Democracy, Dialogue, and Community Action: Truth and Reconciliation in Greensboro

1. The Greensboro Massacre, November 3, 1979

ChApter 1 The Greensboro Massacre, November 3, 1979 NOVEMBER 3, 1979. Radicals with the Communist Workers Party (CWP)1 were taking their positions at their long planned and wellpublicized anti-Klan rally. The event was designed to recruit new textile mill union members residing in Greensboro, North Carolina’s low-income neighborhood of Morningside Homes who lived with low wages and poor working conditions at the mills. The CWP believed that once they had built strong and vibrant unions, they would have in place the structure for an even larger movement, one powerful enough to overthrow the government and the capitalist system that left poor and black people with so little. Their strategy was to use the support of local labor unions to agitate mill workers who opposed the Ku Klux Klan’s (KKK) messages of hate and separation of the races. The CWP wanted to bring an end to the exploitation of workers for the profit and well-being of textile mill owners who were the state’s largest employers. To do that, they had to shut down the influence of the Klan. What made the KKK so powerful was not its membership numbers that had declined through the years, but its documented history of violence and spread of terror among African Americans and their white supporters. The KKK ignited fear and condemned multiracial cooperation of any kind in order to promote a message of white supremacy.The CWP considered the KKK’s intimidating practices and vile speech as major obstacles to its union building campaign. The Communists believed that the lingering racism that the KKK promoted and the extreme class stratification that marked the South were both intolerable conditions caused and sustained by the capitalist domination of the masses. For the CWP, the solution was to seize the  economic and political power away from the reigning city leaders— those who had tolerated and according to the CWP even encouraged Klan activity—and put it into the hands of the working class. The CWP members were largely university-educated activists, deeply influenced by Marxist theory, and avid readers of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Mao Tse-tung. Their leader in Greensboro was Nelson Johnson who had established roots and a reputation as a prominent black student leader at North Carolina Agriculture & Technical State University before becoming a community grassroots organizer.Johnson was a thorn in the side of local law enforcement officials who found themselves the target of many of his campaigns against police brutality. Johnson’s high profile in previous nonviolent and violent protest actions led the city’s police to consider him reckless in his radical pursuits. By the late s,Johnson’s activities were noteworthy as well to fellow civil rights activists including Sandi Smith, Willena Cannon, Joyce Johnson, Claude Barnes, Ed Whitfield, and Signe and Jim Waller, all of Greensboro. Others from Durham, North Carolina joined with the racially diverse CWP coalition—Marty and Mike Nathan,Sally and Paul Bermanzohn, Dale and Bill Sampson, and César and Floris Cauce. Earlier that year, the WVO/CWP along with local residents in the small, rural community of China Grove, about an hour’s car drive from Greensboro, faced-off against the Klan. Following that July confrontation , the CWP redoubled its efforts to challenge and defeat the power of the Klan. They applied for a Greensboro city parade permit for November  and staged a press conference just days before on the steps of city hall. The WVO/CWP publicly taunted the Klan to come to Greensboro using insulting,inflammatory rhetoric as a tactic to disgrace the Klan and agitate parade supporters. On Saturday morning, November , , the CWP members and their supporters gathered on the east side of Greensboro shouting, “Death to the Klan!” It was the same aggressive rally cry the CWP had used in door-to-door canvassing efforts and on flyers posted all over town to build interest in the demonstration.The crowd numbering forty or fifty,urged residents to come out of their homes and go to the march starting point at the corner of Carver and Everett Streets.As they waited to begin the march there, the demonstrators sang songs and chanted slogans—“People,people have you heard? Black and white is the word” and “Death to the Klan.” The air was filled with anticipation, cama-  THE GREENSBORO MASSACRE, NOVEMBER 3, 1979 raderie,and righteous anger against the Ku Klux Klan’s...