 Wilmington is also known as the childhood home of basketball great Michael Jordan and journalist David Brinkley; famous Wilmington natives include Kevin Beasley, Sonny Jurgenson, Sugar Ray Leonard, Charles Kuralt, Charlie Daniels, Roman Gabriel, Meadowlark Lemon, Trot Nixon, and Alge Crumpler. It is also home to the WWII Battleship USS North Carolina (BB-55). Now a war memorial, the ship is open to public tours and is on display across from the downtown port area. The town is home to the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, the Wilmington Hammerheads USL soccer team, the training camp site for the Charlotte Bobcats and the Cape Fear Museum. The city has become a major center of American film and television production; motion pictures such as Blue Velvet, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (film), Cape Fear (1991 film), Black Knight (film), 28 Days (film), The Crow,and some of Pirates of the Caribbean: At Worlds End as well as television shows such as The WB's Dawson's Creek and One Tree Hill have been produced there.
Although there had been attempts to settle the Cape Fear region in the 1600s, the first permanent English settlers established themselves in the area in the 1720s. The town of Wilmington was incorporated in 1739. A number of the first settlers of the region came from South Carolina and Barbados. Slavery came early to the region, as landowners used slave labor to exploit the region's natural resources. The forest provided the region's major industries through the 18th and most of the 19th century: naval stores and lumber fueled the economy both before and after the American Revolution.
Captain William Gordon Rutherfurd, (1765 - 14 January 1818), who commanded HMS Swiftsure in Nelson's victory at Trafalgar, was born in Wilmington.
Thomas Peters, an early founder of Sierra Leone, escaped from slavery in Wilmington during the American Revolution.
[edit] Civil War
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Main article: Wilmington, North Carolina, in the Civil War
During the Civil War the port was a major base for Confederate blockade runners. It was captured by Union forces only in February of 1865, approximately one month after the fall of Fort Fisher had closed the port. Since almost all the action was some distance from the city itself, a number of Antebellum homes and other buildings are still extant.
[edit] Insurrection of 1898
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Main article: Wilmington Insurrection of 1898
In November 1898 Wilmington was the scene of a violent attack by a well-organized group of whites who destroyed the printing press of the African American newspaper The Daily Record and set fire to the building in response to an editorial that "insulted white womanhood", which was credited to editor Alex Manly. The mob then went to the north side of town, where an unknown number of African Americans were murdered by lynching and many hundreds more were run out of town. No whites were killed during the incident.
At the same time, the Republican mayor and city council were forced to resign their offices and the leader of the white mob was then installed as mayor, leading many to characterize what happened in Wilmington as a coup d' t. The events in Wilmington which was the largest city in the state at the time helped make North Carolina into a Democratic Party-controlled state. They also helped institute Jim Crow and disenfranchisement which lasted until the African-American Civil Rights Movement in the United States in the second half of the 20th century.
In 2006 the 1898 Wilmington Race Riot Commission completed its official report on the event. Comprised of thirteen commissioners appointed by the legislature, the governor, mayor and city council of Wilmington, the commission was assisted by the staff of the North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources. They used the experience of the Rosewood Report (completed 1993), and the Tulsa Report (completed 2001) as a model and set out to provide detailed explanations for the causes and effects of the riots and to propose a series of recommendations to address the wrongs perpetrated by earlier generations.
1918 panorama of Wilmington
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