They Stole a City
Wilmington's White Supremacist Coup and the Families Who Live with Its Legacy
Failed to add items
Sorry, we are unable to add the item because your shopping cart is already at capacity.
Add to basket failed.
Please try again later
Add to wishlist failed.
Please try again later
Remove from wishlist failed.
Please try again later
Adding to library failed
Please try again
Follow podcast failed
Unfollow podcast failed
£0.00 for first 30 days
LIMITED TIME OFFER
Get 3 months for £0.99/mo
Offer ends 29 January 2026 at 11:59PM GMT.
Prime members: New to Audible? Get 2 free audiobooks during trial.
Just £0.99/mo for your first 3 months of Audible.
1 bestseller or new release per month—yours to keep.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, podcasts, and Originals.
Auto-renews at £8.99/mo after 3 months. Cancel monthly.
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection - including bestsellers and new releases.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, celeb exclusives, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically.
They Stole a City
Pre-order Now for £21.69
-
Narrated by:
-
By:
-
Lauren Collins
About this listen
After 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.
In 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.
In 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.
Weaving together each generation’s reckoning with their past and how it has imprinted on their present, They Stole a City 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.
Critic reviews
“They Stole a City 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.” —Jelani Cobb, Dean of Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism, winner of the Peabody Award in 2020 and finalist for the Pulitzer Prize
“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. They Stole a City is required reading.” —David Levering Lewis, two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize for W.E.B. Du Bois: A Biography 1868-1963
“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. They Stole A City is at its core an investigation into the cause, and effect, of an American mob, which makes it an investigation into all American mobs. This is a book set 128 years ago, but its warnings are about right now.” —Wright Thompson, senior writer for ESPN and the New York Times bestselling author of The Barn, Pappyland, and The Cost of These Dreams
“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. They Stole a City is required reading.” —David Levering Lewis, two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize for W.E.B. Du Bois: A Biography 1868-1963
“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. They Stole A City is at its core an investigation into the cause, and effect, of an American mob, which makes it an investigation into all American mobs. This is a book set 128 years ago, but its warnings are about right now.” —Wright Thompson, senior writer for ESPN and the New York Times bestselling author of The Barn, Pappyland, and The Cost of These Dreams
No reviews yet