I see people drawing parallels between the 1/6 Capitol insurrection and the white supremacist coup of 1898 in Wilmington, NC. That’s appropriate. But I’m sitting most with what the descendants of those insurrectionists will think of their white ancestors. Here’s what I mean.

In 2018, historian and journalist David Zucchino visited the grandson of a ruthless white supremacist who played central role in the 1898 Wilmington Massacre. The white supremacist was Josephus Daniels. Daniels ran the News & Observer, the largest newspaper in North Carolina. But he did more than run it. He crafted the paper into an anti-Black, white supremacist propaganda engine — a surefire precursor to Fox News. He called time and time again for the violent destruction of Black leaders, Black people, Black businesses, and Black institutions in Wilmington. White supremacists answered that call on Thursday, November 10, 1898.

But back to the grandson. Over a century after the massacre, and sixty years after Daniels’s death, Zucchino met with that grandson, Frank A. Daniels, Jr. They met downtown Wilmington, NC. Zucchino tells this story in the final pages of Wilmington’s Lie: The Murderous Coup of 1898 and the Rise of White Supremacy. Zucchino’s mind must have been some place close to where mine is right now. He wanted to know how the grandson made sense of his grandfather and the role he played in the insurrection/coup/massacre, among other things. The state of North Carolina avoided any formal investigation into this coup for a century. When it finally formed a commission to investigate, its report criticized Daniels’s grandfather for his “racial incitements and demagoguery.” The report was correct. At that meeting downtown Wilmington, Zucchino asked grandson Daniels if he agreed with the report’s conclusions about his grandfather. Daniels told him this:

“I never read it.”

So again: what I’m sitting with is how the descendants of those insurrectionists will think of their white (and otherwise) ancestors.