White mobs destroyed prosperous Black communities with zero convictions

Evidence

In 1898, armed white people stormed Wilmington, North Carolina, an affluent majority-Black city. The biracial Fusion Party had managed to win election to a number of city offices, enraging white supremacists in the area, who plotted a violent overthrow of the local government. The mob murdered dozens of Black residents and forced thousands of others to flee their homes in what remains, to this day, the only successful coup in U.S. history. Two decades later, in 1921, in one of the bloodiest racial attacks ever in the United States, a white mob burned and looted another prosperous Black community, the Greenwood neighborhood in Tulsa, Oklahoma. As many as three hundred Black people were killed and some ten thousand were rendered homeless. Thirty-five blocks were destroyed. No one was ever convicted in any of these acts of racist violence. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 903

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reframing-versus-empirical-claims case study: Wilentz and other historians disputed interpretations of these events, not the basic empirical record.