Biography
Roderick Kirby was a member of the Black community in Wilmington, North Carolina who, seeing police harassing a 12-year-old boy outside a school game, asked the officers why they were intimidating the youth. The police turned on Kirby; he defended himself and the boy, and about a dozen officers beat and arrested him, then claimed he had injured one of them. The confrontation came amid the mobilization of a white-supremacist paramilitary group, the "Rights of White People" (led by Leroy Gibson), and the North Carolina State Police against Wilmington's Black community. Kirby was convicted of assaulting an officer and sentenced to prison. Documented in The Black Panther (December 25, 1971).
