The Legacy of a Great Grandmother

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"It is an odd and a very rich sort of legacy, but odd in the sense that it has a stabbing, almost piercing, almost haunting effect on me when I allow myself to stop," she says. "I try to put myself in her shoes. And I try to imagine what it may have been like when this happened." She adds: "The feelings of fear and anxiety that she probably harbored, but didn't feel that she had a pathway out".

“What I recall most is the way that she grabbed my wrist and, shaking a bit, she said over and over again, ‘If it happens, run. Don’t let that happen to you. Run. If it ever happens, run.’” It was years before Cynthia Brown understood what her great-grandmother, Athalia Howe, was talking about. Athalia Howe grew up in Wilmington, North Carolina in the late 1890s. At the time, Wilmington was called “the freest town in the country” for Black people, and by 1898, Black men had become integral in Wilmington’s government. White Supremacists in the state were determined to stop them, by "ballot or bullet or both.”

David Zucchino's book is Wilmington's Lie: The Murderous Coup of 1898 and the Rise of White Supremacy.

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