North Carolina History Center on the Civil War, Emancipation, and Reconstruction has announced that it plans an immersive exhibit on the 1898 Wilmington Massacre. The Center is expected to be completed in 2027 in Fayetteville. The 1898 massacre is the only successful violent coup d’etat in United States history. Those visiting will be given a choice of going through the experience of the coup or of bypass the immersive experience but reading about what happened.
Myron Pitts wrote about the new exhibit in the Fayetteville Observer:
I heard Greathouse’s presentation, and I am excited to hear about the plans for the Wilmington exhibit. In telling the story of the massacre, the History Center is correcting an oversight made by generations of textbooks and media coverage of the war in North Carolina.
On Nov. 10, 1898, an armed mob of white supremacists — whipped into a frenzy by Southern Democrats over an anti-lynching editorial — burned down the Black newspaper in Wilmington and tore through the Black community. Sixty people died and the mob overthrew a local government that included both Black and white elected officials. Thousands of Black residents fled the city.
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