The Wilmington Massacre

00:00:01 Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio. 00:00:11 Speaker 2: Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and Jerry's here, too. And this is Stuff You Should Know, another black spot on American history, the edition. 00:00:22 Speaker 1: That's right. 00:00:24 Speaker 3: It's not like we're on a mission to make ourselves look bad as Americans. But these are often stories that are not only overlooked, but in some cases like this one, kind of like buried for decades and decades. So nobody knows the truth of the matter, which in this case is that in the late 1800s in Wilmington, North Carolina, a large mob of white supremacists, a very organized group, got together and staged a coup. Uh, because they were not happy that, uh, black people in their town had become. 00:01:03 Speaker 1: Uh, franchised. Is that a word? 00:01:06 Speaker 2: Mm-hmm. Infranchised, maybe. 00:01:08 Speaker 1: Infranchised. Yeah, that'd be it. 00:01:10 Speaker 3: And, you know, we're starting to hold office and have a say and we're winning elections and stuff like that. And they were like, this will not stand. So we're going to stage a coup and kill a bunch of people. 00:01:23 Speaker 2: Yeah. And that is definitely worth dragging up and, and, um, Showing off to everybody because that isn't the kind of thing that should be swept under the rug like it was. And what sucks also is this just bears such an uncanny resemblance to the Tulsa massacre. And one of the things, do you remember that episode too? Oh, yeah. 00:01:45 Speaker 3: Yeah. 00:01:47 Speaker 2: Both of these, any story like this is just so stomach turning, you know, that people do this to other people. And I think one of the other reasons why it's worth talking about is this still goes on in the world. Dominant groups still slaughter other groups for whatever reason. And it just so happened that in the 1890s in Wilmington, North Carolina, it was white supremacists slaughtering black residents who had been democratically elected or just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time when the armed white mob went through town. to stage what you said, a coup. It's considered probably the only successful coup in American history. And I don't even think you have to qualify it with probably. It's the only successful coup in history. Yeah. 00:02:30 Speaker 3: There are also parts of this that, you know, we've seen play out over like the past six and eight years. It was scary a few times where I was like, oh, this march happened with like torches. And I was like, that sounds just like what happened in Virginia not too long ago. 00:02:46 Speaker 1: So, Weird parallels. 00:02:48 Speaker 3: So we're going to tell this story today and I guess start with going back in …