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This chapter and the previous one discuss the sophisticated multiyear campaign to free the Wilmington Ten carried out by religious and secular black nationalists, the Communist-affiliated National Alliance against Racist and Political Repression, Amnesty International, and the Workers Viewpoint Organization of the Maoist new communist movement. In North Carolina, the Commission for Racial Justice, linked the case of the Ten with other local issues, such as police brutality and discrimination in the criminal justice system, and the Wilmington Ten became a locus for radicals and revolutionaries as well as aspiring politicians. Across the country, different organizations connected the case of the Wilmington Ten to labor unions, church groups, student organizations, and elected officials who expressed extreme skepticism of the federal government in the wake of Watergate. Combining education, agitation, and direct action, the major organizations hounded President Jimmy Carter and North Carolina Governor Jim Hunt and forced them to take corrective action. Additionally, chapters four and five place the campaign to free the Wilmington Ten in an international context and demonstrate the ways in which politically conscious actors utilized the contradictions inherent in the Cold War and President Carter’s human rights foreign policy to build international pressure to free the Ten.

Following the guilty verdict in the trial of the Wilmington Ten, a broad based movement developed in North Carolina, the larger United States, and the world to overturn the convictions on appeal and set them free. The movement to free the Wilmington Ten in all its phases developed along multiple independent but intersecting paths. How interested parties along these paths, like the United Church of Christ, the Commission for Racial Justice, the National Alliance against Racist and Political Repression organized themselves and cooperated and competed tells us much about the African American political landscape in the 1970s. From community-, school-, and church-based associations to political parties built on leftist and nationalist lines to the quickening of a stratum of black elected officials, the manners in which the campaigns to free the Wilmington Ten unfolded reveal the ways power was accrued and spent and lost. This chapter discloses the efforts of many organizations in the movement to bring the Wilmington Ten before an international audience to pressure the United States government to free the Ten. The chapter also discusses the Wilmington Ten’s continuing legal appeal, which continued to bring to light evidence of prosecutorial and government misconduct.

This chapter examines North Carolina’s and the federal government’s harassment and disruption of the Black Freedom Struggle in Wilmington culminating in the frame-up and trial of the Wilmington Ten. The particulars of the authorities’ harassment of Ben Chavis, such as ensnaring him in serial and baseless arrests and legal proceedings; the actions of the prosecution in soliciting perjured testimony and illegally excluding blacks from the jury; and the active assistance of the North Carolina judiciary in all aspects of the legal charade are discussed and placed in the context of COINTELPRO and the strategy of repression through the legal system. Despite the outstanding lawyering of Wilmington Ten attorney James Ferguson II, who exposed the lies under oath told by the main prosecution witness Allen Hall, the Wilmington Ten were convicted and sentenced to a total of 282 years in prison.

The conclusion brings the case of the Wilmington Ten from the overturning of their convictions into the twenty-first century when they received pardons of innocence in 2012. Returning to the reality that the state of North Carolina ruined lives in order to forestall inevitable change and combat radicalism, the conclusion briefly examines what happened to the individual members of the Wilmington Ten. It also reappraises the movement to free them in light of recent scholarship on the trajectory of African American politics and black radicalism. Since this century began, North Carolina has pulsed with struggle over the types of issues that characterized the conflicts of the 1970s. Public schools have re-segregated, and state government’s support for quality education for all has been hijacked by a mania for charter, religious, and for-profit schools. Fighters for criminal justice reform have brought to light many other cases of wrongful conviction. Police misconduct, including instances of corrupt investigations, brutality and death under at best questionable circumstances, bubbles to the surface, as in Ferguson, Missouri and elsewhere. This and more has brought forth in North Carolina collective efforts to find solutions, including the broad-based Moral Monday movement, which has been emulated across the South.

The introduction situates the Wilmington Ten events in the long history of racial violence and subordination in North Carolina. The 1898 Wilmington Race Riot was engineered by the state’s white elites and led to the slaughter of hundreds of blacks, the overthrow of the city’s legally-elected, black-led government, and the disfranchisement of blacks in the state. A long-term consequence of the riot was the development of a defeatism that stifled blacks’ political expression: the “1898 mentality.” Fear of violent retaliation was the bedrock on which North Carolina’s progressive mystique of “polite” racial paternalism and “civilities” was built. The boycott and uprising of 1971 snapped the political somnolence and fear that saturated African Americans in Wilmington.

After Austin’s death in 1971, his daughter Vivian Edmonds published the paper from 1971 until 2002. Under Edmonds’ leadership, the paper continued to provide an important voice for the black community, especially during the 1970s and 1980s, when blacks succeeded in increasing their political power in the city and county of Durham. Since 2002, Edmonds’s son Kenneth has published the newspaper. Austin’s daughter and grandson have carried on Louis Austin’s legacy of speaking truth to power, providing a critical voice for the black community in Durham.