opinion
wilmington Ten: Time to Pardon
“Challenging People to Shape
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F
orty
years
ago
in
Wilmington, N.C., there was
a serious struggle of Black
Americans to end racial discrimi-
nation and violence over the man-
ner in which public schools were
desegregated.
The NAACP,
national and local, had won a
series of important court battles in
Wilmington and across America to
desegregate public school sys-
tems. But, during the Nixon
Administration in the early 1970’s,
African Americans in the south, as
well as in other regions of the
nation, were being challenged
with the systematic racial dispari-
ties involved in the details of how
federal court-ordered school
desegregation was being enforced.
We are grateful that at the recent
2011 Black Press Week in
Washington, D.C., the National
Newspaper Publishers Association
(NNPA) committed to lead a
national initiative to get a “Pardon
of Innocence” for the Wilmington,
N.C. Ten. The NNPA is a vital
association of our nation’s leading
newspapers that for 184 years
have served the news and journal-
istic interests of the Black
American community in the
United States and throughout the
Pan African world. While the
specifics of case of the
Wilmington Ten are unique, this
case of political prisoners raised
the broad issues and plight of the
struggle for African American lib-
eration and empowerment to a
nnPa C olumniSt
Dr. Benjamin F. Chavis, Jr.
global level during the 1970’s.
Black students, parents, and com-
munity leaders made a decision in
Wilmington in February 1971 that
they would stand up and fight to
protect and secure the “quality”
education of African American
students by attempting to preserve
the high academic integrity and
institutional legacy of African
history of racial violence and
injustice in that port city, the
African American community
became the targets of a violent,
paramilitary, anti-Black terror
campaign led by the Ku Klux Klan
and the Rights of White People
(ROWP) organization. Our move-
ment’s
headquarters
in
Wilmington
-
Gregory
Congregational United Church of
Christ - and the surrounding
African American community was
placed in a state of siege by armed
White vigilantes, who opposed
... the African American community
became the targets of a violent,
paramilitary, anti-Black terror
campaign led by the Ku Klux Klan
American public schools such as
Williston Senior High School.
The United Church of Christ, and
its Commission for Racial Justice
led by The Reverend Dr. Charles
E. Cobb, decided to stand with the
student-led
coalition
in
Wilmington to demand fairness
and equal justice. As a young civil
rights activist, I was dispatched by
the Commission for Racial Justice
to give organizational assistance to
our brothers and sisters in
Wilmington.
Because we dared to speak out
and to engage in non-violent street
protests to the long, unprecedented
racial justice and equality.
The Civil Rights Movement
evolving from the 1950’s and
1960’s into the 1970’s had to grap-
ple with the fact that the Nixon
Administration took steps to
counter and suppress the momen-
tum and progress of the movement
in the wake of the assassination of
The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther
King Jr. in 1968. Thus, what we
faced in Wilmington, N.C. in 1971
was not only the vile of local racial
hatred and violence, but also we
later found out that right-wing law
enforcement officials in the Nixon
Administration aided and abetted
the concerted frame-up, unjust
conviction, and imprisonment of
the Wilmington Ten.
We are the Wilmington Ten:
Wayne Moore, William Joe
Wright, Connie Tindall, Marvin
Patrick, James McKoy, Ann
Shepard, Willie Earl Vereen, Jerry
Jacobs, Reginald Epps, and
Benjamin F. Chavis, Jr. Because
of our involvement in the struggle
in Wilmington in 1971, we were
unjustly charged, arrested, tried,
convicted, and sentenced to a
combined maximum total of 282
years in prison in North Carolina
in 1972. We all were completely
innocent of the alleged charges of
arson and conspiracy to assault. In
1978, Amnesty International
declared that we were “Political
Prisoners.” We stayed in prison
during most of the 1970’s while
our case was on appeal. On Dec.
4, 1980, the Fourth Circuit U.S.
Court of Appeals overturned the
unjust convictions because of
“prosecutorial misconduct” in the
unconstitutional and unfair frame-
up. Yet, to date there has not been
an official “pardon of innocence”
issued by the state of or by the fed-
eral
government.
NNPA Chair, Danny J. Blakewell,
Sr. affirmed, “We are going to tell
the story of the Wilmington 10.”
Dr. Benjamin F. Chavis, Jr. is
Senior advisor to the Black
alliance for educational options
and President of education online
Services Corporation.
