In 1973 i saw him first, across a loud, profane, filthy newsroom in downtown raleigh. He was right out of school. I was still in school. I looked across at a city summit, who is that . Thats david zucchino. Is going to be the new star here. He had long, dark hair, over his shoulders, sick, jet black mustache. It was a long time ago. David is a grad of the unc Journalism School and in the burnout of the journalism hall of fame. In raleigh, he became famous very quickly in the newsroom when a new young editor came in and sent out a memo to the reporting staff saying each report will submit to his editor every morning and itinerary for his plans for the day. David even then impossible to tame, sat down at the old manual typewriter. Its a legendary story. Said what i will do today, i david zucchino. 10 15 try to to sneak in a late. 10 40 get a son drop. 11 Start Talking up where to go to lunch. He was writing all this done. We went to the diner yesterday at the blue plate special win wt over four dollars so today we may go to the mecca. All written down. Young editor goes crazy. Goes into the office of claude, the very severe, series editor who would been at the New York Times, waving the memo, waving as aquino memo. We can have this kind of insubordination. Sit down and sits and looks at him. Not a pipe. Well, ive got to be honest with you. Hes one of the best general barrs ive ever seen. In fact, he may be the best ive ever seen, and i did work for the New York Times so if we have to fire him, or we have to fire you [laughing] better start packing. [laughing] zucch was in raleigh how long . Five years in raleigh. Then he was on quickly up the ladder, philadelphia, los angeles, all this as a Foreign Correspondent which he has been a contract correspondent for the new times now in kabul. He has been under fire. He has been under water. It has been quite a career and, you know, the late Jimmy Breslin once said of mike royko of the chicago paper when they were doing a sum of the columns, theyre trying to get quotes and everything, he said hes the best, is any . Thats all he said. Thats what they say about david zucchino. [applause] thank you, jim, for those stories. Were those true . All right. Thank everybody for come out tonight. I really appreciate your interest in the book. I would like to ask how many people have been watching the impeachment hearings . And i think they are still going so do i hear a motion to call this whole thing off . Will go to bar, turn on the tv and watch impeachment. No motion . All right. I use like to start off by asking people how many of you were aware of the women 10q or massacre or what if you want to call if we came across this book the wilmington coup. I had heard about this until about 20 years ago. I find out hes one of the leading speakers on the White Supremacy campaign that the subject of this bookin 1898. When i was in that i went to kingsstadium. I didnt know who canaan wasnt really didnt care years later, as im researching this book it turns out hes a character in my book as well. He was a member of one of the machinegun crews that went through town searching out like men tokill. After i left school as jim told you i went to the news and observer s founding publisher was Justice Daniels. Who was revered at the paper. There were tributes to him all around the newsroom. Nobody ever mentioned he was almost the leader of the White Supremacy campaign and lead a Propaganda Campaign in 1898. I had no idea until i started researching this book. I found out recently the student door at chapel hill is named the student store, i had no idea and one of 30 buildings im told by the Daily Tar Heel on the campus are named after White Supremacists, many of them who were active in the White Supremacy movement of 1890 and i bring all this up just to make the point that is both is not really ancient history. Its right now. Its about right now. The legacy of this book is all over the state, all over chapel hill. Some people whove managed to read the book, i ask them their impressions and they usually have 2 questions. First is how did i not know about this and the second is how can this happen in the United States of america . The only thing i can tell them if this is a forgotten chapter of American History, not just North Carolina history but American History that was covered up or mischaracterized for a century. Most of you know the basic story. In 1898 White Supremacists overthrew the multiracial government in wilmington. They killed up to 60 black men and they wounded dozens more. They burned down a black daily newspaper and they evicted city leaders at gunpoint. They appointed the mob leaders as mayor, police chief, sheriff and city alderman and they vanished black and white political leaders. They marched them with militiamen gunpoint tothe train station. They put them on the train and said if you ever comeback to wilmington we will shoot you on site. Not one ever came back. And you can imagine during this period what it must have been like for the black families who lived in wilmington. Their men were being shot down on the street and gunmen were running through the streets terrorizing people and hundreds of them fled into the swamps and cemeteries outside the city trying to hide from the white gunmen and this was in november so you can imagine it was cold and this happened to be the first day they were there, itwas raining. There were some reports that babies died of exposure. They were there under terrible conditions and took them 2 nights and three days before they felt safe enough to return and in the days and weeks following the coup, 2100 black people fled the city and never came