LaborFest
LaborFest was established in 1994 to institutionalize the history and culture of working people in an annual labor cultural, film and arts festival.
Gold Rush era comes alive in waterfront celebration of SF history
www.sfexaminer.com/news/community/embarcadero-event-brings-sf-history-to-life-in-landmark-pier/ar…
By James Salazar | Examiner staff writer Aug 16, 2026
The San Francisco Historium will transform Pier 35 into two historical areas: an 1850s-era town square and an outdoor shipyard.
Courtesy Rich Yee
A variety show, ship tours and cuisine tastings are among the offerings bringing California Gold Rush-era history to life as part of a two-day interactive exhibit.
Red Barn Productions, the event company that hosts the annual Great Dickens Christmas Fair in Daly City, is teaming up with the San Francisco Historical Society to create the San Francisco Historium Spotlight.
More than 50,000 square feet of Pier 35 on The Embarcadero will be transformed into two historical areas: an 1850s-era town square and an outdoor shipyard. Those spaces will be filled with miners, sailors, merchants, craftspeople and other characters sharing stories of how people came together to shape The City.
The San Francisco Historium will run Saturday and Sunday from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Over the course of the weekend, guests can hear live performances from local artists, sample delicacies and beverages from eight vendors, play games and activities, and shop at a market highlighting artisans and makers.
Organizers said the inaugural extravaganza is allowing The City to commemorate those who helped build what was then a small waterfront settlement.
“Many people aren’t interested in history because they think it just presents facts about the past, when in fact, if done right, history is storytelling at its best — a vivid show into events that shaped communities,” said SFHS Deputy Director Lana Costantini.
Performers portraying historical figures associated with The City will be roaming Pier 35 and sharing insightful tidbits with attendees, according to organizers.
The lineup includes Mark Twain — who did not make the comment commonly attributed to him about our frigid summer climate — and Joshua Abraham Norton, a Gold Rush-era businessman who declared himself emperor of the U.S. in 1859 and is now remembered as “Emperor Norton.”
Mary Ellen Pleasant, a millionaire who used her money to invest in the Underground Railroad, is also scheduled to make an appearance.
The Historium will also highlight The City’s maritime beginnings and its role as the West Coast’s center of 19th-century maritime trade. It will offer tours of the 132-foot-long, two-masted sailing ship known as the Matthew Turner.
Owned by the Sausalito nonprofit Call of the Sea, the brigantine was modeled after the Galilee, a ship built in the 1800s by designer and builder Matthew Turner.
Two-day event brings SF history to life
www.sfexaminer.com
San Francisco Historium Spotlight offers glimpse of The City during the Gold Rush.
As Economic Pessimism Spreads, China’s Worker-Writers Strike a Chord
Poems, essays and books written by working-class writers have garnered recognition in recent years — as well as increasing government attention.
www.nytimes.com/2026/08/19/world/asia/china-working-class-writers-books.html
Hu Anyan, wearing a gray T-shirt and dark shorts, stands in a library aisle between bookshelves, holding a book with both hands.
Hu Anyan’s memoir, “I Deliver Parcels in Beijing,” became a best seller in China and was later translated into English. It is a diaristic account of the 19 jobs he held over two decades across China.Credit…Jade Gao/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Yan Zhuang.png
By Yan Zhuang
Aug. 19, 2026, 12:00 a.m. ET
A Chinese food delivery driver rushes from gig to gig, measuring time by the number of jobs he completes instead of by the passing of the seasons. He toils in cities across China to send money back to his family, but has been away for so long that his son calls him “that man” instead of “Dad.”
These are scenes from the poems of Wang Jibing, a food delivery driver, one of several Chinese poets and authors who have turned their experiences of repetitive factory labor and insecure gig work into art.
This literary genre has ballooned in popularity in recent years, as many Chinese have grown pessimistic about the economy. For a wide swath of society, wages have stagnated, youth unemployment is high and the promise of a better life in return for hard work has faded. Some authors use their writing to call attention to the harsh realities of life for migrant and gig workers, while others celebrate the humanity that flourishes in spite of those conditions. Their styles are often raw and straightforward.
Writers like Hu Anyan, a courier who wrote a best-selling memoir about the jobs he has worked across the gig economy, and Fan Yusu, who left her children behind to work as a live-in nanny in Beijing, have tapped into these themes. They have published essays online that have been shared widely and led to book deals. Some best-sellers have been translated and published overseas.
Last month, Mr. Wang’s new poetry collection, “Low Flight,” won the Lu Xun Literary Prize, in the highest institutional recognition for the genre yet.
For the Chinese public, curiosity about these workers is intertwined with anxiety about their own prospects. The concern may be particularly pronounced for members of China’s middle class. They “pay more attention to these kinds of narratives because they may represent their future lives,” said Zhu Ping, a professor of Chinese studies at the University of California San Diego’s literature department.
