Through Survivors' Eyes: From the Sixties to the Greensboro Massacre

Introduction

[xiii] INTRODUCTION: The Greensboro Massacre November 3, 1979, 11:23 A.M. ■ At the corner of Carver and Everitt Streets, black and white demonstrators gather to march through Greensboro, North Carolina, a legal demonstration against the Ku Klux Klan. A caravan of Klansmen and Nazis pull up to the protesters and open fire. Eighty-eight seconds later, five demonstrators lie dead and ten others wounded from the gunfire, recorded on camera by four TV stations. Four women have lost their husbands; three children have lost their fathers. After two criminal trials, not a single gunman has spent a day in prison, although a civil trial won an unprecedented victory for the victims: For one of the only times in U.S. history, a jury held local police liable for cooperating with the Ku Klux Klan in a wrongful death. I was on that Greensboro corner. My husband, Paul Bermanzohn, was shot in the head and arm, critically wounded. After five hours of brain surgery, Paul survived, partly paralyzed. Those killed were close friends of mine; one had been my first husband. Paul and I narrate this book along with four others who had gathered to march against the Klan that day. It is the story of the massacre through the eyes of survivors. Our story begins in the 1940s and 1950s, the last decades of the Jim Crow South. Most of the victims of the Greensboro massacre were born during these decades, members of the post–World War II baby boom. In the 1960s, we were known collectively as the protest generation. African American college students challenged segregation in a sit-in movement that swept the South and energized the civil rights movement. Antiwar protesters by the millions helped end the Vietnam War. Young women broke the barriers of gender discrimination and forever altered the U.S. labor force and family structure. Our generation fought on many fronts: black power, Latino power, Native American rights, Asian American equality, gay rights, unionization, environmental protection. We roused the nation from its slumber in the 1950s, and this experience transformed us; it changed the direction of our lives. Protesters who challenge the status quo need a rationale and strategy for action. Martin Luther King Jr. galvanized the civil rights movement with active [xiv] Through Survivors’ Eyes nonviolent resistance. King’s strategy embraced the American principles of freedom and equality and battled the hypocrisy of racism; his leadership dominated the social movements until the mid 1960s. We who survived the Greensboro massacre had joined other sixties activists who explored Marxism in the seventies . Karl Marx’s century-old call, “Workers of the world unite,” inspired many in search of ways to organize people across barriers of race, religion, and gender. We were awed by the Russian Revolution of 1917, the Chinese Revolution of 1949, and the Vietnamese Communist Party’s defeat of the U.S. military in 1975. Closer to home, we were impressed by the U.S. Communists who were the backbone of the great union drives of the 1930s and 1940s. We read about the repression of people’s movements. African Americans who strove for basic rights had faced Klan terror, lynch mobs, and riot police. Workers who built unions had been beaten, jailed, and shot. The Palmer raids led by J. Edgar Hoover in the early 1920s had rounded up, imprisoned, and deported thousands of leftists, immigrants, and labor unionists. McCarthyism in the 1950s had targeted the Communist Party USA and routed a powerful labor movement . In the late 1960s, police murdered Black Panthers in their beds.1 We never dreamed it would happen to us. The massacre that killed my friends in 1979 helped usher in the triumph of conservatism in the 1980s. November 3 tore my life apart. Never will I fully recover from the loss of my five friends and the crippling of my husband. Writing this book has been a major way I have coped and healed. A few months after the murders, I interviewed the demonstrators who had witnessed the attack; I knew early on that we needed to tell our own story. A decade later, as a graduate student, I sought out every person who had participated in the anti-Klan protest that day. Black and white, male and female, poor and middle class, they came from widely diverse backgrounds . I found their life stories compelling—how they became activists, how their political beliefs evolved, how they had coped with the massacre and its aftermath...