The Wilmington Ten: Desegregation, Fire, and a Wrongful Conviction

By nineteen seventy-one, Wilmington's public schools were being desegregated under federal court order, and the city's Black students were bearing most of the cost. Williston High School, the historically Black high school that had served the community for generations, was closed and its students were forced to transfer to the formerly all-white Hoggard and New Hanover High Schools, where many faced hostility and violence.

The Commission for Racial Justice of the United Church of Christ sent a twenty-three-year-old organizer named Ben Chavis to help. Chavis had worked with Martin Luther King Jr. and preached nonviolence. He met with students at Gregory Congregational Church, a Black congregation that became the headquarters of the student boycott movement.

On the night of February sixth, firebombs went off in downtown Wilmington. A white-owned grocery store burned. When firefighters arrived, gunfire came from the direction of the Gregory Congregational Church.

State prosecutors charged Chavis and nine others with arson and assault. A jury convicted all ten in October nineteen seventy-two, and sentences ranged from fifteen to thirty-four years.

Amnesty International declared the Wilmington Ten political prisoners in nineteen seventy-six. The records here go quiet on the question of exactly what happened that night, and contradictions in witness testimony remained contested for decades. What became clear was this: the prosecution was built on coerced testimony. Key witnesses later recanted. The federal appeals court overturned all convictions in nineteen eighty on the grounds that the prosecutor and the trial judge had both violated the defendants' constitutional rights.

North Carolina granted the Wilmington Ten full pardons in two thousand twelve, forty years after their wrongful conviction. Ben Chavis went on to lead the NAACP. Gregory Congregational Church still stands on South Sixth Street.