Gig and factory workers are ubiquitous, yet the hardship and indignities they endure are rarely depicted by China’s state-controlled media, which prefers a more positive spin. As the literary work’s influence has grown, Chinese officials, wary of the power of workers’ grievances to illuminate policy shortcomings or spawn unrest, have increasingly sought to shape it, experts said.
A person in a blue helmet and shirt holds bicycle handlebars, under a wet umbrella. People in rain gear walk on a wet street.
Food delivery drivers in Shenzhen, China, last year.Credit…Gilles Sabrié for The New York Times
The Rise of Migrant Workers’ Literature
The genre known as migrant workers’ literature mirrors the trajectory of a work force that now numbers more than 400 million people.
Since the 1980s, rural workers have powered China’s factories and cities while often being denied the health insurance, unemployment and retirement benefits available to urban residents. The literary movement’s early authors wrote essays and poems about their experiences in factories, but as manufacturing jobs have begun to disappear, its new breakout stars are more often doing gig work.
One such star is Mr. Hu, the courier who wrote a best-selling memoir. The book, “I Deliver Parcels in Beijing,” was published in 2023 in China, where it was deemed that year’s best book by Douban, China’s equivalent to Goodreads. It is a diaristic account of the 19 jobs he held over two decades across China, including as a sorter at a logistics company, security guard, convenience store worker and courier.
Mr. Hu’s work first came to public attention through an essay he posted online. It detailed his year on the night shift sorting packages at a logistics firm, where the work was grueling and he struggled to get used to sleeping during the day:
I passed by a row of houses on my way in every day. I could smell the cooking going on inside, see the people collapsed on their couches, tired and content after a day’s work. That, to me, was what true happiness looked like. Meanwhile I was already more exhausted than those people, and I hadn’t even reached the warehouse. I cursed myself in those moments: My damned body cursed my willpower, and my damned willpower cursed it back. I swore I would go right to sleep when I clocked off in the morning. But then the morning came around, and everything went the same as the day before. I was trapped in a loop.
— “I Deliver Parcels in Beijing,” translated into English by Jack Hargreaves.
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People milling around tables stacked with colorful books.
The Shanghai Book Fair on Wednesday.Credit…CFOTO/Future Publishing, via Getty Images
Ding Nan, a 35-year-old teacher in Wuhan, said Mr. Hu’s book was the first piece of migrant workers’ literature she had read, and she has since sought out more works in the genre.
She said she was drawn to stories of gig workers because of their constant presence in her own life. “They are the strangers we regularly interact with, but I never knew what their lives were like,” she said.
Some pieces approach the experience with more hope. In his poetry collection, “Low Flight,” Mr. Wang, the delivery driver, celebrates the dignity and resilience of delivery workers:
Who prescribes that with wings spread one must fly high
Low flight is also a flight
With wind rustling like birds’ chirps
And wheels speeding like shooting stars
The meal delivery note attached to a takeout
In clear black and white symbolizes urgency
Like a legal document and a magic incantation
— “Low Flight,” translated by Chen Du and Xisheng Chen
Ms. Ding said that migrant workers’ stories also changed her preconceptions about the workers. “Society has many stereotypes about them — we think their lives are wretched, that they are oppressed,” she said. “But when I read these books, I realized they are also very optimistic.”
“Low Flight” won Mr. Wang the Lu Xun prize, which is overseen by a government body and given out once every three years. Chinese state media has celebrated Mr. Wang’s win as heralding a new, utopian literary landscape in which anyone can find success.
But a tension exists between the interests of the Chinese government, which downplays stories of poverty or social inequality, and migrant workers’ literature, which lays those realities bare, said Ms. Zhu of the University of California San Diego. She saw Mr. Wang’s award as part of the government’s effort to shape the genre by elevating a more acceptable voice — one that tended toward hope and optimism, rather than criticism of the system’s inherent unfairness.
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Wang Jibing, in a blue shirt, holding an open book and smiling.
Wang Jibing won one of China’s most prestigious literary honors last month for poems about his work as a food delivery driver.Credit…Wang Xuzhong
The Chinese government has said that it wants to foster workers’ voices as part of what it describes as “new literature and arts of the masses,” stories that have taken off in the online era, unconstrained by the traditional gatekeepers of the publishing industry.
That means more resources and opportunities for writers — but largely for the ones who tell palatable stories, said Maghiel van Crevel, a professor of Chinese literature at Leiden University in the Netherlands who studies migrant workers’ literature. Depictions of hardship are acceptable, he said, but linking that hardship to government policy “would be crossing a red line and make it impossible to publish.”
But Mr. van Crevel noted that receiving institutional support did not necessarily mean that a writer had “sold out.” Mr. Wang’s reception by the Chinese establishment “doesn’t necessarily make his writing less authentic,” he said.
