Forty years after the wrongful convictions of the “Wilmington 10,” North Carolina outgoing Gov. Bev Perdue (D) pardoned the ten individuals falsely found guilty of having firebombed a grocery store in a racially charged case riddled with evidence of perjury by crucial witnesses, overt racism in jury selection, and withholding of exonerating information. The sentence of a total of 282 years in prison for the ten individuals, nine of whom were African American and most of whom were activists in their teens at the time, prompted international outcry. The activist who received the harshest sentence, Benjamin Chavis, later became the executive director of the NAACP. Although an appeals court overturned the convictions in 1980, civil rights groups and others have been vocal in calls for official state recognition of error in the case a recent New York Times editorial called “one of the more shameful episodes on North Carolina history.”