Benjamin Chavis-Muhammad will be the keynote speaker at an event to commemorate the 35th anniversary of the Wilmington Ten in the Warwick Center Ballroom tonight.

The Wilmington Ten was based on the violence that erupted in downtown Wilmington in the wake of both the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968 and a court-ordered desegregation of Wilmington’s high schools in 1969. Frustrated by the failure of educational and governmental institutions to enforce federal legislation and court decisions aimed at eliminating racial discrimination, African American students announced a boycott of Wilmington schools in January of 1971.

Active in the struggle for civil rights throughout the 1960s in organizations such as the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the Congress of Racial Equality and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Chavis-Muhammad, a native of Oxford, NC, was asked to come to Wilmington to organize the boycott.

Chavis-Muhammad and nine others were arrested and later convicted of charges of conspiracy and arson, their combined sentence totaling 282 years in prison.

After being wrongfully imprisoned for nearly a decade, the Wilmington Ten were freed and their records were cleared on Dec. 4, 1980, when the U.S. Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals overturned the lower court’s decision.

In 1993, at the age of 45, Chavis-Muhammad became the youngest person to be elected executive director and CEO of the NAACP. Two years later, he served as the national director of the Million Man March, the largest mobilization in the history of the United States. Currently he is president and CEO of the Hip-Hop Summit Action Network, co-founded with the founder of Def Jam Records, Russell Simons.

Benjamin Chavis changed his name to Benjamin Chavis-Muhammad after joining the Nation of Islam in 1997.

Events in commemoration of the Wilmington Ten are being sponsored by the African American Heritage Foundation of Wilmington, Inc., UNCW’s Upperman African American Cultural Center, Office of Campus Diversity, Office of the Provost, Academic Outreach and Gregory Congregational United Church of Christ.