From the Factory Floor to Worker Advocacy
Authors like Zheng Xiaoqiong have continued to speak out about workers’ rights even after achieving mainstream success.
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Zheng Xiaoqiong, wearing a gray sweater and white scarf, standing and holding a magazine that covers half her face.
Zheng Xiaoqiong is an editor at a literary magazine in Guangzhou. Her poems from the early 2000s chronicled her life as a factory worker.Credit…via Zheng Xiaoqiong
Ms. Zheng rose to prominence in China in the 2000s for her poems chronicling the monotony and exhaustion women endured in factories. She described exploitative bosses, workers who suffered from severed fingers or occupational diseases and young women forced into prostitution:
the flowing products and interlocking time are swallowed up quickly
aging ten years flowing past like water enormous weariness
floats through the mind for many years she’s stuck by
the screws one screw two screws turning to the left to the right
fixing her dreams and her youth to some product look
at her pale youth running from an inland village
to a factory by the sea all the way to a shelf in America
— “Woman Worker: Youth Pinned to a Station,” translated by Eleanor Goodman.
Ms. Zheng has received literary prizes and parlayed her writing into a better life and a magazine career. She has also continued to speak out about the issues facing workers in China and around the world.
“I’ve always hoped that those in China who have been fortunate enough to achieve upward social mobility can look back and offer a hand to those who are still bogged down, just as they once were,” she said in an interview.
“We cannot change reality with poetry,” she said, “but we have a responsibility to speak out.”
Siyi Zhao contributed research.
Yan Zhuang is a Times reporter in Seoul who covers breaking news.
In a Faltering Chinese Economy, Working-Class Stories Strike a Chord
www.nytimes.com
Poems, essays and books written by working-class writers have garnered recognition in recent years — as well as increasing government attention.
California Museum exhibit explores US mass deportation policies and their aftermath
www.sacbee.com/entertainment/article316876714.html#storylink=cpy
By Tania Azhang Updated August 17, 2026 4:47 PM
On July 18, 1955, federal agents arrived at the Los Angeles home of 7-year-old Victor Ochoa and his family. The agents informed the family they had to leave the U.S. for Mexico. For Ochoa, his typical American upbringing— he visited Disneyland for its grand opening just the day before— ended. When he and his family arrived in Tijuana, the street vendors Ochoa saw reminded him of scenes from the movies. Ochoa remembered his mother cried when he told her. “It was sad for her to see us return to Mexico. For a kid like me, to me, it was a complete adventure,” Ochoa said. Ochoa’s story is just one of several featured as part of the California Museum’s latest exhibition, “Help Wanted/ Leave Now: Operation Wetback & the Revolving Door of Mass Deportation.” The museum’s immersive experience walks visitors through the events of the largest mass deportation carried out by the federal government in its history and its human consequences. The exhibit combines archival images and videos, along with real-life accounts from Ochoa and more recent deportees such as registered nurse Vilma Palacios. Under the Eisenhower-era operation that used an ethnic slur as its title, more than one million people were deported between June 1954 and early 1955. Migrant workers were herded onto buses, boats and planes and sent to Mexico. Most were undocumented, but some, like Ochoa, were U.S. citizens. Many of them came to the U.S. as part of the U.S.-Mexican Farm Labor Program, also known as Operation Bracero, coined for the Spanish word for manual labor. According to History.com, the program brought Mexican immigrants to the U.S. on a temporary legal basis, guaranteeing them wages and humane treatment.
