Wilmington Ten

The Wilmington Ten were those arrested, tried, wrongfully convicted, and incarcerated for arson and for firing guns at responding emergency personnel during a violent 1971 episode in the North Carolina seaport, following sudden school desegregation in 1969. Although the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education had struck down the “separate but equal” ruling of Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), many southern school boards resisted integration for over a decade before it was finally instituted. Wrongfully convicted of violent crimes, the Wilmington Ten— eight Black high school students, a Black minister of the United Church of Christ, and a White female social worker—were actually victims of the racial and political turmoil during America's civil rights era.

Wilmington's modern racial unrest began when Martin Luther King, Jr., who was scheduled to visit Wilmington on April 4, 1968, instead stayed in Memphis, Tennessee, after violence erupted there, and was killed that day. Black high school students in Wilmington peacefully protested King's murder on April 5, but 3 days of rioting followed, with order restored only when 150 National Guardsmen occupied the city.

Until 1969 Wilmington had three high schools: ail-White New Hanover and Hoggard and all-Black Williston Industrial. When desegregation came in the summer of 1969, Black students and teachers were reassigned to New Hanover and Hoggard, while Williston was summarily closed (later to become a junior high school). The closure of Williston stunned the Black community, which had taken great pride in the school. Blacks' sudden presence in the formerly all-White schools brought resentment from both sides. Blacks who had been active in athletics and clubs at Williston were excluded from sports teams and clubs at New Hanover and Hoggard high schools. Taunts and attacks resulted in fights, and police presence was constant. High school unrest became citywide and included rioting and arson, including the burning of the school board's building.

In January 1971, hundreds of Black students boycotted the schools. The White pastor of Gregory [Page 906]Congregational United Church of Christ, Eugene Templeton, offered his integrated church as a gathering place and school alternative. On February 1, 1971, the national United Church of Christ's Commission on Racial Justice sent the young Reverend Benjamin Chavis to Wilmington to organize and provide structure for the students. Chavis, sporting a large Afro, delivered fiery speeches denouncing segregation and demanding social justice. Images of Chavis speaking and crowds of Black youth responding with raised fists dominated local news.

Soon members of a White supremacist group, The Rights of White People (ROWP), a Ku Klux Klan affiliate, arrived. Heavily armed, the ROWP held Klan-like meetings in a public park, ratcheting up tension. Black protesters marched repeatedly to City Hall, requesting a citywide curfew to stop the gunfire that nightriders aimed at the Gregory church. (One night, a Black witness counted over 30 cars with White occupants circling Gregory church.) Curfew was denied.

On February 6, 1971, Mike's Grocery, a convenience store a few hundred yards from Gregory church, was firebombed. Responding police and firefighters were met with sniper fire, which they returned, killing a Black teenager with a gun, Steve Mitchell, in an alley near the store. There was a perception that snipers were in or near the church. The next day a White man with a pistol, Harvey Cumber, was killed in his truck near the church by persons unknown. Rumors of guns, dynamite, and bomb-making in Gregory church circulated. Mayor Williams requested assistance from the National Guard and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, and a curfew was finally declared.

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