Amnesty International placed nine of the convicts on its list of political prisoners. The chief prosecution witness had been sent to a mental hospital before his testimony. Foreign correspondents flew in, asking awkward questions about violations of human rights. The state insisted that the harsh sentences, averaging 28 years, were meted out for dangerous criminal activity, but the convicts' partisans accumulated evidence that the real motive was the stifling of dissent.
The Soviet Union? A Latin American dictatorship? Not this time. The unpleasant scenario is being played out on the sandy plains and flat farm land of eastern North Carolina. Nine young black men and a white woman were convicted 41/2 years ago of fire-bombing a grocery store during racial disorders in the troubled river port of Wilmington. They were sentenced to terms totaling 282 years in prison. Last week, amid charges of perjury and coercion on both sides, the Wilmington Ten were back in a state courtroom, attempting to have the verdict overturned.
Unlawful Burning. The Wilmington affair erupted in early February 1971, when tensions resulting from school desegregation led to widespread demonstrations, arson, shootings and other violence. A black civil rights organizer, the Rev. Benjamin F. Chavis, then 23, was sent to the city by the United Church of Christ's Commission on Racial Justice; he quickly became a leader of the black demonstrators. Just five days after his arrival, someone bombed Mike's Grocery, 300 yds. from Chavis' headquarters at the manse of Gregory Congregational Church. In that weekend of violence, one middle-aged white man and one black youth were killed before National Guardsmen restored order. More than a year later, Chavis and his followers, eight of them high school students, were indicted for conspiracy and unlawful burning. "None of us had anything to do with it," Chavis told TIME'S Jay Rosenstein on the eve of the new hearing. "My role in Wilmington was to preach nonviolence."
The trial was moved to a nearby county, but after a jury of ten blacks and two whites was tentatively selected, Prosecutor Jay Stroud complained of stomach pains and obtained a postponement. Next time out, Stroud used all his 40 pre-emptory challenges to eliminate blacks from the jury, and ended with a panel often whites and two elderly blacks. "The best we were hoping for was a hung jury if the two blacks could hold out," Chavis recalls. After a five-week trial, in which several young blacks testified that the ten defendants had staged the bombing, the jury took only three hours to convict them. Chavis was handed a 29-to-34-year sentence.
It was the first conviction for Chavis, who had earned a degree in chemistry from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, but hardly his first brush with Southern justice. From 1968 to 1971, while pursuing civil rights work, he had frequently been jailed on such charges as trespassing, driving with a faulty turn signal, aiding fugitives and disrupting public schools. All ended in acquittal or dropping of charges. In the Wilmington case, the appeals were turned down 16 months ago, and the ten were imprisoned, though the white woman was paroled early this year.