October 18

I saw a DC3 flying over Wilmington this morning. Sixty-year-old airplanes are at least as rare as sixty-six yea old men touring on bicycles. I saluted my fellow antique.

Took a little tour of downtown Wilmington this morning. It's a nice place, much like downtown Halifax, but there were very few people around. Stopped at the Cape Fear Museum, paid $5 admission, and in five minutes felt I had been ripped off. For instance, they have assembled the fossilized skeleton of a giant sloth, discovered with five others during the excavation for a new building in Wilmington. The exhibit has a two-sentence description of the process of fossilization, without any mention of how long that process takes. Nor was there any mention of the dates in which giant sloths crawled the earth. Six giant sloth carcasses in one site makes me think of human hunters, but that thought is not addressed in the exhibit. In another section there is a display of flint tools found in the Cape Fear region, arranged from earliest to latest, but again without dates.

Paleontologists and Archaeologists had to have worked on those discoveries and displays, and they would have made an attempt to accurately date them. But the museum, in cowardice, ignorance, or shared belief with Creationists, has suppressed that information.

Moving on to more recent times, the museum has a display about the Wilmington Ten, who they say were radicals who blew up Mike's Grocery in 1971. A few photographs and articles from the newspapers at the time. And that is the only display that deals with violence associated with Jim Crow and the struggle against it. No mention of 85 blacks lynched between 1882 and 1962. And as for Mike's Grocery, try this:

Newsweek July 31, 1978, p. 23
THE WILMINGTON TEN. In 1971, Ben Chavis, a field organizer for the United Church of Christ's Commission for Racial Justice, went to Wilmington, N. C., to help quell violence resulting from court-ordered school desegregation. During a night of rioting, a white-owned grocery store was burned to the ground. Chavis, eight other black men and one white woman were charged with firebombing the store. In 1972, they were convicted and sentenced to a combined total of 282 years in prison - one of the stiffest sentences ever imposed in North Carolina for arson in which no one died.

In 1976, one of the three young witnesses against them recanted his testimony and the others followed suit. They claimed that they had been coerced and bribed by prosecutors. Civil-rights leaders and politicians requested a new trial or a gubernatorial pardon. But a superior-court judge refused to grant a new trial, and last January, Gov. James Hunt declined to pardon the ten, though he did approve slight reductions in the sentences of the nine still in jail. Since then, one more of the ten has been paroled. The eight remaining are on AI's list.

I shoulda asked for my money back.