They Stole a City

“An excellent new history out this summer that considers how the past lives in the present . . . Collins’s history is deeply researched and astonishing in its breadth . . . Her willingness to explore how a great injustice reverberates in both the perpetrators’ and the victims’ lives, as well as the lives of their descendants, pushes past what many people imagine a history might be. For Collins, revisiting shameful events in the past is important not for the meaningless exercise of self-flagellation but because one cannot understand one’s present day without this understanding.” —Kaitlyn Greenidge, Harper’s Bazaar

“A scathing history of an infamous act of racial violence . . . Collins’ narrative takes [the 1898 coup and massacre], with ‘dozens and perhaps hundreds of Black citizens’ killed, and extends it to a larger legacy of racial oppression . . . An urgent work of reportage and historical research that lays bare structural racism past and present.” —Kirkus (starred review)

“With moral clarity and narrative precision, Lauren Collins has crafted a searing account of the 1898 Wilmington massacre that is as analytically rigorous as it is emotionally resonant. By centering the interwoven lives of four families, They Stole a City exposes the calculated architecture of white supremacist violence while illuminating the enduring strategies of Black resistance, survival, and community-making. Collins refuses the comfort of historical distance, instead insisting on the intimate and structural continuities between past and present. The result is a work that not only deepens our understanding of a singular American atrocity, but also sharpens our recognition of the forces that continue to threaten democratic life. This is essential reading for anyone committed to reckoning honestly with history—and to confronting its living legacies.” —LeRhonda S. Manigault-Bryant, author of Talking to the Dead: Religion, Music, and Lived Memory among Gullah/Geechee People.

“With startling directness and vivid prose based on original and deep research, journalist Lauren Collins retells the story of Wilmington, North Carolina’s darkest period. This sweeping saga featuring four families across generations lays bare a long, horrid history of racial oppression and political violence, revealing not only how anti-democratic, white supremacist forces organized and leveraged brutality, but also how targeted individuals defended their humanity and communities. They Stole a City is an immersive yet sensitive account that reminds Americans we need not look to twentieth-century Europe for examples of electoral corruption and autocratic consolidation reinforced by racist ideology, roving thugs, economic elites, and immoral politicians. This is an urgent, unsettling history that we need now.” —Tiya Miles, author of All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, a Black Family Keepsake

“Collins eloquently renders spellbinding tales of the 1898 Wilmington racial massacre and the families whose lives it changed forever. Her meticulous research juxtaposes its bloody history with profound interpretations of the legacies that shaped such diverse figures as Michael Jordan and Lara Trump. They Stole a City proves that past is always present. An indispensable read for all of us in these times.” —Glenda Gilmore, Peter V. and C. Vann Woodward Professor of History Emerita at Yale University

“Lauren Collins has written a deeply reported history and released it into this moment when history is dying, erased by lies and conspiracy, so that when reading I couldn’t tell if this is a story of one city’s lynch mob in 1898 or an entire nation’s lynch mob in 2026. They Stole A City is at its core an investigation into one American mob, which makes it an investigation of all American mobs. This story happened 128 years ago. This story is happening now.” —Wright Thompson, senior writer for ESPN and the New York Times bestselling author of The Barn, Pappyland, and The Cost of These Dreams

“The brilliance of They Stole a City is not just that Lauren Collins grounds her sweeping, incendiary history of an infamous historical episode in the intimate lived experiences of four North Carolina families, but that she captures the ‘prolific afterlife’ of the massacre and coup in Wilmington, demonstrating in vivid, poignant, often painful detail the extent to which the past continues to shape and echo in our present day. An extraordinary book.” —Patrick Radden Keefe, New York Times bestselling author of five books, including Empire of Pain

“They Stole a City is a brilliant rendering of a history buried in a shallow grave. Lauren Collins has not only measured the weight of a specific and tragic chapter of our past, she has charted the Wilmington Massacre’s bearing upon the present. The origins of our current crisis become more legible in these pages – as do the forces that would just as soon steal a nation.” —Jelani Cobb, Dean of Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism, winner of the Peabody Award in 2020 and finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and author of Three or More Is a Riot

“Lauren Collins’s 1898 Wilmington race-riot masterpiece ends with Donald Trump’s second coming, thus bookending Reconstruction’s democratic promise with our hard-fought diversity, equity, and inclusion dangerously mocked. They Stole a City is required reading.” —David Levering Lewis, two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize for W.E.B. Du Bois: A Biography 1868-1963