Is the Wilmington 1898 coup getting lost in the classroom?

WILMINGTON – Sitting in her high school history class, Kennedy Fuller couldn’t help but notice when her fellow students would shoot glances in her direction during lectures on Black history.

Maybe it wasn’t intentional, she thought. It could have even slipped past her if it happened once or twice. But that wasn’t the case.

“Whenever we brought up racial topics in class, people would look back at me,” said Fuller, now 22 and living in Cincinnati. “It was like they were asking me, ‘How does this story work for you?’”

Fuller, who is biracial, was a student at New Hanover High School when she took American History, during which she remembers lessons on the horrors of slavery and the complexity of Reconstruction.

Then they reached a story she knew nothing about – the 1898 Wilmington massacre.

Often described as the country’s only successful coup d'etat, the violent event saw a mob of white supremacists overthrow the progressively diverse local government and kill an untold number of African-American citizens, in a city where they had become the majority.

During the hyper local lesson, Fuller recalled her teacher Whitney Coonradt spoke of the violence perpetrated by hundreds of armed white men as they marched through the streets either looking to harm Black residents or run them out of town.

“I think we were all trying to process it,” Fuller said. “I was not under any pretenses that Wilmington didn’t have a racial past. We are a port city after all, and slavery was prevalent. But I was trying to understand how people could be in denial about how racism still exists, even in our own city, when we have a story like this in our past.”

That moment of personal reflection with the story of 1898 for any local student, whether they take from it what Fuller did or something else, is why historians, community members and descendants of the victims have fought for years to get it into the local school curriculum – after a long, deliberate absence from classrooms.

For decades after the massacre, the group that seized power actively worked to scrub the city’s history of its actions and any memory of its one-time diverse leadership, leaving generations of students unaware of 1898 – which, in turn, led to many adults in the community not even knowing it happened.

Today, the story has the benefit of the 2006 Wilmington Race Riot Commission’s 500-page state report, the 1898 Foundation’s Memorial Park on North Third Street in Wilmington, a new state highway historic marker installed last November and the popular documentary “Wilmington on Fire,” among other resources, to help keep it in the public consciousness.

But the classroom remains one place where the troubling but important story of 1898 has struggled to find a dedicated place.

There has been success in recent years in carving out instructional time for it at the public education and higher education levels. But hurdles like funding, time, resources and no consistent directive on how to teach it continue to pose persistent challenges to getting it in front of students like Fuller.

A looming change that will cut American history courses at the high school level in half is also poised to threaten its already-nomadic place in the curriculum.

“I have found it to be a real challenge in feeling like I can do it justice because it needs days to teach and we just don’t have that time,” said Coonradt.

The political moment

Currently, a student’s exposure to this history lesson can vary depending on their teacher, school and academic opportunities.

At the county level, some students will be introduced to it in third grade before getting a devoted lesson in eighth grade. In high school American history courses, it is a strongly encouraged lesson but not currently required.

At Cape Fear Community College and the University of North Carolina Wilmington, it is up to professors to dedicate time for a lecture on the coup’s complexities.

But Lynn Mollenauer, chair of the history department at UNCW, said teaching 1898 can also be dependent on the world outside the classroom.

“I think awareness of 1898 and the emphasis put on it in schools does wax and wane according to the political moment, especially within the white community in Wilmington,” she said.

With the country now several months into recent Black Lives Matter protests, it’s another political moment.

The drum beat to better and more consciously tell the stories of the Black experience in America, especially in schools, has never been louder and some local teachers hope it only amplifies the need for 1898 in schools.

“This current movement is not just about telling more stories,” Coonradt said. “It’s not just about another myth or heroification or person you can study one day in Black History Month. It’s about really showing the breadth of that African-American experience. In so many ways, 1898 can provide nuance to those stories, if given the time.”

Comes in stages

No matter the grade level or political moment, most educators who dedicate time to 1898 freely admit it is hard to teach.

The story involves the complex era of Fusionist politics and shows how the work of Reconstruction led to Wilmington as one of the most progressively diverse cities in the South. It also requires a deep dive into the rising white supremacist movement in North Carolina of the 1890s that culminated in the Port City’s darkest hour.

“Even though I’ve been doing it for over a decade, my lesson on 1898 is still in like a rough, rough draft version,” Coonradt said. “I don’t think I’ve ever done the same thing twice because there are so many things about it that are exceptional.”

But for students who don’t pursue degrees in history or some related field, K-12 education is where they are likely to get their only instructional lesson on the coup.

