On November 10, 1898, an armed mob of two thousand men marched through the streets of Wilmington, North Carolina, burned the city's Black daily newspaper, killed an unknown number of citizens, and overthrew a legitimately elected biracial government at gunpoint. It was the only successful municipal coup d'état in United States history — and for nearly a century, it was remembered as a race riot.

The Coup on the Cape Fear restores the full, devastating truth. Drawing on the findings of the 2006 North Carolina State Commission, survivor testimony, and the record of the Black press, Gregory McGowan reconstructs the conspiracy from its roots: the extraordinary prosperity of Wilmington's Black community, the Fusion coalition that gave that community democratic voice, and the meticulously planned campaign — financed by white businessmen, orchestrated by a Democratic Party operative, amplified by a weaponized press, and enforced by paramilitary terror — that destroyed it all in a single morning.

Here are the men who organized the massacre: the cotton magnate Hugh MacRae, the orator Alfred Moore Waddell, the press baron Josephus Daniels. Here are the men and women whose world they destroyed, and the community that survived seventy-four years of enforced political invisibility to reclaim it. And here is the reckoning — incomplete, contested, still unfinished — that American democracy has yet to fully face.