A planned History Center on the Civil War and its aftermath will make a central element an immersive exhibit on the 1898 Wilmington Massacre. A center official says the dramatic experience could prove too intense for some guests, who will be offered another option to learn the history of what some historians believe is the United States’ only coup d’etat.
Leisa Greathouse, a content development historian on the N.C. History Center on the Civil War, Emancipation & Reconstruction, said a member of her team told her he would not take his young son through the immersive experience.
“We created a bypass,” she told people at a meeting earlier this month for Organizing Against Racism: Cumberland County. “You will still get the exact same information but one will be going through reading panels, and the other you will be walking through Wilmington.”
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Marc Barnes, a spokesman for the center, promised of the Wilmington theater: “You are going to be amazed. It is going to flat blow you away.”