The Wilmington Ten: Violence, Injustice, and the Rise of Black Politics in the 1970s by Kenneth Robert Janken (review)

In March 1972, law enforcement officials arrested seventeen people who they claimed were responsible for setting fire to Mike’s Grocery in Wilmington, North Carolina, and for preventing emergency personnel from responding. Eventually, ten of those people were convicted on some combination of charges related to the incident and sentenced to prison terms that totaled 282 years. Efforts to free the Wilmington Ten coalesced into a movement that reached far beyond the Port City and demanded the attention of the Justice Department, Amnesty International, the Soviet Union, and President Jimmy Carter. Kenneth Robert Janken’s The Wilmington Ten: Violence, Injustice, and the Rise of Black Politics in the 1970s skillfully traces the emergence and evolution of this movement and provides the definitive account of a major development in the evolution of black politics and protest in the late twentieth century.

The story of the Wilmington Ten has its origins in student-led protests over racial discrimination in Wilmington’s newly desegregated schools, and it is there that Janken begins his narrative. An escalating succession of conflicts at the city’s two high schools culminated in a February 1971 school boycott by black students. In the midst of the boycott, a series of fire-bombings, shootings, and other clashes erupted around the city, and several local businesses, including Mike’s Grocery, were burned. A crackdown in the wake of the violence ended the boycott, but activists continued to organize in Wilmington around many of the issues that the boycott had sought to address. This persistent activism drew the ire of state and local officials and is critical, Janken argues, to understanding the motivation behind the prosecution of the Wilmington Ten.

Having established the essential state and local context, Janken then convincingly details the myriad ways in which prosecutors, state officials, and judges colluded to deny the Wilmington Ten a fair trial and keep them in prison. Central to these efforts was the use of a key witness coached by prosecutors through false testimony, a failure to disclose exculpatory evidence to defense attorneys, and elaborate maneuvers to ensure the selection of a jury predisposed to render a guilty verdict. Further, as the case made its way through the appeals process, both state and federal judges proved willing to dismiss or ignore overwhelming evidence of such misconduct. In light of such circumstances, efforts to secure justice for the Wilmington Ten could not be confined to the courts, and Janken describes how a “vital radical Left” mobilized a vast network of supporters into a united front able to bring national and international pressure to bear (p. 1). Drawing on a wealth of sources, including an impressive array of interviews and oral histories, Janken’s chronicle of this movement is convincing and comprehensive.

The Wilmington Ten reads as a well-paced narrative of the case, but it does not lack for important insights into the trajectory of the black freedom struggle. Janken demonstrates how a new generation of activists in the 1970s continued to organize around persistent concerns such as unequal education and police brutality while simultaneously drawing upon networks and institutions established by earlier generations. Crucially, Janken also documents how intensified repression by local, state, and federal officials undermined such efforts, deliberately forcing activists to shift energy and resources toward dealing with the consequences of that repression. Tragically, as Janken notes in the conclusion, the coalition that eventually secured the release of the Wilmington Ten was not able to repair fully the lives of the nine men and one woman at the center of the case. Nor was such a coalition accessible to countless others across the country who found themselves caught in an expanding carceral state that officials increasingly relied on to criminalize dissent. Simultaneously thorough and concise, deeply researched, and insightful, The Wilmington Ten deserves a wide readership...