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[193] 7 Countdown of a Death Squad Death squads are secret, often paramilitary, organizations that carry out extralegal executions and other violent acts against clearly defined individuals or groups. Murder is their primary reason for being. They operate with the overt support, complicity, or acquiescence of government, or at least some parts of it. But death squads are clandestine groups, so that government officials can deny connection to them. One of the first death squads was the early Ku Klux Klan.1 How did armed Klansmen and Nazis converge in Greensboro on the corner where we were getting ready for an anti-Klan march? How did they take us by surprise, open fire on us, and kill five among us? Where were the police? Why weren’t they protecting our demonstration? Because the death squad that attacked us was the result of Klan, Nazis, Greensboro police, and federal agent collusion. The italicized text in this chapter and the next represents facts unknown to us at the time that we have reconstructed from later trial testimony, newspaper reports, and FBI files. Organizing the Death Squad July 26, 1979: The ATF and Local Nazis Bernard Butkovich was an agent of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF).2 Less than three weeks after the China Grove confrontation, Butkovich—a short, dark, clean-shaven man with an eastern European, Jewish-sounding name— drove up to the home of Roland Wayne Wood, the local Nazi leader in WinstonSalem , thirty miles west of Greensboro. On July 26, he parked in front of Wood’s small white house and walked over to the adjacent garage. Hardly more than a shed, Wood’s garage was the office of the Forsyth County unit of the American Nazi Party. Roland Wayne Wood, a hulking 6′4′′ man with scruffy reddish-brown hair and beard, wore a “White Power” T-shirt that stretched across his bulging belly. He was thirty-four years old, a sheet-metal worker whose arrest record dated to his early teens and included felony and misdemeanor convictions for forgery, larceny, and bad checks. In his twenties, Wood had joined the Federated Knights of the Ku Klux Klan and moved up to a North Carolina “klud” or group leader. Finding the Klan [194] Through Survivors’ Eyes not extreme enough for his tastes, Wood gravitated toward the American Nazi Party and became head of the Forsyth County unit. Roland Wood was “an effective worker,” according to North Carolina Nazi leader Harold Covington. He moved “massive amounts of literature, distributing door to door. He held regular meetings, running training courses for ST men [Storm Troopers], getting on his CB radio, and rapping to all the people about Adolf Hitler.” The courses took place at Nazi paramilitary training camps in two North Carolina counties. On that July day, Bernard Butkovich shook Roland Wayne Wood’s hand and told Wood he was a long-distance truck driver interested in joining Wood’s unit of the Nazis. Over the following months, Butkovich hung out with Wood and his friends, encouraging them to acquire illegal weapons. “Butkovich said he could train us in hand-to-hand combat if we wanted,” Nazi Raeford Caudle later testified in court. ATF agent Butkovich offered to get them selector switches to convert legal semiautomatic weapons into illegal automatic guns.3 September 22: The United Racist Front Butkovich joined his new friend Roland Wayne Wood and other Nazis and Klansmen to found the United Racist Front. They met over the weekend of September 22–23 on a farm outside Louisburg, thirty-five miles east of Durham. On Saturday afternoon, the leaders held a press conference. Virgil Griffin, Grand Dragon of Invisible Knights of the KKK, pointed to a resurgence of racist sentiment in the South, claiming: “We’re coming back strong. . . . People don’t see it yet. It’s underground. But we’re coming back strong.” According to the September 25, 1979, Greensboro Daily News: “Some of those at the meetings were heavily armed, and there were reminders of racial violence of the past. A rope noose, ‘for purely inspirational purposes,’ was strung from an old oak tree outside the lodge.” North Carolina Nazi leader Harold Covington, holding high his AR-16 semiautomatic, shouted: “Piece by piece, bit by bit, we white people are going to take back this country.” A reporter for the Greensboro News and Record noted the “Niggers Beware” bumper stickers on cars. One hundred people attended the weekend event, including Wood, Gorrell Pierce...

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