The screening process for the Bracero Program was invasive — workers were forced to undergo physicals to test their strength and were sprayed with pesticide upon arrival. A large portion of the exhibit is dedicated to the inhumane conditions many of the workers were subjected to. The exhibit is also an attempt to humanize the workers as individuals with families. “You see some of those faces, they look really young. Some of them look sixteen,” said Pablo Espinoza, California Museum Board Member and member of the exhibit’s advisory council. Bracero Program applicants line up for vaccines in Mexico City in 1942. Howard Rosenberg, Ag Personnel Management Program, UC Berkeley Labor Management Decisions (1993), UC Agriculture and Natural Resources. Part of the exhibit is interactive, including a recreation of a Mexican-American family home and the garlic that would perfume the foods of a typical meal. Women and children are pictured working in the fields. One photo features Mexican women working on the railroad during World War II. “Yesterday I was able to see in the pictures, as you all will also, there are young mothers with their toddlers and their babies in their laps,” Espinoza said. “There’s a wonderful quote, and I’m paraphrasing, that says ‘we wanted workers, and we got human beings.’” For some left behind, the experience had debilitating effects on their health and wellbeing, said exhibit advisory board member Juan Garcia, Mexican-American historian and author of a book on the topic. “My mother ultimately developed agoraphobia because she had entered without documents when she was 18, and she was always so fearful that she would be discovered and removed from her family,” Garcia said. Ochoa returned to the U.S. in 1967 to continue his education. He eventually became a well-known painter and activist, commissioned to paint murals for the Black Panthers, Cesar Chavez and the Farmworkers Union. “So you know, I’ve sort of dedicated my life to responding to these issues,” Ochoa said. Registered nurse Palacios had just graduated from Louisiana State University in June 2025 when she was detained by federal agents. She had immigrated to the U.S. from Honduras with her parents 17 years prior. Palacios spent six months in detention where she faced severe mistreatment before she made the difficult decision to return to Honduras, she said. She will always be grateful to the U.S. for providing her with an education and a home. “But now it’s not the country where everyone would be so excited to migrate to,” Palacios said. Espinoza, who is from Ecuador, said the stories featured in the exhibition also contain hope. He said he was inspired by Gonzalo Alvarado Sr., who despite his deportation in the 50s, still holds love for the U.S. Espinoza paraphrased Alvarado who said his life would not have been the same if he had stayed in Mexico. The California Museum show was made possible through members of the exhibit counsel including labor leader and civil rights activist Dolores Huerta. It will run through Jan. 10, before it is turned into a traveling exhibit. Tickets for general admission are $10. Children under the age of five are admitted for free, while children aged six through 17 are admitted for $8.
California Museum exhibit explores US mass deportation policies and their aftermath
www.sacbee.com
In 1955, the Eisenhower Administration launched one of the largest deportation operations in U.S. history.
Help Wanted / Leave Now: “Operation Wetback” & The Revolving Door of Mass Deportation
¡Se Solicita Personal! / ¡Fuera! “Operación Wetback” & La Puerta Giratoria De Deportaciones Masivas
californiamuseum.org/help-wanted-leave-now/
On view August 13, 2026 – January 10, 2027 | En vista 13 de agosto de 2026 – 10 de enero de 2027
For over a century, the story of labor in the United States has been a recurring cycle of “Help Wanted” and “Leave Now.” This first-of-its-kind exhibition explores how generations of Mexican farmworkers, miners, and others were recruited to sustain U.S. industry, only to face mass expulsion during times of economic anxiety and political scapegoating.
Through firsthand accounts, rare photographs, historical artifacts, and interactive elements, the exhibit confronts difficult truths while honoring the individuals whose labor has underpinned American economic growth.
“Help Wanted/Leave Now” will be a fully bilingual display, presented in both English and Spanish.
LEARN MORE
Durante más de un siglo, la historia del trabajo en Estados Unidos ha sido un ciclo recurrente de “¡Se solicita personal!” y “¡Fuera!”. Esta exposición, la primera de su tipo, explora cómo generaciones de campesinos, mineros y otros trabajadores mexicanos fueron contratados para sostener la industria estadounidense, solo para enfrentar expulsiones masivas en tiempos de ansiedad económica y señalamientos políticos.
A través de testimonios de primera mano, fotografías inéditas, artefactos históricos y elementos interactivos, la exhibición confronta realidades difíciles al tiempo que rinde homenaje a las personas cuyo trabajo ha sustentado el crecimiento económico estadounidense.
“¡Se solicita personal! / ¡Fuera!” será una exhibición completamente bilingüe, presentada tanto en inglés como en español.
MÁS INFORMACIÓN
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californiamuseum.org
This bilingual exhibition examines how generations of Mexican farmworkers, miners, and others were recruited to sustain U.S. industry, only to face mass expulsion during times of economic anxiety and …
‘Like if John Sayles directed Forrest Gump’: the incredible life of historian Howard Zinn
The life of the hugely influential ‘people’s historian’ is explored in a wide-ranging new book that brings in everything from wars to civil rights to Matt Damon
www.theguardian.com/books/2026/aug/06/howard-zinn-the-peoples-historian-book
Martin Pengelly
Thu 6 Aug 2026 05.00 EDT
Matt Damon may play a great hero in The Odyssey, but one of the star’s own heroes is also set for his time in the spotlight. In Massachusetts in the 1970s and 80s, Damon grew up close to Howard Zinn, now the subject of The People’s Historian, a biography by Dave Zirin.
“Frankly,” Zirin said, “the fact that he’s Matt Damon and oh by the way is now in the biggest movie perhaps since Titanic, it makes it a nice little bauble for the book that I got to interview him.
“But honestly, I would have interviewed anybody who had Matt Damon’s perspective of being young and knowing Howard Zinn as this kind of elder, because the dynamics of their relationship to me really say something about Zinn, from him being willing to go to little Mattie’s public high school to do a talk, as a favor to the family, to being a friend and a sounding board, not behaving like some unapproachable elder, but at the same time it being pretty clear that other adults really respected this guy.”
