Free the Wilmington Ten at Once!
Free the Wilmington Ten at Once!
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.
Keywords: Commission for Racial Justice, National Alliance against Racist and Political Repression, Workers Viewpoint Organization, Wilmington Ten, Black nationalism, Human rights, Amnesty International, Jimmy Carter, Jim Hunt, Cold War
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