Tag: kenneth robert janken

“Flyleaf: The Wilmington Ten”, NC Department of Natural & Cultural Resources’ Monthly Facebook Live Conversation Featuring Dr. Kenneth Robert Janken and Mr. Sean Palmer

Earlier in October, the North Carolina Department of Natural & Cultural Resources’ hosted their monthly Flyleaf Facebook Live conversation with UNC Press author Kenneth Robert Janken and UNC Wilmington’s Director of the Upperman African American Cultural Center Sean Palmer. Palmer and Janken discussed Janken’s book The Wilmington Ten: Violence, Injustice, and the Rise of Black Politics in the 1970s and… Continue Reading “Flyleaf: The Wilmington Ten”, NC Department of Natural & Cultural Resources’ Monthly Facebook Live Conversation Featuring Dr. Kenneth Robert Janken and Mr. Sean Palmer

2021 Association for the Study of African American Life and History Annual Meeting

Throughout the rest of September, the Association for the Study of African American Life and History is hosting their annual meeting virtually. We hope you’ll visit our ASALH 2021 virtual booth to browse our new and recent titles in African American history.  Acquisitions editors Brandon Proia and Andrew Winters would love to connect with you if you have a project that you are working on. Congratulations William… Continue Reading 2021 Association for the Study of African American Life and History Annual Meeting

Excerpt: The Wilmington Ten, by Kenneth Robert Janken

The case of the Wilmington Ten emerged out of the events of February 1971. In an effort to lay blame for the violence and remove the effective and popular organizer Benjamin Chavis, the Wilmington police and state prosecutor—assisted by the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (BATF)—concocted a case against Chavis, eight other black men (five of them high school students), and one white woman. Arrested more than a year after the disturbances, they were charged with conspiracy, burning Mike’s Grocery, and shooting at the firefighters and police who responded to the fire. (Ann Shepard was charged only with conspiracy.) The prosecutor, with the assent of the presiding judge, illegally excluded blacks from the jury. He solicited perjured testimony from his main witnesses to convict the Ten, who were sentenced to a total of 282 years in prison. Their convictions sparked a campaign across North Carolina, the nation, and the world to free them. Continue Reading Excerpt: The Wilmington Ten, by Kenneth Robert Janken

Interview: Kenneth Robert Janken on The Wilmington Ten

Hannah Lohr-Pearson: Who are the Wilmington Ten and why are they important?

Kenneth Robert Janken: The Wilmington Ten were Ben Chavis, Reginald Epps, Jerry Jacobs, James McKoy, Wayne Moore, Marvin Patrick, Ann Shepard, Connie Tindall, Willie Earl Vereen, and Joe Wright. They were nine black men in their teens and early twenties, many of them still in high school, and a white woman in her thirties, who participated in conflict and protests over the desegregation of the public schools in Wilmington, North Carolina, and were punished with the full force of the law for standing against discrimination. The case of the Wilmington Ten amounts to one of the most egregious instances of injustice and political repression from the post-World War II black freedom struggle. It took legions of people working over the course of the 1970s to right the wrong. Like the political killings of George Jackson and Fred Hampton, the legal frame-up of Angela Davis, and the suppression of the Attica Prison rebellion, the Wilmington Ten was a high-profile attempt by federal and North Carolina authorities to stanch the increasingly radical African American freedom movement. The facts of the callous, corrupt, and abusive prosecution of the Wilmington Ten have lost none of their power to shock more than forty years after the fact, even given today’s epidemic of prosecutorial misconduct. Less understood, but just as important, the efforts to free the Wilmington Ten helped define an important moment in African American politics, in which an increasingly variegated movement coordinated its efforts under the leadership of a vital radical Left. Continue Reading Interview: Kenneth Robert Janken on The Wilmington Ten