Many did, worldwide. After an epic career in academia and progressive politics, Zinn died in 2010, aged 87. Damon has carried lessons from him through his own career. Good Will Hunting, his breakthrough hit from 1997, contains mention of Zinn’s seminal work, A People’s History of the United States: “That book’ll fuckin’ knock you on your ass.” Damon has sought to bring Zinn to the screen, including via the documentary The People Speak, from 2009.
But despite such adult endeavors, Zirin said the star’s “child’s perspective on Howard Zinn” was most useful when it came to writing his book. After all, plenty of American schoolchildren continue to come to know Zinn through A People’s History, first published in 1980, often updated, now with more than 4m copies sold. The story of America from “1492-Present”, it is explicitly notthe story of the great white men of tradition, from Christopher Columbus to the founders and on through the civil war, the Gilded Age and the long 20th century. Inevitably, it has long been a target for angry rightwingers.
“Our children are instructed from propaganda tracts, like those of Howard Zinn, that try to make students ashamed of their own history,” Donald Trump said at the National Archives in September 2020, laying the ground for the present assault on revisionist history.
When asking historians or biographers what their subject might have made of Trump, it often pays to be circumspect. Not when talking to Zirin, who is sports editor of the Nation, the progressive magazine founded in 1865. In his introduction, Zirin considers what Zinn would have thought about the politics of the 2020s, including the pursuit of racial justice and its rightwing backlash. Furthermore, Zirin knew Zinn well, having written his own A People’s History of Sports in the United States, and having moderated events with Zinn towards the end of his life.
“He wrote so much and he lectured so much to the end of his life, that we have more than breadcrumbs” about what Zinn would think, Zirin said. “We have full loaves of bread. When you read what he was writing about the Bush administration and the endless wars and the growth of the surveillance state, he could very much be talking about Donald Trump, in terms of his acidic humor about having this dullard in the White House, to the growth of tyranny … he had a perspective on history and how one weathered the ups and downs of history, and in those statements you get a kind of broad view that I think is universal and can apply to 2026 as much as to 1949.”
Zinn was born in 1922, in Brooklyn, New York, to poor Jewish immigrants from Russia and Austria-Hungary. At 17, he went to work in the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Swiftly, he became a union organizer, beginning a political journey that would land him in the sights of the FBI in the red scare and after. In 1944, he met Roslyn Shechter, another leftwing firebrand who became his wife. Joining the US Army Air Corps to fight fascism, Zinn became a bombardier. In April 1945, he took part in a raid over the French coast, an early use of napalm. His horrified realization of what he helped do to the town of Royan would shape his decades of activism and protest.
Zinn was a leading voice against the Vietnam war, where napalm was heavily used. In an extraordinary chapter, Zirin retells the story of the arduous, hazardous journeyZinn and the priest and peace activist Daniel Berrigantook to Hanoi in 1968, to secure the release of three US airmen, battling absurd army bureaucracy and Washington machinations. Another key passage of The People’s Historian concerns the early to mid-60s, years when Howard and Roz Zinn worked on the ground in the American south, in the thick of the civil rights struggle. Academic politics intrudes too, including stories of how Zinn ran afoul of conservative authorities at Spelman College in Atlanta and at Boston University, where he taught for decades. Given such rich subject matter, Zirin’s book sometimes reads less like a biography of a historian than as the basis for a novel or screenplay, written (in fantasyland) by Joseph Heller or Philip Roth.
Zirin found himself thinking cinematically, sometimes “of the Woody Allen character Zelig or or even the Tom Hanks character of Forrest Gump: people who find themselves unintentionally at these incredible pivot points in history. And yet the difference between Howard Zinn and Zelig or Forrest Gump is that Zinn is also a working-class, Ivy League-trained historian [he studied at NYU and Columbia after the war], so he finds himself at these incredible pivots and yet also has this incredible history and perspective and leadership ability through his years as an organizer. It’s incredible. It would be like if John Sayles directed Forrest Gump.”
Zirin clearly looked up to Zinn, much as Damon did before. Nonetheless, the portrait in Zirin’s pages is unsparing.
“There’s a sign over my desk that says ‘hagiography’ with a line through it,” Zirin said. “I looked for the warts, hard, because the fear going in was given my respect for the work and the fact I got to know him at the end of his life,” a need to celebrate the man and his work might take over.
Zinn’s commitment to protest and rise to national fame was hard on Roz and their children, Jeff and Myla. When times got tough for Zinn, Zirin said: “What I found was that if you want to call it his drug of choice, he was able to live through these times when he was also able to lecture in the classroom, about all sorts of topics from the history of civil liberties to the Gilded Age. He taught social sciences at different points, and then saw his students be able to go out and apply it, then come back to the classroom. He lived through times when people were living history. He was able to teach that history, and then see history being made.”
The People’s Historian: The Outsized Life of Howard Zinn, published by Dutton, is out now.
