are unwilling to do; they pay far more in federal taxes than they receive in federal benefits; and, unlike Trump himself, they are convicted of committing serious crimes at a lower rate than the U.S. population as a whole.
Fascist Dictators Put Grossly Unqualified Sycophants in Key Governmental Positions
The many grossly unqualified sycophants who Trump has nominated or appointed to key government positions in his second administration include Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, a favorite Fox News interviewee who has himself been accused of alcohol abuse, sexual misconduct, and mismanagement of nonprofit financial funds, and who has spoken in defense of U.S. soldiers charged with war crimes; Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. who seeds doubt concerning vaccine effectiveness and promotes other medical quackery; and FBI Director Kash Patel who endorses the “deep state” theory and who has previously described jailed January 6 insurrectionists as “political prisoners.”
Fascist Dictators Exhibit Flagrant Sexism
Trump boasted in a 2005 video recording about not only groping women and kissing them without their consent, but about an incident involving a married woman in which, in his own words, “I moved on her like a bitch.” He added, “I failed, I admit it, I did try and “f—k her.” Trump called Hillary Clinton a “nasty woman” during their final 2016 presidential debate; he has repeatedly referred to Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) as “Pocahontas;” and he entertained a joke during a 2024 campaign rally implying that past Vice President Kamala Harris once worked as a prostitute.
The list of common characteristics in the study of 20th-century fascist dictators and their regimes includes 14 categories in all, and Trump and his MAGA disciples have already exhibited characteristics in most of these categories. One common characteristic not mentioned in the study is the fact that all the 20th-century fascist dictators met ignominious ends—but not before they had caused enormous damage, including the deaths of millions of innocent people.
Questions about what fascism might look like when it comes to the United States of America and whether it can or cannot happen here are no longer merely hypothetical. Fascism has come to the USA. It is happening here. The question now is whether the people of the United States have the necessary critical thinking skills, moral compass, and political courage to reverse the rise of fascism in our country before further harm is done, or will we be like the characters in Sinclair Lewis’ 1935 novel; the people in Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy; and the people in current day Russia, China, and North Korea and allow our system of government to devolve into a full-fledged fascist dictatorship.
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Trump Is Neither God nor King: Why His Rewriting of History Must Be Stopped
Every time Trump attempts to rewrite January 6 or parrot Putin's propaganda about Ukraine, we must respond not with outrage (after all, this was all written in Project 2025), but with unwavering commitment to truth.
Feb 26, 2025
When U.S. President Donald Trump declared on February 19 that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky—not Russian President Vladimir Putin—was the real dictator, he wasn't only spouting inflammatory rhetoric. He was launching a calculated assault on our collective memory and shared reality. From our reality-star king-in-chief this is not just another chaotic distraction that we slap the word unprecedented on—it's an active threat that puts millions of Ukrainian lives at risk and fuels violent instability across Europe.
But it's also a direct insult to the American people, who witnessed these events unfold in real time just two years ago. Most voters can recall the horror of watching a sovereign nation be invaded by an army. Trump's audacious attempt to rewrite current events follows the authoritarian playbook to the letter: Deny reality, rewrite the narrative, and weaponize chaos and confusion until the public's grip on truth begins to slip. The end goal is crystal clear: total power, sacrificing democracy and millions of lives in the process.
The strategy is painfully familiar because we've already lived through it. Within hours of his inauguration, Trump continued his rewriting of January 6—yet another event we all witnessed in real time. The pardon he issued is far from popular or celebrated by voters, as 83% of Americans disapprove of this decision, disapprove of this rewriting of history. We watched his supporters, inflamed by his lies, storm the Capitol to block the peaceful transfer of power. That poll indicates that the American people know what we saw no matter how many executive orders he signs. We recall how the violence was methodical: smashed windows, destroyed barricades, ransacked offices. The human cost was devastating: lives lost, lawmakers running for safety, democracy itself under siege. For 187 excruciating minutes, Trump—then still the sitting president—ignored pleas to stop the violence, instead making calls to senators urging them to object to the election while watching the chaos unfold on Fox News. When he finally spoke, it wasn't to condemn the violence but to validate it: "We love you... I know your pain... the election was stolen." He watched democracy burn and poured gasoline on the flames. And now, he's reaching for the gas can again.
Fact-checking isn't just a journalistic practice—it's an act of civic resistance that each of us must embrace.
