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[237] 9 Aftermath On November 3, the Klan and Nazis had fired their guns for eighty-eight seconds. They killed four demonstrators at the corner of Everitt and Carver: Sandi Smith, Bill Sampson, César Cauce, and Jim Waller. Three others lay in the hospital in critical condition: Paul Bermanzohn, Mike Nathan, and Jim Wrenn. The police had arrested several demonstrators, including Willena Cannon, and kept Nelson Johnson in jail overnight. The Morning After Sally ■ At dawn on Sunday morning, I awoke with a jolt. Was Paul alive? In sock feet, I ran into the ICU. Paul was breathing. He still had an air tube down his throat, another up his nose, and an IV in his arm. His head was completely bandaged, including his eyes. It was hard to recognize him in the mound of gauze, but his upper lip looked familiar. A nurse told me that Paul’s vital signs had been stable all night. She took one look at the dried blood on my shirt and threw me out of the ICU. I was a germ hazard. Nelson ■ In jail, I had been awake all night thinking about what happened. By morning, I was clear that we were the victims of a planned, calculated murder by police and FBI. It was a military maneuver. The convoy was led by a vehicle which set a slow pace. At the back of the convoy was the arsenal car with the people who carried out the assassinations. Other vehicles were in the middle. The slow funeral-like pace of the caravan and the race curses of the Klansmen drew people to the convoy. There was a signal shot fired out of the window of one of the front cars. All vehicles stopped. This was designed to move people away from the signal shot and back towards the assassins’ bullets. Right after the signal shot, the Klan jumped out of the vehicles and picked fights with César, myself, and others. Some Klansmen fired birdshot at people. All this created chaos, designed to disperse the crowd. The bunch of demonstrators unbunched, and this made it possible for the Klan to assassinate selected people. It is a classic tactic. You cannot assassinate in [238] Through Survivors’ Eyes a crowd. The Klan acted in semi-military precision, jumping out of cars, attacking people, and then suddenly retreating. I believe it is called an “L maneuver” in military language. Push the crowd one way, then the other way. If people are not trained, they fall right into the trap. The police and FBI knew we were not trained. They knew what our spontaneous actions would be, that our folk would respond spontaneously with hatred for the Klan and do things like kick the Klan’s car tires. They knew we would not leave our people staggering. So our leadership was the first to fall. The Klan opened fire, not in response to protesters kicking their cars: It was a carefully calculated plan. In that jail cell that night of November 3, I couldn’t sleep. I spent the whole night thinking. The next morning, a lawyer named Bill Martin got me out of jail. He told the judge that I was not a danger to the community. Willena ■ That morning, my sister Annette and I were at the jailhouse for Nelson’s release. We were very worried about Nelson being in jail. Who knew what those cops would do to him? When Annette saw Nelson come out of the jail, she ran up to him and hugged him ’round the neck. She was so relieved to see he was all right. The TV cameras got a picture of her hugging him, and it was all over the TV that evening. The next day, Annette’s boss called her into his office and threatened to fire her for hanging around with communists. Nelson ■ There were a bunch of reporters asking me questions as I left the jailhouse. I told them that it was a setup, and that the police had participated in it. “I have a message for white youth,” I said. “This was not the action of white people, but of a few racists. White and black must unite against this system.” Sally ■ The Greensboro newspapers ignored what Nelson said. The Greensboro Daily News had already pegged Nelson Johnson. On November 4, as Nelson got out of jail, the paper on the newsstand carried an article that blamed him for the massacre: Violence Not...

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