‘Like if John Sayles directed Forrest Gump’: the incredible life of historian Howard Zinn
www.theguardian.com
The life of the hugely influential ‘people’s historian’ is explored in a wide-ranging new book that brings in everything from wars to civil rights to Matt Damon
Hubert Harrison & The Forbidden Genius Of Black Radicalism With Professor Brian Kwoba
youtu.be/D5Qgc83S1Eg
One of the most important Black working class leaders in the United States was Hubert Harrison who was from the Caribbean but immigrated into the United States and Harlem where he played an important role in the Black working class and labor struggles.
Brian Kwoba has written a critical book about his life called "Hubert Harrison, Forbidden Genius of Black Radicalism".
He spoke during LaborFest about Harrison's life and its relevance for today. This interview took place on July 31, 2026.
Additional Info:
www.briankwoba.com/
LaborFest
www.laborfest.net
Production of WorkWeek
www.labormedia.net
White Supremacists Took Over a City in 1898. The Fallout Continues.
A new book by the journalist Lauren Collins chronicles the ongoing effects of the violent takeover of Wilmington, N.C., on those living in its aftermath.
www.nytimes.com/2026/07/15/books/review/they-stole-a-city-lauren-collins.html
An old black-and-white photo of the smoldering remains of a two-story building with several dozen armed men standing in front of it.
An armed white mob in front of the smoldering remains of The Wilmington Daily Record, a Black newspaper, on Nov. 10, 1898.Credit…via Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division
Jennifer Szalai.png
By Jennifer Szalai
July 15, 2026
THEY STOLE A CITY: Wilmington’s White Supremacist Coup and the Families Who Live With Its Legacy, by Lauren Collins
When Philip Gerard published “Cape Fear Rising” in 1994, he was met with angry letters, prank calls and a bloody deer’s head, deposited on his neighbor’s front lawn. The fury was bewildering. It wasn’t as if he had written a polemic, or even a work of nonfiction; his book was a novel set in the North Carolina port city of Wilmington, and the events that inspired it took place way back in 1898.
“I wrongly imagined that the events were historical,” Gerard would later recall, “that they were far in the past, removed from present passions and agendas.” Gerard, who died in 2022, makes a cameo appearance in “They Stole a City,” a powerful new book by Lauren Collins. He had moved to Wilmington in the late 1980s. His novel broached “the thing that no one in Wilmington talked about,” Collins writes, and he used the actual names of the principals involved — all long since dead.
What happened in Wilmington on Nov. 10, 1898, has been variously called a riot, a massacre and — by the white people who perpetrated it — a revolution. Collins calls it both a massacre and a coup.
The violence that day — estimates of the death toll range from a dozen to several hundred — was ostensibly sparked by an editorial in a Black newspaper rebutting a white woman’s call for more lynchings of Black men. But the bloodshed wasn’t just a spontaneous outburst; it was ultimately strategic.
By 1898, Wilmington’s population was about 60 percent Black, and the city was one of the most integrated in the South. Its so-called Fusionist government brought together white populists and Black Republicans. The afternoon of the massacre, white Democratic leaders brought a group of armed men to City Hall and seized control.
“The most critical phase of the so-called 1898 revolution had been achieved,” Collins writes, “replacing an interracial coalition with a new regime whose singular goal was to make Wilmington white again.”
Collins is a longtime staff writer for The New Yorker who is known for pieces that are often witty and delightful. In 2016, she published a memoir, “When in French,” about falling in love with her French husband. Needless to say, “They Stole a City” is a categorically different kind of book. Collins, who lives in Paris, was born and raised in Wilmington. Her parents had moved there in the 1970s, “white, upper-class newcomers” who were welcomed into the fold as long as they didn’t ask too many questions. Collins may not have any ancestral ties to the massacre; she didn’t even know much about it until a decade ago. But she still considers herself an “implicated subject.”
“They Stole a City” follows “Wilmington on Fire,” a 2015 documentary by Christopher Everett, and the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Wilmington’s Lie,” by David Zucchino, published in 2020. Everett and Zucchino took a history that had been distorted and forgotten and brought it back to light. Collins builds on their work. Soon after starting her research, she realized that the massacre couldn’t be contained to its particular time period. It had numerous antecedents, and its effects continued to reverberate across generations: “The event begged to be examined in its longitudinal fullness.”
The cover of “They Stole a City,” by Lauren Collins.
Her book traces the experiences of four families: the Moores and the Bellamy/MacRaes, who are white; and the Howes and the Halseys, who are Black. Collins begins with a scene on a Wilmington-area plantation in the 1770s and ends with pointed commentary about the “white nationalists of 2026” who nurture “a narrative of victimhood” in order to justify cruelty.
