The Greensboro Massacre, a tragic event in the history of North Carolina.
Four Communist Workers' Party members and another person,student body president at local HBCU Bennett College; were killed during a confrontation between anti-racist protesters and White supremacists, Ku Klux Klan and American Nazi Party members. The organizers were in the process of conducting a racially-integrated effort to organize a labor union in a local plant. At the time of the killings, they were leading an “Anti-Klan Rally” to “push back” against the Klan and Nazi effort to intimidate workers from joining the union.
Around 11 AM, this November 3rd, WVO members and supporters gather at two locations in the Black neighborhood. Some are gathering at the publicly announced assembly point, a Community Center that faces a well-traveled, four-lane highway. A larger crowd is gathering at the actual starting point for the march, Morningside Homes, a housing project surrounded by narrow, two-lane streets rarely travelled by whites other than the police.
Morningside Homes is in the center of an area known as “The Grove” which has a reputation as the roughest Black neighborhood in town. This assembly point obviously offered the potential for better security than the Community Center. WVO in publicizing one assembly point while actually using another apparently hoped to confuse potential attackers as well as perhaps other left political groups whose participation they did not want.
November 3,1979, Klansmen and American Nazis drove an armed caravan into an anti-Klan rally and shot five protesters to death,stabed and beat other protesters. The crimes occurred in front of TV cameras, which filmed the KKK and Nazi assailants holding up photos of the persons to be assassinated and then shooting each organizer through the head.
Up to this point the police are almost totally absent. In fact, two police intelligence officers are parked a block down the street. They have followed the Klan caravan from the outskirts of town. Once the shooting starts, they call reinforcements but make no effort themselves to stop the shooting or arrest the attackers. Other police who are assigned to protect the march are at various staging areas, the closest 10 or 12 blocks away. Some are in a restaurant halfway across town eating lunch.
As the Klan and Nazis drive out of the neighborhood, a few police arrive, stop some of the cars and arrest some of the attackers. As WVO members lie wounded and dying in the grass the police arrest two other WVO members for inciting to riot and interfering with the police.
Within months, the Klan and Nazi assailants were acquitted of murder charges by an all-white State jury. Then, less than a year later, the killers were acquitted of civil rights violations by an all-white Federal jury.
In 1980, survivors filed a civil suit in Federal District Court seeking $48 million in damages. The Christic Institute led the legal effort. The complaint alleged that law-enforcement officials knew "that Klansmen and Nazis would use violence to disrupt the demonstration by Communist labor organizers and black residents of Greensboro but deliberately failed to protect them." Four federal agents were named as defendants in the suit, in addition to 36 Greensboro police and municipal officials, and 20 Klansmen and members of the American Nazi Party. Among the federal defendants was Bernard Butkovich of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, who had worked as an undercover agent in 1979 and infiltrated one of the American Nazi Party chapters about three months before the protest. He testified that a Klansmen had referred in a planning meeting to using pipe bombs for possible assaults at the rally, and that he took no further action.
The Christic legal team was led by attorneys Lewis Pitts and Daniel Sheehan, together with People's Law Office attorney G. Flint Taylor and attorney Carolyn MacAllister of Durham, North Carolina. A Federal jury in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, found two Klansmen, three Nazis, two Greensboro police officers, and a police informant liable for the wrongful death of Dr. Michael Nathan, a non-CWP demonstrator, and for injuries to survivors Paul Bermanzohn and Tom Clark, who had been wounded. It awarded two survivors with a $350,000 judgment against the city, the Ku Klux Klan, and the American Nazi Party for violating the civil rights of the demonstrators. The widow Dr. Martha "Marty" Nathan, was paid by the City in order to cover damages caused by the KKK and ANP as well. She chose to donate some money to grassroots efforts for social justice and education.
Several survivors joined a hundreds-strong march in 2004 to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the massacre. Without support or authorization from city government, a community group called the Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission started an investigation that year. The conclusion? Police and the FBI knew about the possibility of violence ahead of time.
Please take time to watch the videos to get a real feel of what happened.
Greensboro Massacre 1979 (Short Documentary)
The Greensboro Massacre Nov 1979
Information sources:
greensboro.com/news/nov-a-day-that-still-divides-city
colorlines.com/articles/tbt-today-marks-37-years-greensboro-massacre
romeroinstitute.org/project-greensboro-massacre
wcax.com/content/news/Vermont-authors-tale-of-survival-from-the-Greensboro- Massacre- 457293493.html
triad-city-beat.com/greensboro-city-council-apologizes-citys-role/
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greensboro_massacre
marxists.org/history/erol/ncm-5/greensboro/part1.htm
CNN: Surviving a 'massacre'
Greensboro: Closer to the Truth
30th Aniversary of Greensboro Massacre
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