The Wilmington Ten — nine young Black men and a white anti-poverty worker, led by 24-year-old organizer Ben Chavis — were convicted in 1972 of arson and conspiracy after racial violence surrounding school desegregation in Wilmington, North Carolina, and sentenced to a combined 282 years. The case rested on three witnesses who all later recanted, saying prosecutors had bribed and pressured them; Amnesty International declared the Ten political prisoners, among the first U.S. cases it ever adopted.
A federal appeals court overturned the convictions in 1980, citing prosecutorial misconduct, and in December 2012 North Carolina's governor issued pardons of innocence after the prosecutor's notes surfaced showing he had screened jurors for Klan sympathy. The companion Charlotte Three case — Black activists convicted of burning a riding stable on similar paid-informant testimony — followed the same arc of conviction, international protest, and eventual clemency, together documenting how North Carolina used criminal courts against the Black freedom movement's local leadership.