{"product_id":"they-stole-a-city-isbn-9781984878816","title":"They Stole a City","description":"\u003cb\u003eIn this ambitious and groundbreaking history, Lauren Collins weaves together stories of four Wilmington, North Carolina, families over 125 years to create a full accounting of the long-term effects of the 1898 white supremacist massacre and coup and its critical role in subverting American democracy\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAfter the Civil War, Reconstruction ushered in an era of political equality and economic opportunity for Black people, and it lasted longer in Wilmington than almost anywhere else. In 1898, Wilmington was a bastion of Black success: Black cultural life flourished, while a thriving Black middle class brimmed with lawyers, educators, and elected officials. The city became a symbol of Black hope—only for all of it to come to a violent end on November 10, 1898.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn this epic, multigenerational narrative, Lauren Collins traces the fates of four Wilmington families: the Howes, the Halseys, the Moores, and the Bellamy\/MacRaes, all of whom were present on the day when a mob of white supremacists launched a murderous coup to “take the city.” After issuing a “White Declaration of Independence,” white men gunned down scores of Black men, chasing their families into hiding. Then they marched to city hall, where they overthrew the democratically elected, multiracial local government at gunpoint in what is thought to be the only successful coup d’état on American soil. No one knows exactly how many Black citizens they murdered—surely dozens, likely hundreds—while driving thousands of survivors and their white allies out of town. Folklore among both Black and white Wilmingtonians holds that the Cape Fear River ran red. While the effects of this episode of racial terrorism would ricochet through the next century of our nation’s history, no one was ever prosecuted or punished, and many of the details have been largely—and deliberately—forgotten.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn collaboration with living descendants of Black and white families, Collins seeks to create a more complete understanding of 1898 than can be drawn solely from the archives. She follows these four families and their descendants through the eras of segregation and Jim Crow, the Great Migration, the Civil Rights movement, and school desegregation, all the way up to the Black Lives Matter and racial justice protests in 2020, emphasizing the lasting and consequential effects of 1898 on the city and people of Wilmington.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWeaving together each generation’s reckoning with their past and how it has imprinted on their present, \u003ci\u003eThey Stole a City\u003c\/i\u003e is an ambitious and revelatory examination of American racial terror as it has played out in one Southern city, written in the conviction that the story of the 1898 Wilmington massacre and coup is, in fact, a story about America in 2025.“Collins eloquently renders spellbinding tales of the 1898 Wilmington racial massacre and the families whose lives it changed forever. Her meticulous research juxtaposes its bloody history with profound interpretations of the legacies that shaped such diverse figures as Michael Jordan and Lara Trump. \u003ci\u003eThey Stole a City\u003c\/i\u003e proves that past is always present. An indispensable read for all of us in these times.” \u003cb\u003e—Glenda Gilmore, Peter V. and C. Vann Woodward Professor of History Emerita at Yale University\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Lauren Collins has written a deeply reported history and released it into this moment when history is dying, erased by lies and conspiracy, so that when reading I couldn't tell if this is a story of one city’s lynch mob in 1898 or an entire nation’s lynch mob in 2026. \u003ci\u003eThey Stole A City\u003c\/i\u003e is at its core an investigation into one American mob, which makes it an investigation of all American mobs. This story happened 128 years ago. This story is happening now.” \u003cb\u003e—Wright Thompson, senior writer for ESPN and the New York Times bestselling author of\u003ci\u003e The Barn, Pappyland, \u003c\/i\u003eand \u003ci\u003eThe Cost of These Dreams\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e“The brilliance of \u003ci\u003eThey Stole a City\u003c\/i\u003e is not just that Lauren Collins grounds her sweeping, incendiary history of an infamous historical episode in the intimate lived experiences of four North Carolina families, but that she captures the 'prolific afterlife' of the massacre and coup in Wilmington, demonstrating in vivid, poignant, often painful detail the extent to which the past continues to shape and echo in our present day. An extraordinary book.” \u003cb\u003e—Patrick Radden Keefe, \u003ci\u003eNew York Times \u003c\/i\u003ebestselling author of five books, including \u003ci\u003eEmpire of Pain\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“\u003ci\u003eThey Stole a City\u003c\/i\u003e is a brilliant rendering of a history buried in a shallow grave. Lauren Collins has not only measured the weight of a specific and tragic chapter of our past, she has charted the Wilmington Massacre’s bearing upon the present. The origins of our current crisis become more legible in these pages – as do the forces that would just as soon steal a nation.” \u003cb\u003e—Jelani Cobb, Dean of Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism, winner of the Peabody Award in 2020 and finalist for the Pulitzer Prize\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Lauren Collins's 1898 Wilmington race-riot masterpiece ends with Donald Trump's second coming, thus bookending Reconstruction's democratic promise with our hard-fought diversity, equity, and inclusion dangerously mocked. \u003ci\u003eThey Stole a City\u003c\/i\u003e is required reading.” \u003cb\u003e—David Levering Lewis, two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize for \u003ci\u003eW.E.B. Du Bois: A Biography 1868-1963\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cb\u003eLauren Collins \u003c\/b\u003ewas born in Wilmington, North Carolina, in 1980. She is a staff writer at \u003ci\u003eThe New Yorker\u003c\/i\u003e and the author of \u003ci\u003eWhen in French: Love in a Second Language\u003c\/i\u003e, which \u003ci\u003eThe New York Times\u003c\/i\u003e named one of its 100 Notable Books of 2016. She lives in Paris with her family.","brand":"Penguin Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":48233775268069,"sku":"NP9781984878816","price":32.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9781984878816.jpg?v=1767742429","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/they-stole-a-city-isbn-9781984878816","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}