In 1898, Wilmington, North Carolina was one of the most successful Black communities in the American South: a city with Black-owned newspapers, a thriving middle class of lawyers and educators, and elected Black officials serving alongside white ones. Then, on November 10 of that year, a coordinated group of white supremacists overthrew the city’s government by force, killed dozens of Black residents, and drove thousands more from their homes. Lauren Collins’s “They Stole a City” tells that story, and the century and a quarter of consequences that followed, through the eyes of the families who lived it.
Collins structures the book around four families connected to the 1898 massacre and coup: the white Bellamy, MacRae, and Moore families, whose ancestors helped plan and profit from the violence, and the Black Howe and Halsey families, whose ancestors were among its targets. Rather than treating 1898 as a closed chapter, the book traces how the coup’s effects rippled forward through Jim Crow, into the civil rights era, and up to the present day, following descendants whose lives, careers, and fortunes were shaped by what happened generations before they were born.
What distinguishes “They Stole a City” from a straightforward historical account is Collins’s reporting on the present-day families themselves. She interviewed descendants on both sides, and the book gains its power from putting those testimonies in direct conversation with the archival record, letting readers see how a single act of violence continued to determine who held power and who didn’t, long after the history books moved on. The prose is clear and unflinching without being sensational, and Collins resists easy resolution in favor of showing how thoroughly the coup’s outcomes became normalized as simply the way things were.
Critical response to the book has been strongly favorable, with reviewers praising the depth of Collins’s archival research and her ability to connect a single, often-overlooked historical event to the broader arc of American racial history. Many have highlighted the family-based structure as the book’s most effective device, since it turns a story that could feel abstract or purely historical into one with immediate, personal stakes. Some critics have noted that the book asks a lot of its readers by moving across four family lines and more than a century of history, and that keeping the various threads straight requires real attention, but the consensus is that the payoff, a fuller reckoning with an event most Americans were never taught, justifies the demand.
“They Stole a City” belongs alongside the best recent work of narrative history: rigorously reported, clearly written, and built to make an underexamined atrocity impossible to look away from. Collins doesn’t just recover a buried event, she traces the straight line from it to the present, and the book is more urgent for it.
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