Nazis, Klansmen killed 5 people in NC 40 years ago during the Greensboro Massacre
Long before the Charlottesville car attack in 2017 and the Charleston church shooting in 2015, there was the Greensboro Massacre.
On Nov. 3, 1979, Klansmen and America Nazis arrived at a “Death to the Klan” protest held by members of the Communist Workers Party at a public housing complex in Greensboro, North Carolina.
Guns were drawn. When the chaos cleared, five anti-Klan demonstrators between the ages of 25 and 36 were dead and at least 10 more were injured, according to historical record.
Sunday marked the 40th anniversary since the shootings.
Politico recently referred to it as “the coming-out bloodbath for the white nationalist movement.” But for a generation of survivors who remained in Greensboro, WFDD reported it’s still an “open wound.”
The Massacre
Members of the Communist Workers Party gathered that day in 1979 to hold a news conference and distribute fliers in what newspapers reported was a “Death to the Klan” march, according to the N.C. Department of Cultural Resources.
“Word spread to members of the Ku Klux Klan and American Nazis in other parts of the state and they arrived with guns in their trunks,” the department said in its description of the events.
Both sides reportedly fired their weapons, and television crews on site were able to record in-part the violence that ensued.
A caravan of white supremacists began shooting at the protesters “in the absence of a dissuasive police presence,” as recorded by the Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
Signe Waller — who survived the attack but whose husband was killed — told Teen Vogue in 2018 she took off running with her son when the gunfire erupted.
“I felt like I had been running forever,” she said, according to the magazine. “I just hoped he could run faster.”
The Rev. Nelson Johnson told WFDD he helped organize the march that day. Someone tried to stab him with a long butcher knife that pierced his arm when he blocked it, the station reported.
“The knife went through my arm, and I can’t lift this finger to this day,” he said, according to WFDD.
The encounter lasted just 88 seconds, Politico reported.
What’s happened since
Some of the perpetrators were charged and later acquitted during a state trial in 1980 and a federal trial in 1984, according to the Department of Cultural Resources.
The family of one victim also sued the city, which ultimately paid them a $351,000 settlement after jurors found several people — including members of the police force — liable for his death, WFDD and the Department of Cultural Resources reported.
But the wounds ran deep.
Greensboro eventually tasked the Truth and Reconciliation Commission with taking a closer look at the events of Nov. 3, 1979, to help the community heal. It issued a final report in 2006.
“After more than two decades, the two criminal trials, and a civil trial that found members of the Greensboro Police Department jointly liable with Klan and Nazi members for the wrongful death of one victim, many in the Greensboro community still did not feel that justice had been served,” the report stated.
The commission found varying degrees of fault on all sides. Demonstrators who beat on the caravan cars as they drove by reportedly exacerbated the situation, and their leaders were “naïve about the level of danger posed by their rhetoric.”
But evidence suggested Klansmen and Nazis intended to provoke violence that day, and police made no effort to intervene or even warn demonstrators about the planned confrontation.
The commission recommended certain steps for reconciliation, including formal acknowledgment from the city and an apology from the police department.
They also suggested a monument be constructed on the site of the shootings, but none was built, according to the Department of Cultural Resources.
Instead, a highway historical marker sits at the intersection of McConnell Road and Dunbar Street in Greensboro.
It reads: “Ku Klux Klan members and American Nazis, on Nov. 3, 1979, shot and killed five Communist Workers Party members one-tenth mile north.”
This story was originally published November 4, 2019 at 7:36 PM.
