25 Years After

Greensboro Massacre: We Will Not Forget!

Reprinted from Workers Vanguard No. 835, 29 October 2004.

On 3 November 1979, in broad daylight, nine carloads of Klansmen and Nazis drove up to a black housing project in Greensboro, North Carolina, where an anti-Klan rally was gathering. With cool deliberation, the killers took out their weapons, aimed, fired and drove off. Five union officials and organizers and civil rights activists—supporters of the Communist Workers Party—lay dying in pools of blood. Ten others were wounded or maimed for life. The Greensboro Massacre was the bloodiest fascist attack in the U.S. in decades.

Greensboro was a conspiracy of the fascists and their capitalist state patrons. From the outset, the fascists were aided and abetted by the government, from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms agent who helped train the killers and plot the assassinations, to the "former" FBI informer who rode shotgun in the motorcade of death and the Greensboro cop who brought up the rear. When the two-minute fusillade ended, the cops moved in to arrest the survivors for "rioting."

Signe Waller, widow of Greensboro martyr Jim Waller, recounted, "The FBI had men going around the textile mills and showing people pictures, asking for their identification. Many of the pictures were of people who were later killed in the Greensboro Massacre, and one of them was Jim's" (The Carolinian Online, 18 October). Two successive all-white juries acquitted the killers of all charges, affirming once again the meaning of "justice" in this racist capitalist country.

Carried out during the Democratic Carter administration, the Greensboro Massacre was the opening shot of what would be the Reagan years' war on labor and blacks. When the Klan announced it would "celebrate" this massacre on November 10 in Detroit, the Spartacist League initiated a labor/black mobilization that drew over 500, many of them black auto workers, who made sure that the Klan did not ride in the Motor City. In organizing the protest we had to overcome opposition from the union and black misleaders and face down a ban on anti-Klan marches ordered by black Democratic mayor Coleman Young. In city after city over the following years, when KKK and fascist provocations have been threatened, we have repeatedly brought out core battalions of black and labor militants who understand we can't ignore the fascists and Klan—we must stop them.

In recent years, efforts to commemorate the Greensboro Massacre have been directed toward establishing a "Truth and Reconciliation Commission," which was empanelled in June, and on November 13 a march "for Justice, Democracy and Reconciliation" will be held in Greensboro. The commission is modeled on the South African commission, which has served to whitewash the crimes of apartheid-era butchers and to assure a peaceful transition to neo-apartheid rule under the ANC (African National Congress), which continues the superexploitation and oppression of the black and other non-white masses.

The Greensboro Massacre was racist murder. The truth is that no justice can come from the same capitalist state whose forces helped to orchestrate the killings in the first place. "Reconciliation" with the forces of racist reaction and with the capitalist rulers who keep the fascist bands in reserve to unleash against the working class in times of social crisis can only serve to politically disarm and demobilize workers and the oppressed in the face of fascist terror.

We honor the Greensboro martyrs—Cesar Cauce, Michael Nathan, Bill Sampson, Sandi Smith and James Waller—as well as the many others who were wounded that November day. They take their place among a proud roster of fighters for the working people and oppressed before them, whose memory must be seared into the consciousness of the working class.

Citing the executions of the Haymarket martyrs in 1887 and of Joe Hill in 1915 and the brutal 1919 attack and subsequent frame-ups of Industrial Workers of the World members in Centralia, Washington on the one hand and the greatest victory for the international working class, the Russian Revolution of 7 November 1917, on the other, James Cannon, then secretary of the International Labor Defense and later founder of American Trotskyism, wrote in "The Red Month of November" (Labor Defender, November 1927):

"A red stream runs through the month of November, marking in its course many struggles of the working class of this country, here with defeat there with victory, always with inspiring record of working class courage, exemplary in its noble devotion to the cause of the oppressed, magnificent incidents of solidarity and self-sacrifice, instructive milestones along the difficult road to liberation. It is a record to sharpen the hatred of labor to jailors and assassins, to increase the respect and pride we have for our fighters."

We remember and honor the Greensboro martyrs by fighting for the freedom of imprisoned victims of capitalist state repression, like death row political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal. We honor them by fighting to build a revolutionary workers party that will fight to put the working class in power through a socialist revolution that will make sure there will be no more Greensboros.