The Wilmington 10 - American Political Prisoners
I have been a dedicated newspaper reader since I was in the first grade in 1971. I did not limit myself to just the comics. I thought Dear Abby was fascinating and I always read the headlines on the front page. In North Carolina in the 1970s an infamous civil rights case was often featured. The Wilmington 10 was the name given to eight high school students, a minister from the United Church of Christ and an anti-poverty worker who had been caught up when the men were arrested for arson, following a bombing during racial unrest in the coastal town of Wilmington. The case was considered by many to be a travesty of justice from the very beginning. The convictions were based on eyewitness testimony from a mentally ill man who recanted during cross-examination and was banished from the courtroom. The other witness was given a motorcycle for his testimony. He too, later recanted.
when the Soviet Union was accused by the United States of human rights violations, the Soviets used the Wilmington 10 as an example of American hypocrisy. After serving nearly a decade in prison, all of the convictions were overturned, and the state declined to re-prosecute. In 2013, over 40 years after their initial convictions, the Wilmington 10 were granted pardons by the governor of North Carolina, although four of them had already passed away. The oldest of them, the Reverend Benjamin Chavis, went on after his incarceration to become the national president of the NAACP.