In between she shows how white Wilmingtonians were particularly resentful of Black success after the Civil War, complaining of “Negro domination” and “insolence.” The panic was so unhinged that it could border on parody, with unintentionally ridiculous headlines to match: “Negro on Train With Big Feet Behind White,” or “Stole Cheese: Negro Man Boldly Purloins a Cheese.”
The elite planners of the coup meticulously laid the groundwork. They created a paramilitary and placed a notice in The Wilmington Messenger headlined “Attention White Men,” which called for a gathering at the courthouse on Nov. 9, 1898, promising that “business in the furtherance of White Supremacy will be transacted.” There, they signed a new city charter they called “The White Declaration of Independence.” The next day, they attacked the offices of the Black newspaper that ran the offending editorial and proceeded to take over City Hall.
The consequences were enormous and enduring, though the exact number of deaths is unknown. Collins considers the higher estimates more realistic, given the likelihood that some victims were never found. Black survivors were pushed out of Wilmington at gunpoint or else terrorized into silence. The new government codified rules to ensure that nearly all white men could vote and Black men could not. It would take more than half a century before a historian would dare to call what happened “a coup d’état.”
Collins follows her four families through the ensuing decades. “They Stole a City” is bookended by her moving portrait of Cynthia Brown, a descendant of the Howes, one of Wilmington’s pre-eminent Black families at the time of the massacre. She died on Thanksgiving Day in 2023, two weeks after the city held commemorations for the 125th anniversary of 1898. As a child, she had visited her ailing great-grandmother, a survivor of the massacre. The dying woman grabbed young Cynthia’s wrist and whispered, “If it ever happens — run.”
I happened to be reading “They Stole a City” over the July 4 weekend, toggling between Collins’s historical descriptions of a white supremacist paramilitary marching through Wilmington and contemporary news reports of a white supremacist group marching through Washington, D.C. The effect was sobering. As Collins says, “Nov. 10, 1898, is a centuries-long day that isn’t over yet.”
White Supremacists Took Over a City in 1898. The Fallout Continues.
www.nytimes.com
A new book by the journalist Lauren Collins chronicles the ongoing effects of the violent takeover of Wilmington, N.C., on those living in its aftermath.
Review: WRECKAGE – A MUSICAL TRAGICOMEDY at San Francisco Mime Troupe
www.broadwayworld.com/san-francisco/article/Review-WRECKAGE-A-MUSICAL-TRAGICOMEDY-at-San-Francisc…
Review: WRECKAGE – A MUSICAL TRAGICOMEDY at San Francisco Mime TroupeWhat did our critic think of WRECKAGE – A MUSICAL TRAGICOMEDY at San Francisco Mime Troupe?
By: Steve Murray
Jul. 16 2026M
Could it possibly be that events have finally confirmed just what the San Francisco Mime Troupe has been howling at the wind for 67 years! The troupe whose shows have been called whacko conspiratorial commie and alarmist now find themselves leading the pack when it comes to shining a bright light on social injustice. Wreckage is a tongue-in-cheek satire that hits a bullseye on pray for pay evangelism the dangers of AI in the wrong hands and the disillusionment of a patriotic immigrant when he realizes he’s being used to destroy the liberty he came here for. Mime Troupe Image(L – R) 5. Keiko Shimosato Carreiro Chloris Li Michael Gene Sullivan Jed Parsario.With musical direction by Daniel Savio and Will Durkee four actors (veteran SF Mime Troupe collective members: Michael Gene Sullivan (Security, Nestor, Bobby, Paul); Jed Parsario (Gideon, Businessman, Bertrand, Karl, Lance); Keiko Shimosato Carreiro (Stage Manager, Mari, Jeribeth); Chloris Li (Felicity, Businesswoman, Fredericka, Claudine, Sergeant Nicola, Mari’s Mother) present the good and the very bad with little nuance or subtlety. The divisions couldn’t be more stark- and the alarm presented here is now ominously palpable, and very real.
This new show premieres amongst the backdrop of new ICE murders, a nebulous Iran war, the savaging of voting rights and a bold kleptocracy that had no limits is preaching to a growing audience that is not just a usual choir. The Tony-Award winning SFMT recently received The Prize of Hope 2026 from Åsen Theatre in Denmark for a body of theatrical work created over years in the San Francisco Bay Area, and Michael Gene Sullivan received the Charles Dean Award for Outstanding achievement in acting and dedication to Bay Area Theatre – deserved recognition for their bold and critical role as harbingers of the truth.
Review: WRECKAGE – A MUSICAL TRAGICOMEDY at San Francisco Mime Troupe Image
Jed Parsario.
Wreckage runs July 3 – Sept. 7, 2026.
All shows are FREE and open to the public unless otherwise listed. Paid Ticketed performance: Z Space’s Steindler Stage: Wed., Aug. 19, 2026 – 7:00 pm (Indoors).
