'The wound hasn't healed': Activists recount 1898 Wilmington coup that terrorized Black residents...

Athalia Howe was just 12 years old when she, her sister and mother were forced to seek refuge in a cemetery as armed white supremacists terrorized Wilmington, North Carolina, in the fall of 1898. Separated from her father, they were unsure if he was still alive until days later when they reunited.

Decades after the incident, Howe had a flashback to that time. She grabbed the wrist of her great-granddaughter, Cynthia Brown, and screamed, "If it ever happens again, run! Don't let it happen to you!"

"She had a very stark, distant look in her eyes," Brown told ABC News, remembering the encounter. "I was very thrown. I didn't know what to make of it. After that, no one talked about it, no one explained it."

It would be years before she finally learned from family members what her great-grandmother was referencing: the Wilmington Coup of 1898, the only successful coup d'état in American history.