Shaun F. Richards

The only successful political coup d’état on United States soil occurred on November 10, 1898 in Wilmington, North Carolina. A group of white supremacists murdered black men, women, and children; destroyed black businesses and property; and forcibly exiled elected officials and black middle-class professionals from the city. One of the major causes leading up to what has come to be known as the Wilmington Racial Massacre was an editorial published in a local black newspaper that denounced the practice of lynching. The plot’s orchestrators used this article as a call to action for white men to commit atrocities against the city’s majority black population. A few years later, Chesnutt novelized the action leading up to these events. His protagonist, Dr. William Miller, is a successful surgeon whose son is killed and whose hospital is destroyed as a result of the white riot. Part of a larger dissertation chapter on the impossible paradox posed by black medical professionalism within the white supremacist tradition of the Jim Crow South, this paper reads the racialized violence committed against Miller as a symbolic lynching intended to punish black advancement into the white public sphere. It contends that the near-lynching subplot of a minor character in the novel provides an important but critically underexplored interpretive key for understanding Chesnutt’s reconfiguration of black masculinity at the turn of the twentieth century