Stop us if this scenario sounds familiar: A closely-watched election; voters split along party—and racial—lines; misinformation circulated as journalism; and an undercurrent of violence that grows stronger as voters head to the polls.
That may sound like the presidential election cycle Americans just lived through, but those same events played out over 126 years ago in Wilmington, North Carolina. While we’re on the cusp of a peaceful transfer of power from President Joe Biden to President-elect Donald Trump in the present day, the events of 1898 culminated in one of America’s most notorious race massacres, and the country’s first—and so far only—successful coup d’état.
That’s the subject of the new American Experience documentary American Coup: Wilmington 1898, currently streaming now on most PBS platforms. Directed by Brad Lichtenstein and Yoruba Richen, the film reconstructs the series of events that resulted in a group of white supremacists overthrowing North Carolina’s legally elected biracial government.
And local newspapers played a key role in bringing the coup to fruition. Josephus Daniels, editor of Raleigh’s News and Observer broadsheet, was among the conspirators and used the pages of his paper to stoke the embers of white grievance.
“It’s incredible to look at the disinformation and misinformation that perpetuated the events of 1898, and how partisan these papers were,” Richen—an associate professor at CUNY’s Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism—tells TVNewser about the way journalism operated in 19th century America. “Daniels was a partisan Democrat and that was the mission with his newspaper.” (At that point in time, the Democratic party stridently opposed Reconstruction and other attempts to lessen racial inequality in post-Civil War America.)
But American Coup also spotlights the voices in the press that tried to push back on the not-so-hidden agenda of white supremacists. Black editor Alex Manly owned and edited Wilmington’s Daily Record paper, and directly addressed spurious claims in a landmark editorial that laid bare the hypocrisy surrounding prevailing attitudes in white society towards interracial couplings.
“That was something that Black newspapers did all over the country in terms of reporting on what was happening within communities and counter the misinformation,” Richen says, drawing a connection to the dearth of local news outlets that exist today. “We have to continue supporting local news—a majority of counties don’t have a local news outlet today.”
We spoke with American Coup’s directing team about how the past seen in their film informs our present and their feelings about the current and future state of journalism.