This pattern isn't just about misstatements or confusion. This is about the systematic dismantling of shared reality—a tactic many authoritarian heads of state have relied on. In Romania, where I was born, the brutal dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu didn't just control the present; he rewrote the past. His regime banned books, silenced histories, and maintained lists of names that couldn't be spoken aloud. The goal wasn't just censorship—it was the eradication of collective memory. It was also necessary for his attempts to target specific communities. If our histories were not honored it was easier to deny our human rights.
Putin's Russia shows us this same pattern. He claims Ukraine has no legitimate history as a nation, that it was "entirely created by Russia." These aren't just words—it's the groundwork for invasion and occupation. When Trump echoes these lies about Ukraine and Zelensky, he's not just parroting Putin's propaganda. He's signaling his allegiance to the authoritarian practice of bending reality itself to serve power.
And of course, we need to talk about Hitler's Germany. Not only because the Nazi salute is suddenly being flaunted before conservative audiences in the U.S., but because that is exactly what we are seeing unfold right here in the United States. When the White House posts an ASMR video of an undocumented person in chains being taken to a concentration camp, we need to talk about Nazi Germany. Like Trump, the Nazi regime didn't begin with death camps; they began with propaganda, with book burnings, with the systematic rewriting of history to support their white supremacist ideology. North Korea too maintains its grip on power through absolute control of information and historical narrative. These aren't distant cautionary tales—they're blueprints being followed by Trump.
The architects of alternative facts fear one thing above all: truth told boldly and repeatedly. Since 1848, when the Associated Press was founded with an emphasis on factual reporting, journalism has served as a check on power. It's no coincidence that Trump has now banned AP reporters from the White House press corps for their factual reporting about the Gulf of Mexico. When facts become the enemy, we're watching authoritarianism in action. But defending truth isn't just the job of journalists, though their freedom remains essential to democracy's survival. The front line in this battle runs through every conversation we have, every social media post we share, every time we choose to speak up rather than stay silent. Fact-checking isn't just a journalistic practice—it's an act of civic resistance that each of us must embrace.
The more chaotic and overwhelming these attacks on truth become, the more essential it is that we refuse to normalize them. Speak up. It matters. It makes a difference. Each book banned, each journalist silenced through intimidation or exile, each historical event rewritten—these are not isolated incidents. They are coordinated strikes against our collective power to resist.
It often feels like we are at the point of no return, especially when we look at the complicity of Congress. Congress' willingness to surrender its constitutional role has become apparent to many Americans. Rather than draft legislation or serve as a check on executive power, Republican lawmakers have chosen to let Trump rule by decree. Why bother with the messy work of democracy when you can simply allow a demagogue to issue orders? This isn't just institutional failure—it's institutional surrender and they are betraying every American by doing so. The Republicans in Congress have traded their dignity and our democracy for positive tweets from Elon Musk and Trump.
Though this is undeniably bleak, I don't believe it means defeat. It means we must make a collective decision: Will we perform what Timothy Snyder calls "anticipatory obedience" (especially since a majority of the orders are unjust, unconstitutional, and illegal), or will we hold onto our shared reality with fierce determination? History isn't just a record of what happened—it's a guide for resistance. When we allow our past to be rewritten, we surrender the lessons that could save our future. When someone thinks they can rewrite the past, they believe themselves to be God in control of events. We have to make sure we declare that Trump is no King nor God.
The path forward isn't through individual action or protecting our personal freedoms. This moment demands collective resistance, a tall order in a country that is being told it must destroy its neighbors to survive. But we know better. We love our neighbors. We see the labor and care our national park service workers are investing and we believe the firing of the 100,000 federal workers who maintained our freedom is unjust and needs to be reversed. We know that in a democracy, an unelected billionaire does not have the right to treat Americans as pawns. We are smarter than Elon and Trump are acting like we are. Every time Trump attempts to rewrite January 6 or parrot Putin's propaganda about Ukraine, we must respond not with outrage (after all, this was all written in Project 2025), but with unwavering commitment to truth. We must refuse to let our shared reality be negotiated away in service of authoritarian ambition.
History is clear on this point: When leaders wage war on truth itself, silence equals surrender. We cannot afford to surrender now. Read the books. Refuse to obey in advance unjust, unconstitutional, and illegal executive actions. Gather with your neighbors and friends and speak the truth. Refuse to believe in the lie that we are now against one another, for our individual survival. We must gather and speak the truth in unison: Trump is no King nor God.
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