Looking to the past to understand the present.
Anyone who turned on a television over the last week would have been hard pressed to avoid seeing the news coverage of the riot in the Capitol.
The first question anyone asks after such an event is “how could this happen?” Journalists scrambled to understand and provide some context for the mobs of angry people breaking into the Capitol Building, and one of the historical precedents they found was The Wilmington Race Riot of 1898. Pictures of that event may be familiar they appeared on news stations and news website articles.
The Wilmington Race Riot, also known as the Wilmington Massacre and cited as the only successful coup d’etat in the history of the United States, was an armed insurrection by white supremacists that violently overthrew a duly elected government and drove almost a third of the black population of the city out of town. Buildings were burned, and hundreds of people were killed.
As it happens, this week’s Reader Meet Writer event features the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David Zucchino, whose book about the 1898 insurrection, Wilmington’s Lie, has just been released in paperback.
Zucchino will be speaking this Thursday at 7 PM, EST. You can register via your local indie bookstore, or, if your store isn’t on the list, you can sign up here.
Here is what Rosemary at Malaprop’s Bookstore/Cafe in Asheville, NC has to say about Wilmington’s Lie:
Further reading about the 1898 Wilmington Race Riot:
The Marrow of Tradition by Charles Chestnut
Cape Fear Rising by Philip Gerard
In this issue:
Bookseller Buzz: Where the Wild Ladies Are by Aoko Matsuda
Reviews of The Yellow Wife by Sadeqa Johnson, The Beak Book by Robin Page, Better Luck Next Time by Julia Claiborne Johnson, The Friendly Vegan Cookbook by Michelle Cehn & Toni Okamoto, Into the Real by Z Brewer, and The House on Vesper Sands by Paraic O’Donnell