with the word ‘crap’ on it—simple,” he
said. “I’ll carry my groceries in there.”
—Mark Yarm
1
OVERDUE MEMORIAL
INHERITANCE
W
ilmington, North Carolina, 1898:
Just after Election Day, white
supremacists affiliated with the Dem
ocratic Party murder dozens of Black
people in the streets and take over the
local government. They banish the city’s
most successful Black men and a few
of their white allies, creating a diaspora
that stretches from Washington, D.C.
(where Armond Scott will become a
municipal judge), to Whitesboro, New
Jersey (where Black exiles from Wil
mington will create a selfreliant com
munity), and Boston (where Thomas
McKeller will pose for John Singer Sar
gent). Before the coup, Wilmington is
a majorityBlack city, with about eleven
thousand Black residents. Within two
years, the city has lost nearly a thou
sand Black people.
North Aurora, Illinois, 2010: Tim
Pinnick, a trackandfield coach, and
his wife, Rosemary, a school adminis
trator, start thinking about retirement.
They want to live somewhere that’s by
the water and not Florida. An amateur
genealogist who has written extensively
about historical African American news
to track down every living descendant
of the victims.
Pinnick hangs out in churches to
build up his network. “These damn Bap
tists—I ain’t got time for two and a half
hours of your preaching,” he says, laugh
ing. “I favor going to Bible studies in
the middle of the week, or Sunday
schools.” He’s on Ancestry nonstop.
One day, he finds a family tree that Nate
Brown has constructed with his mother.
It suggests that Brown’s greatgreatgrand
father was Joshua Halsey. “I’m, like, ‘Yes,
this is him,’” Pinnick recalls. “I was able
to reach out to him, and now I’m play
ing the waiting game: Is he gonna re
spond in a couple of days, in a couple
of months? Does he even look at his
Ancestry account?”
Rosedale, Queens, New York, 2020:
Brown sees Pinnick’s message almost
immediately. The information doesn’t
surprise him; after getting the Ancestry
subscription, Brown came across an 1898
article from a white newspaper that re
counted his greatgreatgrandfather’s
death by gunshot wound “in the fight
between the whites and blacks” and noted
that sworn testimony from white witnes
ses “will prove conclusively that the ne
groes were the aggressors.” Later, he reads
other sources of information, including
a painfully detailed account of Halsey’s
being shot as he fled, written by a white
resident. “When I told my family what
I found, we kind of celebrated it,” Brown
says. “We just found out someone was
brutally murdered, and my greatgreat
grandmother was forced to suffer as a
result. And we’re relieved in some way,
and I just couldn’t get why. But I’m guess
ing it was some sort of closure.”
Since discovering the coup, Brown
has devoted himself to “aggressively
studying the effects it’s had on my fam
ily.” Joshua Halsey’s widow, Sallie, even
tually moved to Summit, New Jersey,
where she raised Brown’s grandmother,
Juanita Cato, and died in 1940, at the
age of ninety. Learning about the trauma
that his grandmother inherited has
helped Brown understand some things
about her. “The most telling aspect of
it is resolve,” he says, recalling how she
walked everywhere well into her eight
ies. He continues, “My grandmother
was the sweetest thing on two legs, and
she used to watch sports on TV. A bas
ketball game would be on, and she’d say,“Mmm...so then I leave the house, and we spend
eight hours apart, and we actually look forward to seeing each
other at the end of the day. Should I keep going?”papers, Pinnick is looking forward to
devoting more time to his hobbies. They
buy a lot in Wilmington and move there
six years later.
Rosedale, Queens, New York, 2017:
Hesketh (Nate) Brown, Jr., can tell you
that people in his family tend to be ex
tremely good at crossword puzzles, in
cline toward sobriety, and display a cer
tain assiduousness toward whatever it
is they’re doing, whether it be walking
four miles to save a dollar bus fare or
chopping onions for his greataunt’s fa
mous limabean soup. He doesn’t know
much else about his background. When
his mother’s three siblings die in quick
succession, Brown decides to buy her a
subscription to Ancestry.com for Christ
mas. He sees it as “a leisure thing, a com
forting thing, so my mother will be able
to see the sides of our family, and it will
give her a little more closure.”
Wilmington, North Carolina, 2019:
Upon moving to Wilmington, Tim
Pinnick finds out about the 1898 mas
sacre. He joins the New Hanover County
Community Remembrance Project,
which local racialjustice advocates have
launched to honor the victims. Eight of
their identities are known: Silas Brown,
John L. Gregory, Joshua Halsey, Wil
liam Mazon, Samuel McFarland, John
Townsell, Daniel Wright, and a man
whose last name was Bizzell. As part of
the project, Pinnick and a team of vol
unteers—working in conjunction with
the Equal Justice Initiative, which seeks
to confront the legacy of racial terror
nationwide, and using research provided
by the Third Person Project—attempt