In New Hanover County Schools, the first exposure to the story can come as early as third grade.

NHCS Social Studies and World Language Coordinator Travis Matthews said all third graders take part in a program called Tar Heels Go Walking, where they board school buses and head out on field trips to learn about local history where it happened.

For several years, he said the program has featured a stop at the 1898 Memorial Park, where students often eat lunch and hear a scripted lesson on the events that doesn’t go into the tragic details.

“We tell them this was a dark time for our city and the local government was overthrown,” Matthews said.

The district has also produced a short story featuring a father-son conversation about 1898 that uses third grade friendly language.

The full picture

Whether or not they get that 1898-specific field trip, students get the full picture of the event in their eighth-grade history course, where it is specifically mentioned – for the only time – in the state standards curriculum.

For most eighth-grade students coming into American History, they’ve just seen the toll humans can take on one another in World History.

“The real gut punch for history students is seventh grade because that’s when we teach the Holocaust,” said Bradley Hodges, a teacher at Murrayville Elementary School. “They kind of already get the idea that humans can do terrible things to each other. But when we talk about 1898 and how it was here in their backyard and not just out somewhere in the United States, there is a lot of anger, shame and genuine intrigue from them. They want to know more about it.”

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To assist teachers in presenting the subject, NHCS offers a history lab that includes dichotomous primary and secondary sources on a given topic for students to interpret and research themselves.

“We allow students to be their own historian,” Matthews said. “That’s the purpose of history lab. We want students to act like historians and not memorize stuff for multiple choice exams.”

Teachers can also do lessons beyond the history lab to foster discussion and questions about 1898. Hodges uses the overtly racist political cartoons that ran in newspapers across the state to illustrate the temperature of the moment in 1898.

At this point, the details aren’t sugarcoated.

“By the time they get into 8th grade, we don’t pull any punches,” Matthews said. “Nothing about this is softened because they are looking at the primary sources themselves. They can see what happened right there.”

A field trip component a few years ago took two classes downtown to visit 1898-specific sites and sift through sources at the New Hanover County Library. Drama students from the high schools even filled in to play real-life figures for dramatized lessons. But funding issues ended the trips before they could take hold, Matthews said.

Last summer, the Cape Fear Museum stepped up to help continue the field trips by offering to host trips to the museum for classes to hear about the story and look at artifacts including copies of The Daily Record, the Black-run newspaper burned at the start of the coup.

Those field trips started in March but only three groups were able to visit the museum before COVID-19 closed schools.

The museum itself also recently launched an extensive and interactive online map and timeline of the 1898 events for students and the entire community to help educate themselves outside of the classroom.

Losing ground

Another teaching tool Hodges and other teachers deploy is “Crow,“ a 2012 novel by Barbara Wright that uses 1898 as its backdrop.

Coonradt, who has taught history at New Hanover High for 17 years, said she can tell when “Crow” is taught in lower grades because the students often reference having read it when she begins her 1898 lesson.

But it’s at the high school level that 1898 is in most danger of getting cut from classrooms across the county, according to some teachers.

Currently, students study American history across two semesters, usually around 11th grade. The first charts the New World through the end of Reconstruction around 1877. The second course picks up with the dawn of the 20th century and takes students to the present day.

The school district’s curriculum map strongly recommends teachers include 1898 at the end of the first course with Reconstruction even though it comes a few years later. But it is not required, allowing some teachers to overlook it.

Rebecca Griffiths, a teacher at Issac Bear Early College, said putting it at the end of the first semester means it can be lost in the shuffle of state testing prep, the sprint to winter break or just a rush to finish up the semester’s worth of material.

“If things take longer here or there, 1898 might be one of the subjects that get lost in the chaos of a semester coming to a close,” Griffiths said.

Even more concerning for teachers is the N.C. Department of Public Instruction’s recent decision to consolidate the American history course to a single semester in order to add a Personal Finance Literacy and Economics course.

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Now, all of American history will be expected to be taught in the fall, affording what Griffiths estimates will be around 80 instructional days when factoring in course introduction time, testing and events like pep rallies.

Local districts are given the authority to include specific topics of interest in their own recommended curriculum, but Coonradt worries there still won’t be enough time.

“We are all kind of freaking out because there has been a concerted effort to tell stories like 1898 and now there is a real concern for how we are going to find a way to still do that when the entirety of American history has to be taught in one semester,” Coonradt said. “The easier streamlined narratives are always presidents, wars and inventors, all of which tend to be older white men.”

She added that because those are more likely to be featured on state standardized tests, 1898 and stories like it get cut.

