The Wilmington coup was rallying fiction about Negro rule, not real black insurrection

Evidence

But in the story of the campaign (for white supremacy), the Negro had become unruly, needed instead to be ruled once more out, “Negro rule” ousted into the swampy fantastic as fear, as specter, as a promise. The phantasm of Negro rule was what the high school textbook never acknowledged had rallied the Wilmington race (war) of 1898, the riot planned and instigated, orderly disorder, the wrong the Redeemers sought to riot up, right justifying anything, even murder, the declaration to “choke the Cape Fear River with the carcasses” of whatever the Negro populating their fantasies was—threatening and promising domination, threatening revenge, promising a North Carolina governed by the many not the few. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 863

Categorization

• QUESTION: How did the textbook narrative of ‘Negro rule’ as an unruly reality get taught versus the documented white-instigated coup?
• XREF: Pairs with the ‘deviation vs design’ reading goal: the textbook treats the coup as suppressing deviation rather than the coup itself being the designed project.
• DEEPTHINKING: The paragraph collapses the racial-fantasy projection, the textbook’s evasive historiography, and the planned massacre into one dense unit deploying scare quotes and ‘fantastic’ as a ghost that haunts the syntax itself.