By Wayne Moore
Reaffirmed.
That’s what I felt deep within, where
even the January cold that stalked the National Mall could not touch me as I stood there on Inauguration Day. For so
long, frustration and disappointment had taken up residence in the hot,
earthen-red marrow of my bones. I reflected on how Michelle Obama must have
felt in her husband’s maiden run for the White House when she said, "for the first
time in my adult life I am proud of my country.”
On that Mall with so many others
there to witness Barrack H. Obama, a black man like me, sworn in for his second
term as our nation’s president, I felt overwhelmed, and like I belonged there.
It wasn’t just the day’s flowery prose and poetry, its soaring songs, festive
parades and fluttering flags. It was, for me, the culmination of a realization
that the country that I always loved more than it loved me had done right by me
– and, along the way, the cause of justice.
In the last hours of 2012, outgoing
North Carolina governor, Beverly Perdue, issued and signed a Pardon of
Innocence for the Wilmington Ten. I was among nine black men and one white
woman who were unjustly charged and convicted for the 1971 firebombing of a
grocery store in my hometown of Wilmington, N.C. during an especially racially
tense time following the closing of the city’s only black high school. At the
time, I was a teenage activist who only wanted, like all ten of us, to see
black students treated with some degree of respect and consideration.
For our efforts, the Wilmington Ten
were sentenced to a total of more than 280 years in prison. Our case generated
widespread condemnation and support, especially following the recantation of
the prosecution’s three star witnesses. Sixty U.S. Congressmen filed
friend-of-the-court briefs with the Forth Circuit Court of Appeals demanding
that it overturn our conviction. The Justice Department found widespread
misconduct on the part of prosecutors. President Jimmy Carter even spoke up
after Amnesty International declared us political prisoners in 1977.
In 1980, the Fourth Circuit Court
of Appeals finally overturned our convictions; we were all
released from prison, released
but not exonerated. I was free of the degradation of prison life, of physical
bondage, but I hardly felt free because every day we spent in N.C. we
carried the gorilla of injustice on our backs That heavy weight dogged
us for years, following four of the ten to all-too-early graves, and prompting
me to try to start a new life in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where I, now 60, live and
work as an electrician.
But I wasn’t thinking about the Great Wrong done to us as I stood at the
inauguration, which happened to fall on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day and the
150th anniversary year of the Emancipation Proclamation. I was thinking, as I
do now during Black History Month, of all the triumphant warriors that came
before me. I thought of the strength and courage of Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, Nat Turner,
Toussaint L’ouverture, Malcolm X and Dr. King. Of Barrack Obama.
Being in Washington on that day was
an indescribable experience, heavy with the weight of the struggles all black,
brown, yellow and red people have had to wage since we all first set foot
on American shores. I give such heartfelt thanks that I could be
free, vindicated and live to see a black man stand on Capitol steps built by
slave labor and take the oath of the land’s highest office in the same vein as
a George Washington and Abraham Lincoln.
I am overjoyed to have received the
pardon after forty years of immense pain trying to live without it. However, my
greatest joy is found no so much in the fact that I have been exonerated from
any culpability in the case, but in the truth that I was able to summon
strength through struggle, from all those triumphant warriors who live within
me.
My greatest wish is that these kinds
of injustices continue to be exposed, so that what happened to the Wilmington
Ten won't continue to destroy the hopeful dreams of young black folks, any
folks for that matter. A pardon can't give back my life. It does, though,
officially bestow upon me the title of
Triumphant Warrior.
Earlier that day in D.C. I found
myself staring up at the great granite likeness of Martin Luther King, Jr.,
memorialized on the Mall, as he should be. I couldn’t help but think that this
tribute was to the same Dr. King who just a
little more than 40 years ago was the subject of jeers and vilification and
hatred. This great monument stood before
me in all its majesty, honoring the same
man for whom I had heard blaring horns
of cars filled with whites cheering his assassination as I strolled through the
streets of Wilmington on that awful day in 1968.
But staring up at
the stone Dreamer on his January holiday, I wondered if there wasn’t a lesson
in his turnabout for me, for the remaining six Wilmington Ten. Will history be
as kind to us? Could those who water-boarded Lady Justice, and the many who
chose to look the other way, to lock us away, ever understand that we were
guilty of nothing more than acting like Americans?
I certainly hope so, because if they
do, they too will likely find their love and faith in this nation reaffirmed.
It feels so good.