That drastic shift for the history course was originally supposed to be implemented this fall, but it has been shelved for now as COVID-19 concerns keep classes online and state educators figure out how to accommodate the demand for more underrepresented voices in American history in a course cut in half.

But Griffiths said the state’s push to broaden the standardized curriculum while giving local districts that autonomy to put an emphasis on area-specific topics has created a statewide system that can have gaps in information.

“When we started looking at every curriculum as being a set of very, very broad standards… what happened is you got a very big difference in what was being taught from Murphy (in the mountains) to Manteo (on the coast),” she said.

She is proof of that. For much of her 30-year teaching career, Griffiths taught in Avery County where there was no mention of 1898. When she moved to Wilmington 2012, she had to learn the story just so she could teach it.

“I knew about it vaguely, but I truly had to dig in there and learn, which is something other teachers have to do just to have a basic knowledge,” she said.

Coonradt added that instructors not teaching it elsewhere "don’t even know to take up the mantle when they get here.“

Matthews said the district hopes to bridge those gaps with a new online canvas course designed to help educate the educators. Now available to faculty to use for themselves and their classes, it offers modules, primary resources and videos that tell the story chronologically.

"Teachers can go through to get more information about 1898 so they can better talk about it with students,“ Matthews said. ”This is something every teacher should know something about.“

Higher education road blocks

At UNCW, Mollenauer said several professors – some of whom were instrumental in the 1898 Memorial Park, the state commission’s work and other valuable research of recent years – taught the subject in their classes.

But as they retired or moved on, their commitment to ensure it had a place in the university went with them.

“The success that studying 1898 has had is due to the hard work and determination of individuals, but not yet institutions like UNCW,” she said. “I do hope – and I hope it is more than just hope – that the revolutionary moment we have right now can help us confront fraught history, because 1898 is not a local story. It is a national story and it should be taught as such.”

That lack of institutional support is where Mollenauer said dedicated 1898 lessons can hit a roadblock.

“You have to have the money and institutional backing to do this kind of work, to get it to the point where it exists beyond the individuals who created it and be passed down,” she said.

To ensure that cycle doesn’t continue, she and other professors and the Third Person Project research group are working to write a grant to create and support an interdisciplinary curriculum that would launch with an “1898 to the Wilmington Ten” course and build from there.

In three to five years, they hope to develop courses in history, art, music, journalism, environmental history and English that would employ the 1898 event as a foundation on which to explore the ripple effects it and others like it had on the Black community in Wilmington and beyond.

“We first establish a curriculum and then broaden that curriculum to use 1898 as a lens into American society, culture, history, politics and all of it,” she said. “It has been the case in the past that this subject has fallen through the cracks. But the past doesn’t write our future.”

Better than the generation before

At nearly every level of local education, 1898’s inclusion in the picture of American history is up to the teacher. Even when it is mandated, there is still flexibility in how much prominence it is given.

But for those who have made the effort, they are adamant it is essential learning.

“I certainly would not want to be in a position where I am told this is what you have to teach, when you have to teach it and how you have to teach it,” Hodges said. “But I do also feel like anybody who is teaching North Carolina history, especially in Eastern North Carolina, you gotta give a hat tip to the coup of 1898 because it is just too unique and important to this city and this country not to teach to these kids.”

They are all in agreement that there’s still work to be done, too. As of now, 1898 is rarely taught outside eighth grade classrooms across the state and certainly the country.

But Matthews said this was the culmination of a statewide white supremacist movement and it’s value in the classroom cannot be understated.

“In our district, there is work to be done, but I think we have come a long way,” he said. “These kids are being exposed to this story. This is not a secret, we are not hiding it. We have encouraged it with our teachers, not just with our voices but also by providing the resources and opportunities.”

Now several years removed from her time in a history class, Fuller said she is grateful to have learned about 1898 in school because, had it not been for teachers like Coonradt, she’s not sure she ever would have known it happened.

“I think I'm better because I know about it,” Fuller said. “I think it is beneficial for students in Wilmington to know it happened because it offered me a better perspective of where I grew up. There really is no safe haven from racism.”

But even more than her own experience, Fuller hopes more teachers continue to make room for it so maybe, in time, the story can be institutional knowledge in Wilmington – and students won’t need to look to their classmates to know how to interpret it.

“I think teachers faced with whether or not to teach 1898 should really ask themselves, ‘Do we want our students to be better people than we are?’” Fuller said.

Reporter Hunter Ingram can be reached at 910-343-2327 or Hunter.Ingram@StarNewsOnline.com.