back. And whats hard to believe about all this is that no one was ever punished. No one was prosecuted, much less convicted for the murders or for a violent coup. Its also hard to believe that they announced it all i had of time. They said they would overthrow quote, negro rule by the ballot or bullet or both. They said they were going to do it and they did it as the whole country watched. Because they had announced it well beforehand this would have been in the spring and summer and fall of 1898. All the major newspapers sent their white reporters down to cover. The New York Times was there, washington post, philadelphia inquirer, baltimore sun, washington evening star and the papers in charlotte and atlanta and of course the news and observer, they were all there and when these white reporters from out of town would arrive at the train station the leaders of the White Supremacy movement would meetthem there, and that cigars, give them liquor , arrange for lodging and to use a modern term they would embed them with the white gunmen who were going around patrolling the citys before the coup and these reporters would go out with them never interviewed a black person as far as i can tell that they would go out and they would swallow the stories that these gunmen and White Supremacists were telling them that there was going to be a black riot, that blacks were stockpiling weapons, that blacks were incapable of governing and they didnt have the right to vote and this was reflected, if you can believe these northern newspapers was reflected in the stories they sent back so the nation got this whole story that was basically the talking point for the White Supremacists through the white press. For a century or more this was called a quote, race riot. It wasnt. It was a racial massacre. It was a planned murder spree. In our nations history in the 19th and early20th centuries there have been many many socalled race riots. And almost all of these were spontaneous outbursts of white rage and in many cases, it involved real or supposedly contact between the black man and a white woman. But wilmington was unique. It was completely different. It was premeditated, it was a carefully orchestrated racial revolution planned well in advance and it was by far the most successful and permanent island overthrow of anelected government in us history. There has never been anything like it. Now, why was wilmington such a threat to whites . I think because it was a bold experiment and wilmington was really an outlier in the late 19th century. It was a rarity in the south. It was a majority black city, 56 percent black, very few big cities in the south at a black majority but more importantly it had a multiracial government. Blacks were in positions of authority and of the 26 Police Officers in the city were black, three of the 10 city alderman were black. Therewere a black magistrates, doctors, lawyers and there was the daily black newspaper. In 1898 a baptist publication called remington the freest town for a negro in the country. This was intolerable toWhite Supremacists and they were not going to let it stand. They had a goal. Their first goal was to overthrow the government in wilmington but that was just their first goal. There was a bigger goal and their major goal was to deny black people the right to vote and the right to hold Public Office forever. And by those standards it was an incredibly successful coup. In 1896 there were 126,000 registered black voters in North Carolina, 126,000. 1906, 10 years later, 6100 and it went downhill from there. And in fact, black citizens in North Carolinadid not vote in significant numbers for 70 more years until after the Voting Rights act of 1965. The coup also turned a black majority city into a white supremacist stronghold almost overnight. In 1898 as i said wilmington was 56 percent black. Anybody have a guess as to what it might be today . Somebody knows, 18 percent. In 1898, america had one black congressman in the entire country, one black congressman and his name was George Henry Whitefrom North Carolina and he represented a district in the southeastern part of the state that was adjacent to wilmington. He was our last, he and his family were harassed and basically run out of office by whitesupremacists. He said in 1900 was not going to run for reelection. It was leaving the state and his parting words were i cannot live in North Carolina and be treated as a man and after George Henry White left office in 1900, no black citizens from North Carolina served in congress until 1992 almost a century later. After those three black aldermen were evicted at gunpoint in 1898 no black citizen served on the Wilmington City Council until 1972. It wasnt that long ago. The coup also installed White Supremacy and jim crow as official state policy for nearly 50 years inspired White Supremacists across the south. Ill give you one example. In georgia in 1906 there was a statewide Election Campaign and the White Supremacists therewere trying to find a way to deny blacks to vote and steal the election. What do you think they did . They consulted with the leaders of the wilmington coup to find out how to do it. The white supremacistgovernor who got elected was hopelessness and heres a direct quote from him. We can handle the blacks the way they handled them in wilmington where the woods were black with their hanging purposes. That was a quote not all whites in wilmington were white supremacist. White republican officials worked closely with black officials in large part because the black vote was what helped put republicans in office under government called fusion at the time. Some whites their black neighbors