In the years after the Civil War, more than 125 Black men served in the North Carolina General Assembly. They were all Republicans. They built public schools, fought for homestead protections, and represented some of the most politically active Black communities in the American South — sustained by a Fusion coalition of Black Republicans and white Populists that lasted into the late 1890s.

When that coalition collapsed under sustained white supremacist violence, the silence that followed lasted seventy years. The last Black state legislator departed in 1899; the last Black congressman from North Carolina departed in 1901. A population that was roughly a third of the state produced zero Black legislators across all of it.

The Wilmington Massacre
November 10, 1898

A white supremacist mob, organized by the Democratic Party of North Carolina, overthrew the elected government of Wilmington, the largest city in the state. They murdered an unknown number of Black residents, burned the offices of the Black newspaper the Daily Record, and expelled elected officials and community leaders from the city at gunpoint. It was the only successful armed coup against a municipal government in American history. It ended Black political power in North Carolina more effectively than any law. The last Black state legislator departed the following year.