Gadhafi: America’s Love, Hate Relationship
T
he United States’ relation-
ship
with
Moammar
Gaddafi has vacillated over
the years, at one time viewing him
as a mad dog leader, then accept-
ing him into the international com-
munity as a member in good
standing and more recently,
depicting him as an outcast while
participating in coordinated multi-
national air strikes on Libya.
In a recent speech to the nation
on Monday night, President
Obama defended his decision to
join France, the United Nations
and now NATO in launching air
strikes on the African country to
protect civilians.
The mass protests that led to the
downfall of Egyptian President
Hosni Mubarak after 35 years in
power and the 23-year tenure of
Tunisia President Zine al-Abidine
Ben Ali have inspired protests
throughout Northern Africa and
the Middle East – including in
Libya, Bahrain, and Yemen – and
have underscored the United
States’ inconsistent foreign policy.
While professing support for
democracy around the world, the
U.S. has openly supported dicta-
tors who routinely exploited and
killed their own people, as was the
case in Egypt under Mubarak and
is the case in Bahrain under King
Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa. In
those and other instances, the U.S.
turned a deft ear to human rights
violations because the leaders of
those countries were allied with
America in the fight against inter-
national terrorism.
In the case of Gaddafi, he has
been considered both friend and
foe.
Page 4 The Portland Skanner march 30, 2011
t he C urry
r ePort
George E.
Curry
Libya, a mostly desert country
about four times the size of
California, was divided into three
different provinces, each with
deep tribal tension, until a
Gaddafi-led revolution ousted its
former king in 1969.
Even
Gaddafi’s severest critics concede
killed.
Reagan retaliated by
bombing Libya. In the process,
dozens of innocent civilians were
killed, including Gaddafi’s adopt-
ed infant daughter.
Two years later, Libya experi-
enced the wrath of the internation-
al community after it was suspect-
ed of bombing Pan Am Flight 103
over Lockerbie, Scotland that
resulted in the deaths of 270 peo-
ple. In 1992, the United Nations
applied sanctions against Libya
for failing to turn over two sus-
pects in the bombing.
Beginning in 1998, when it
became the first nation to issue an
international arrest warrant for
Osama bin Laden, Libya took a
The major fear among some African
leaders is that having joined in the air
strikes against Libya, the Obama
administration may now use that as
an excuse to support military
intervention in other African countries
that he has used Libya’s newly-
discovered oil wealth to uplift the
poor, improving hospitals, and
schools.
Detractors say he runs an
oppressive regime where political
opponents are victims of public
hangings.
Gaddafi became an international
pariah 25 years ago. In 1986, the
Reagan administration accused
Libyan agents of bombing a disco
in Berlin, Germany in which two
American
soldiers
were
series of high-profile actions to
repair its tarnished international
reputation.
In 1999, Gaddafi turned over
two suspects in the Pan Am bomb-
ing, prompting the U.N. to lift eco-
nomic
sanctions
against
Libya. Two years later, when the
two suspects were found guilty of
murder, Gaddafi condemned the
Sept. 11 attacks and urged his fel-
low citizens to donate blood to the
victims.
The U.N. made additional con-
cessions in 2003 by lifting travel
and weapons bans against Libya
after it formally accepted respon-
sibility for the Pan Am bomb-
ing. Libya paid more than $2 bil-
lion to settle claims by the victims’
families.
In another step toward regaining
international respectability, Libya
disbanded its nuclear program and
provided the CIA with information
that helped uncover a nuclear
underground market in Europe.
President George W. Bush, eye-
ing Libya as a potential partner in
the war against terrorism, lifted
most U.S. trade sanctions in 2004.
Describing the newly-thawed
relationship, the Los Angeles
Times, which spells the Libyan
leader’s last name differently from
most news outlets, observed: “As
it struggles to combat Islamic ter-
rorist networks, the Bush adminis-
tration has quietly built an intelli-
gence alliance with Libyan leader
Moammar Kadafi, a onetime bitter
enemy the U.S. had tried for years
to isolate, topple or kill.
“Kadafi has helped the U.S. pur-
sue Al Qaeda’s network in North
Africa by turning radicals over to
neighboring pro-Western govern-
ments. He has also provided
information to the CIA on Libyan
nationals with alleged ties to inter-
national terrorists.”
The newspaper continued, “In
turn, the U.S. has handed over to
Tripoli some anti-Kadafi Libyans
captured in its campaign against
terrorism. And Kadafi’s agents
have been allowed into the
Guantanamo Bay detention camp
in Cuba to interrogate Libyans
being held there.”