North Carolina Coalition to Free the Wilmington Ten

The Wilmington Ten were a group of nine men and one woman who were charged with arson and conspiracy in Wilmington, N.C. in 1971. For activist groups at the time, their conviction represented growing racial tensions and injustices occurring after the death Martin Luther King Jr. Amnesty International eventually represented the ten African Americans and overturned their sentences. John Kenyan Chapman, the creator of this collection, was an activist and social organizer in North Carolina starting in the 1960s.