The world-views of civil rights leaders like Chavis Muhammad and Martin Luther King, Jr., were shaped against this backdrop of hatred and bigotry.
In 1968--the year of King's assassination, which some observers feel brought an end to the modern civil rights era--Chavis Muhammad became a field officer for the United Church of Christ's Commission for Racial Justice. The Commission, organized in 1963 in response to the assassination of civil rights activist Medgar Evers and the infamous Birmingham, Alabama, church bombing, coordinated racial justice strategies for national and regional organizations and spearheaded community organization and criminal justice campaigns.
In February of 1971, Chavis Muhammad was in Wilmington, North Carolina, to drum up support for a school desegregation lawsuit that had been brought by the NAACP. On a night of racial violence, one of many in a season of escalating tension, Mike's Grocery, a white-owned store in a black part of town, was firebombed. A year later, the Wilmington 10 (as the nine black men, including Chavis Muhammad, and one white woman came to be known) were convicted of arson and conspiracy and sentenced to a combined total of 282 years in prison, with the lengthiest term, 34 years, slapped on Chavis Muhammad.
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