From the Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX, this is Reveal. I'm Al Etzene.

It's almost election day in Wilmington, North Carolina. We're at the YWCA.

A DJ is practicing his scratching and mixing for a voter registration drive.

When you get dead, you're dead.

Janik Wapammer is one of the organizers. She's from North Carolina and she and her family moved to Wilmington a few years ago.

I am excited about voting for this election. I can say I'm probably nervous because I don't know what the outcome is going to be.

And the past four years have been slightly traumatizing as a black woman.

And so I'm excited because I have a glimmer of hope that like change maybe on the horizon.

In this contentious selection year, North Carolina is a key battleground state.

And it's long been at the center of fights over voting. Things like voter ID, voter registration and racial gerrymandering.

This year, people here are more politically engaged than usual, especially after what happened over the summer.

Like many cities around the country, Wilmington saw a nightly protest demanding justice over the killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor.

I think you also saw people in the community that weren't just black but that were brown and indigenous. And they were right saying like, another's enough.

That was a big change for the city. It's been racially divided for a long time. For some reasons you might expect and some you can't imagine.

You know, it wasn't something that was taught to me when I was in school. But then when I look at how Wilmington systems are strategically placed so that communities within Wilmington don't ever see each other, don't ever interact with each other.

There are people who grow up in the North side who will never live in Riceville Beach. And there are people in Riceville Beach who's never been to the North side. They don't know what the North side looks like.

People on one side of town don't go to the other. It's like a dividing line drawn down Market Street. A deep scar in Wilmington more than a hundred years old. The black community still feels it.

Even though it may not live consciously in your mind that your body remembers it and that your family's bodies remember it and that the trauma of knowing that there were people hiding in swamps because there were white mobs that were looking to kill them for no other reason. But the color of their skin like that lives in somewhere deep inside of you.

Today we're going deep inside a chapter of Wilmington's past that people try to suppress for a hundred years.

It was an event that totally changed this place. This is not a race ride. It has to be deemed a massacre.

And it also created a blueprint for embedding structural racism and inequity in American life even after slavery was outlawed.

The white supremacists who carried out the coup created a false narrative that lasted almost a hundred years.

...