Fifty years ago this month, protests convulsed Wilmington, N.C., with extensive property damage, vigilante violence and death. Black citizens had been protesting their mistreatment in the city’s schools as they underwent desegregation, and White supremacists responded by patrolling the streets. The events of February 1971 became immortalized thanks to the case of the Wilmington 10 — nine Black men in their teens and early 20s, many of them still in high school, and a White woman in her 30s — participants in the protests who were punished with the full force of the law for standing against discrimination.
The case amounted to one of the most egregious instances of injustice and political repression from the post-World War II Black freedom struggle. It represented a high-profile attempt by federal and North Carolina authorities to stanch an increasingly radical African American freedom movement. Only a years-long, concerted effort by activists righted the wrong. The callous, corrupt and abusive prosecution has lost none of its power to shock a half-century after the fact. Less understood, but just as important, the efforts to free the Wilmington 10 helped define an important moment in African American politics, in which an increasingly variegated movement coordinated its efforts under the leadership of a vital radical left.
In the first week of February 1971, African American high school students in the newly desegregated Wilmington school system staged a school boycott to protest systematic mistreatment by the city’s education authorities, teachers, police who were called to campus and White adult thugs who harassed them on school grounds. The students issued a list of demands and established a boycott headquarters at a church in town.
As news of the boycott spread, the armed Rights of White People (ROWP) launched violent attacks on the church and the students. After enduring several days of drive-by shootings and receiving no police protection, the boycotters and their supporters established an armed guard around the church’s perimeter.
Some boycott supporters, to this day unknown, firebombed nearby White-owned businesses, including a mom-and-pop store called Mike’s Grocery. While Mike’s was burning, police shot and killed a student leader who many claimed was unarmed. The next morning, an armed White man was shot and killed as he prepared to attack the church.
With the man’s death, Wilmington’s mayor finally declared a curfew, and the governor mobilized the National Guard to suppress the boycott. Local officials and the press criticized the police for not being aggressive enough against the boycott. One judge stated from the bench that he would have treated protesters as Lt. William Calley had treated the villagers of My Lai, whose slaughter by American troops in Vietnam was still a fresh memory. The loudest voices in the public square howled for retribution.
A year later, in March 1972, local and state authorities arrested 17 protesters on charges related to the week of violence — but no one from the ROWP. In September 1972, 10 people — the Wilmington 10 — were put on trial, accused of burning Mike’s and conspiring to shoot at the police and firefighters who responded to the blaze. During the trial, the judge allowed the exclusion of most Blacks from the jury and denied defense motions and objections. After being treated unusually well by law enforcement officials, prosecutors’ key witness lied on the stand. The prosecutor also withheld evidence from the defense, including that this witness lied. After a few hours of deliberation, the jury convicted the Wilmington 10 on all counts and sentenced them to a total of more than 280 years in prison.
Almost immediately, a widespread and worldwide campaign began to free the 10. Powered initially by the grass-roots organizing of Black nationalist organizations, it came to involve adherents of other political ideologies, elected officials, foreign governments and Amnesty International. In December 1980, faced with worldwide public outcry and overwhelming evidence of judicial and prosecutorial misconduct, a federal appellate court overturned the convictions.
In large measure, the campaign to free the 10 succeeded by connecting this injustice to the struggles of others in North Carolina and beyond, touching people from all walks of life. The United Church of Christ’s Commission for Racial Justice (CRJ) argued that this miscarriage of justice was symptomatic of the legal repression of the Black freedom struggle. It educated the public about the criminal justice system and fought for reform.
The CRJ was joined by the Communist Party-influenced National Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression (NAARPR), which had considerable contacts in the labor movement and networks of left-of-center politicians across the country. Later, the multiracial Workers Viewpoint Organization (WVO) initiated the North Carolina Coalition to Free the Wilmington 10 to call attention to the case among left-leaning constituencies. Separately and together, these groups educated the public on the case, fueling widespread outrage that forced the U.S. government and the federal courts to act.
This history offers lessons for those fighting injustice today. The CRJ, NAARPR, WVO and others worked to unite preexisting and atomized strands of discontent (principally, but not exclusively, in the Black freedom struggle) with a focus on the 10. They explained to people how their particular struggles were linked and, most crucially, that the source of the problem was a justice system that operated for the profit of the few at the expense of the many. This campaign brought disparate actors who might have seen their struggles as separate from the push to free the 10 into the arena, increasing attention on the case and pushing the justice system to act.
Despite the successes of the Wilmington 10 campaign, the past 50 years have witnessed increased inequality and suffering in both economics and criminal justice. The injustice of police violence, mass incarceration and, more recently, the federal government’s failed response to covid-19 have animated the past year’s protests, drawing to the streets people from all walks of life focused on the police killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and others.
There is now a possibility to renew a radical politics that attacks the inequality that has metastasized in our society and educates people about its causes and solutions. But doing so will require a functioning coalition that brings together activism on myriad issues that have drawn people to action — police violence, judicial misconduct, health care as a right, jobs, a living wage and debt relief, among others. These problems afflict a majority of Americans, especially African Americans, and they cannot be solved as separate issues. Such an effort would recognize racism not as separate from history but as part of historical processes and political economy, as the “free the 10” campaign did. Such a movement will be in a better position to influence a majority of the people and seriously contend for radical change.