did not hear their grievances, and the students organized a boycott to protest for their civil rights. Chavis and nine others were arrested in February 1972, charged with conspiracy and arson. Following a controversial trial, all ten were convicted in 1972. The oldest man at age 24, Chavis drew the longest sentence, 34 years. The ten were incarcerated while supporters pursued appeals. The case of the Wilmington Ten was condemned internationally as a political prosecution. In 1978 Amnesty International described Benjamin Chavis and eight others of the Wilmington Ten still in prison as "American political prisoners" under the definition of the Universal Rights of Man and the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights. They were prisoners of conscience. In December 1980, the Federal Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals ordered a new trial and overturned the original conviction because of "prosecutorial misconduct." Chavis drew from this experience in his books: An American Political Prisoner Appeals for Human Rights (1978) (written while he was still in prison) and Psalms from Prison. In 1978, Chavis was named as one of the first winners of the Letelier-Moffitt Human Rights Award. On December 31, 2012, Chavis and the surviving members of the Wilmington Ten were granted Pardons of Innocence by North Carolina Governor Beverly Perdue. The New York Times editorialized for the pardons of innocence for the Wilmington 10 as the case had become an international cause celebre as an example of virulent racist political prosecution. Environmental racism In 1982, Dr. Chavis coined the term environmental racism during environmental justice protests in Warren County, NC. Over the past four decades, Dr. Chavis has emerged as the "Godfather of the Environmental Justice Movement." One account by the Washington Post documented that Benjamin Chavis cried out: "this is environmental racism!" at the moment of his arrest during the 1982 PCB landfill protests in North Carolina. He writes in the forward of a 1993 testimonial of the environmental justice movement: Racial discrimination in the deliberated targeting of ethnic and minority communities for exposure to toxic and hazardous waste sites and facilities, coupled with the systematic exclusion of minorities in environmental policy making, enforcement, and remediation. In 1986 Chavis conducted and published the landmark national study: Toxic Waste and Race in the United States of America, that statistically revealed the correlation between race and the location of toxic waste throughout the United States. Chavis is considered by many environmental