Lynne Scott Constantine
Digital Photomontage, 2023-2024. 20” x 16”

In this piece, I envision a witnessing consciousness being confronted with the weight and density of the Red Shirt, the signifying garment of a white Southern terrorist organization active in the Carolinas in the late 1890s. The site of this deeply fraught encounter is overlaid with a map detailing the extent of the terror in Wilmington during the 1898 Wilmington Coup and Massacre, a white supremacist uprising against legitimately elected Black officials and “fusion” white officials in favor of racially integrated governance. The Red Shirts played a brutal part in the murders, firebombings, and expulsion of Black citizens that characterized the coup.

Until I moved to North Carolina, I had never heard of the Wilmington Coup and Massacre. I had never heard of the Red Shirts. In 1898, my Italian family had only just begun to arrive in New York. But living in Eastern North Carolina, Wilmington is my history too. It was always my history. I just didn’t know it.

Image Sources: The red shirt in the image is a highly manipulated version of an 1890s Red Shirt in the collection of the North Carolina Museum of History. The map of the Wilmington Coup and Massacre that overlays the artwork is a highly manipulated version of the overlay of an interactive “story map” produced by the New Hanover County Government. The silhouette in the photomontage is derived from a photograph I took and manipulated for use in the artworks in this exhibition.