Three (3) shows will require RSVPs:
For a complete schedule and more information, visit sfmt.org or call 415-285-1717.
Review: WRECKAGE – A MUSICAL TRAGICOMEDY at San Francisco Mime Troupe
www.broadwayworld.com
Could it possibly be that events have finally confirmed just what the San Francisco Mime Troupe has been howling at the wind for 67 years! The troupe whose shows have been called whacko, conspiratoria…
Data center co. wants 100-year lease on WWII internment site. Tulare residents say no
www.fresnobee.com/news/local/article316646530.html#storylink=cpy
By Leqi Zhong Updated July 24, 2026 1:36 PM Gift Article Fairgoers crowd the midway at the opening of the Tulare County Fair. MARK CROSSE/THE FRESNO FILE PHOTO MARK CROSSE/THE FRESNO BEE Fresno Bee Staff Photo
A proposal to build a data center on the site where over 5,000 Japanese Americans were incarcerated during World War II sparked public outrage in the San Joaquin Valley. Hundreds of Tulare County residents flooded a board meeting at the county fairgrounds this week, urging the board to reject a company’s proposal for a 100-year lease of the site to build a data center, citing harm to the environment, public health, and historical value of the fairgrounds. TOP VIDEOS “This would not only be deeply disrespectful, but also blatantly erase the history of concentration camps in California only a century ago,” said Nashili Morales, a 17-year-old high school student. “This would be an erasure of the unjust treatment of Japanese people. A data center would be built for better technology or advancement, but at all these costs.” Said Mikayla Ortiz, born and raised in Tulare: “No, it’s not going to be built here. This is detrimental to the historic land where a Japanese incarceration camp was held, and we don’t even have a monument to address that historic base.” Opened on April 20, 1942, the Tulare Temporary Detention Facility operated for four and a half months and held more than 5,000 Japanese Americans. Of the 15 WWII detention centers in California, Tulare was the only one with no plaque, marker, or memorial of any kind, according to archaeologist Koji Lau-Ozawa, whose grandparents and great-grandparents were detained at the Tulare concentration camp. For decades, the traces of history were lost as it turned into fairgrounds. Since 2016, some local alumni and students from Mission Oak High School have been raising awareness in the community and working to establish a memorial at the site. On Tuesday evening, temperatures in Tulare exceeded 102 degrees and the air conditioning at the fairgrounds was out of service. The meeting attendees who packed the room had to stand or sit on the floor and use paper to fan themselves, but many stayed till the end of the four-hour-long public comment session. Residents said inviting data centers into the community would exacerbate the water shortages, air pollution, and severe heat conditions in the valley, putting impoverished families and the agricultural industry at risk. “Whenever I leave the valley, I’m astounded by how much better the air is,” said Ethan Magill. “We are at such a disadvantage just because of where we are born. As a teacher, I had days where my students couldn’t play outside because of the bad air quality, an externality that affects everyone who lives here.” Deseree Arroyo, whose grandfather worked in agriculture since the 1960s and migrated the family to Tulare, said she and her children grew up near the fairgrounds. She said it’s disappointing to see her grandparents’ home possibly disrupted by the data center. “Our food feeds the people across the nation,” Arroyo said. “Money is buying communities, destroying communities. You’re destroying the community. You’re destroying the nation.” Data center on fairgrounds statewide The proposal presented to the Tulare County Fairgrounds Board was put forward by Global Stack USA, a company founded in March with an ambitious plan to establish data centers on 70 fairgrounds across California by 2030. It’s aiming to help fairgrounds that are struggling with seasonal income and aging infrastructure, according to the company’s website. In the proposal, the company said that the edge computing infrastructure it’s looking to build is different from a massive data center. Approximately the size of a standard shipping container, the facility can process critical information locally, providing computing capabilities to the community during emergency operations such as wildfires, earthquakes, and other disasters when traditional infrastructure may be compromised. Global Stack USA did not respond to The Fresno Bee’s request asking how many proposals they have sent out and how many fairgrounds have agreed on the partnership. The company has reached out to eight fairgrounds in the Bay Area, including a proposal that features a data center, a massive parking garage, and a helicopter landing pad at Cow Palace in Daly City, which was originally the California State Livestock Pavilion since 1941 and is known for hosting rodeo and livestock shows, the San Francisco Chronicle reported. Two sites in the San Joaquin Valley, Tulare and Kings counties’ Fairgrounds from the California District Agricultural Associations, have received the proposal, according to a press release from Dena Rizzardo, the district’s CEO. Both fairgrounds are considering the partnership but have not made a final decision, Rizzardo said.
Data center co. wants 100-year lease on WWII internment site. Tulare residents say no
www.fresnobee.com
The company proposes a 100-year lease and is aiming to build data centers on 70 fairgrounds across the state.Just say NO!! Not Now, not ever!!!