There was a successful municipal coup in the United States in 1898 in Wilmington, North Carolina. In years prior to the coup, the Populists and the Republicans had done well in North Carolina's elections in defeating the anti-Reconstruction Democrats. By 1898, however, the tide had turned ,and the Democrats began retaking control of the state. The majority-black port city of Wilmington nevertheless continued to support Populist and Republican candidates and elected a city council that included whites and blacks in 1898, defeating the Democrats who ran a campaign of white supremacy. Wilmington was a large city within NC at the time, and so this represented a stumbling block for the anti-Reconstruction wave overtaking the state. Wilmington, therefore, became the center of white-supremacist activity in the region.

Further inflaming the situation, Wilmington resident Alexander Manly, the only black man to own a newspaper in North Carolina, published an editorial that attacked the notion of black sexual aggression and warned white men that they might end up losing their women to men of all races, not just blacks.

Thousands of white supremacists gathered in the town in November of 1898 and rioted against both the government and the blacks that had voted it into power. They burned Manly's newspaper headquarters; they chased elected officials out of the city; and they used the local military's weapons to mow down dozens of the city's black residents. Blacks then fled not only Wilmington but the state as a whole, and the final bastion of Reconstruction in North Carolina fell into the hands of white supremacists.

Of course, citizens of Wilmington appealed to the federal government to do something about the insurrection. The government of William McKinley--the same McKinley that would oversee the bloody annexation of the Philippines after the United States had originally promised them independence--did not respond, however. And so, as strange as it sounds, a legally-elected municipal government of the United States was overthrown in a violent coup.

In recent years, this has become a popular subject of research in North Carolina and the South. If you are interested in reading about this strange moment in American history, see the collection of historical essays Democracy Betrayed: The Wilmington Race Riot of 1898 and Its Legacy (2010), which is becoming standard reading in North Carolina.