escape thewhite gunmen on the day of the coup but that made them targets. During the summerof 1898 , white republicans who were prominent and who were seen as working too closely with black officials received postcards in the mail and they were called remember the sixth andthey had a skull and cross bones and a pistol on them and it was a death threat and on the card it said these six men, it was the sixth leading white republicans of the town , they call them degenerate sons of the white race and they said the day was coming when they would pay for putting blacks in office and they would be banished from the town. As it turned out they were. The mayor, the white mayor, white policechief, white commissioner and several white lawyers were marched at gunpoint to thetrain station, put on the train and said dont come back , we will kill you and not one of them ever came back. The main weapon or one of the main weapons for the White Supremacy campaign was a Fake News Campaign led by Joseph Daniels who planted phony stories in the observer about blacks that would fight whites to who attacked them and for the 25 percent of white voters who were illiterate daniels hired a cartoonist to draw race baiting cartoons. Id like to read a brief passage from the book about the Propaganda Campaign. More than a century before sophisticated fake news attacks targeted social media websites, daniels manipulation of white readers through phony or misleading newspaper stories was perhaps the most daring and effective Disinformation Campaign ofthe era. The most sensational stories august on what daniels and other democrats claimed was a black rapist. As a native of the south daniels understood implicitly sexual insecurities of white southern males. Already emasculated by union troops had occupied their town they rest further shame if black men were elevated to something approaching equality. A black man who could vote or hold Public Office was a man who might bear by their logic become a rival for the affections of white women. Daniels escalated trivial incidents into frontpage outrages. All that was required was incidental contact to a white woman anda black man. Each cartoon and with each provocative article daniels pitted whites against blacks. The day was coming, daniels wrote in the news and observer when white men will take the law in their own hands and by organized force make the negroes behave themselves. A race war was inevitable quote, a clash is surely coming between the races, daniels assured his readers and in such clashes, the white race is always victorious. Now, White Supremacists had their own fake news and their Media Campaign butthey also had their own militia. They were called redshirts and they were basically an outgrowth of the clan. Many of the men in the redshirts were sons or relatives of confederate veterans or former clan members and they were basically the private militia of the whitesupremacists. All summer redshirts job was to ride through the cape fear countryside at night , burst into homes, drag out black men and beat them and with them and tell them they would be killed if they registered to vote or dared to vote on electionday. And on election day , which is in november 1898, they intercepted any black man trying to get to the polling station and intimidated them and beat them and by doing so they crushed the black turnout that day and stole the election. In addition to the redshirts, there were 2 state militias in wilmington read the first was the willington light infantry and the other was the wilmington naval reserve. These were basically the National Guard of the day. They were supposed to report to the governor in raleigh but they were in fact commanded by White Supremacists and reported to the two leaders. The militiamen served in the spanishamerican war. The war played out atsummer. But the white leaders made sure that they were back in wilmington from the war for the time of the coup and they had planned the coup for two days after the election and then during the coup and during the riots unleashed them on black citizens. On the day of the coup these militiamen were still in federal service. They were federal sort soldiers because they wouldnt be mustered out for another week or two so that meant federal soldiers murdered american citizens on the pretext of putting down a black right. Blacks soldiers also served in the spanishamerican war and segregated units but white leaders made sure they were far from wilmington on the day of the two at a Training Camp in georgia under the miles away so that left the black community defenseless. Here you had all these young men trained soldiers, trained inweapons but they were miles away. There were defenders of the black community and one was named alex manley, he was the black publisher of the daily record. And as a journalist i was drawn to manley. I thought it was a fascinating character. He was a courageous man,just an amazing character. He challenged whites in print and demanded civil rights for blacks. He demanded the country live up to its promises to its blackcitizens. In august 1898 he wrote an incendiary editorial about race and sex that almost got him lynched. He had to flee the city. He wrote many black men were supposedly raving white women were in fact consensual lovers and pointed out white men raped black women with impunity. This editorial was in response to a speech by a white woman in georgia who said the only solution to rate was the lynch rope. Quote, 1000 times a week if necessary. I like to read now briefly from the editorial, it was a fairly long editorial and im going to read a short selection. Close, every negro lynched is called