As February is Black History Month, we turn our attention to the 1898 coup d’état in Wilmington. WHQR spoke with Philip Gerard, author of Cape Fear Rising.
In 1898, a group of white supremacists overthrew the democratically elected biracial government of Wilmington and replaced it with officials who instituted the first Jim Crow laws in North Carolina. Philip Gerard, a creative writing professor at UNCW, researched these events for his historical novel: