'Slavery is inhumanity and slavery is against God'

A native of Oxford, NC, Benjamin Chavis represents the generation that followed the Greensboro Four and was inspired by them. A civil rights leader during the black power phase of the late 1960s like Nelson Johnson, Chavis represents a style of activism that is more difficult for mainstream whites to embrace.

Chavis' early years as a North Carolina civil rights leader have been chronicled, in part, in historian Timothy Tyson's seminal book, Blood Done Sign My Name, soon to be released as a movie. In the early 1970s, Chavis went to Wilmington to work on a school desegregation campaign. He was reportedly convicted of conspiracy and arson in 1976 in connection with that campaign and received a sentence of 34 years that was overturned four years later.

On Jan. 28, Chavis was at the NC A&T University Alumni Events Center for a panel discussion with the Rev. Jesse Jackson and others about the legacy of the civil rights movement. An audience member asked him how he managed to avoid becoming bitter after being falsely convicted. Here's what he had to say:

“The short answer to the question is, I went to Wilmington without being bitter, and so when I came out of prison, there was no room for bitterness. Dr. King used to teach us [that] bitterness only destroys the beholder. All of us have reasons to be angry, to be frustrated, to be disgusted…. Somebody talked about dreams, aspirations — that’s what hip hop is....

“Poverty starts in your mind. We’re poor, but we’re not that poor. If you give up and become bitter — when you become bitter, you start turning on one another. It wasn’t just the prosecutors, and the Nixon administration and J. Edgar Hoover and Cointelpro. They didn’t just put us in jail unjustly. They used some black people to do it. That didn’t mean the black people that turned against me were devils. They were misinformed and misused brothers. So I forgave the brothers that gave false testimony against the Wilmington 10.

“One of the things that happens to slaves, you don’t want to be the slave master. Because slavery is inhumanity and slavery is against God. There are some black brothers who are….

“The children that are here may believe that when the sit-ins occurred everybody was down with the sit-ins. Don’t you believe that we had a movement and everybody participated. There were sit-ins when Dr. King came to town and preachers would not let Dr. King in the church. There always is going to be contradictions…. But I thank God for what happened in this city 50 years ago. I thank God for the students. But you have to understand — what inspired them to do that? There was a movement before 1960, and there will be a movement in 2010, 2011, 2012, 2020…. We’ll all have an opportunity to give and to participate, and not to hate. Because bitterness can take you into a situation where it becomes counterproductive.

“I thank God for my codefendants in the Wilmington 10. I was 23 years old. 10 of us. 15, 16, 17 years old. We were sentenced to 282 years in prison. But we fought hard. Irv Joyner, James Ferguson, the lawyers — black lawyers. People didn’t believe that black lawyers could do it. You all know what I’m talking about: You get in trouble, very few of us are going to get a black lawyer. Come on, you know what I’m talking about. So I’m proud that this is one the few cases that we had all black lawyers all the way up to the Supreme Court. And finally, in 1980, we reversed the convictions, and the rest is history.

“I love my home state of North Carolina. Yes, in this city the Klan and the Nazis killed some people and got off scot-free. Right in this city. In Greensboro. They don’t want to talk about it because they say it will polarize. If we stand before God, the real God, the one God and not the devil, then we have to be truthful at all times.”