University of North Carolina Press, 1998

During the Civil War, Wilmington, North Carolina, had been the Confederacy’s major port. In 1898 it was still North Carolina’s largest city, and in that year occurred the notorious Wilmington “race riot.” The 1898 violence was crucial to the history of Wilmington and the state; indeed, as Laura Edwards puts it in Democracy Betrayed, “What happened in Wilmington became an affirmation of white supremacy not just in that one city, but in the South and in the nation as a whole.”