“Unearthing Site: Locational Dissonance and the Latent Possibilities of Wilmington’s 1898 Memorial”
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Abstract
The 1898 Memorial in Wilmington, North Carolina stands at the northern edge of downtown. Composed of six towering bronze paddles and two densely inscribed walls, the monument provides visitors with an overview of one of the darkest chapters of Wilmington’s history. On November 10, 1898, a white supremacist mob carried out the only successful coup d’état in U.S. history by violently overthrowing the city’s democratically elected, bi-racial municipal government and initiating a riot in which Black citizens were threatened, killed, and forced to flee. In the decades that followed, this campaign of racial terror was largely erased from the historical narrative, and it was only in the late 1990s that commemorative efforts finally emerged. After a decade of organizing, the 1898 Foundation proudly dedicated the new memorial on November 8, 2008. With location as a starting point, this article explores the palimpsestic site-specificity of the 1898 Memorial. By reading this monument and its site alongside theories of everyday life, place-making, and memory work, I argue that despite its locational dissonances, the 1898 Memorial is a project of latent possibilities that has the capacity to stimulate new dialogues and community connections when paired with grassroots commemorative practices. My analysis will show that the presence of the 1898 Memorial is at once incongruous with its location, while also being transformative, recasting an ordinary place into a site that encompasses a plural and multifaceted network of histories and temporal moments.
