Alfred Moore Waddell

Lawyer and American military officer

Alfred Moore Waddell (September 16, 1834 – March 17, 1912) was an American politician and white supremacist.A member of the Democratic Party, he served as a U.S. representative from North Carolina between 1871 and 1879 and as mayor of Wilmington, North Carolina from 1898 to 1906.

Waddell was a leader of the Wilmington insurrection of 1898, in which a violent, coordinated mob of about 2,000 white men massacred up to 300 African-Americans, destroyed the property and businesses of African-Americans, and overthrew the elected Fusion government of the city of Wilmington, North Carolina; and Waddell became mayor of Wilmington after holding his predecessor at gunpoint and forcing him to resign.

This event is considered to be the only successful coup d'état to have taken place on U.S. soil, and helped to initiate an era of severe racial segregation and disenfranchisement of African-Americans throughout the South.