1979 Massacre—Cop/Klan Collusion

Greensboro Commission: "Reconciliation" with Fascist Terror

On 3 November 1979 in Greensboro, North Carolina, five anti-racist activists and union organizers, supporters of the Communist Workers Party (CWP), were fatally gunned down by Ku Klux Klan and Nazi fascists. Nine carloads of Klansmen and Nazis drove up to a black housing project—the gathering place for an anti-Klan march organized by the CWP. In broad daylight, the fascists coolly pulled out their weapons and unleashed an 88-second fusillade that was captured on television cameras. They then drove off, leaving the dead and dying in pools of blood. From the outset, the Klan/Nazi killers 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. The Greensboro killers literally got away with murder, acquitted twice by all-white juries.

A nearly 600-page report issued this past May by the Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission—an unofficial, foundation-funded body—serves to bury the hard truths and bitter lessons of the Greensboro Massacre. While acknowledging such well-documented facts as the role of police informants in the killings, the commission denies that there was any police-fascist conspiracy and baldly concludes that “the single most important element that contributed to the violent outcome of the confrontation was the absence of police.” No, the police helped prepare the fascist attacks and secure their getaway. The report despicably asserts that “some, albeit lesser, responsibility must lie with the demonstrators” due to their “violent” language and because some were armed in self-defense. This is nothing but a rehash of the bourgeois media’s vile slander that the massacre was a “shootout” between “extremists,” which has been promulgated since the day of the murders to whitewash the role of the fascists and cops.

We honor the memory of the Greensboro martyrs—César Cauce, Michael Nathan, Bill Sampson, Sandi Smith, Jim Waller. As revolutionary Marxists, we had our differences with the CWP. But we understand that these courageous men and women were targeted because they were black and white comrades working openly together for black rights and union organizing in “right to work” North Carolina, where Klan terror has historically been used by the bosses to keep out unions. Signe Waller, widow of Jim Waller, noted that “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…and one of them was Jim’s” (The Carolinian Online, 18 October 2004).

Carried out during the Democratic Carter administration, the Greensboro Massacre was the opening shot of what would become the Reagan years’ war on labor and blacks. Greensboro survivors, one of whom was partially paralyzed for life, were jailed, fired and blacklisted from work, stalked by FBI and local police. The state put on an ominous show of force at the CWPers’ several-hundred-strong funeral procession. Five hundred National Guardsmen, 250 state troopers, 175 local cops and riot-clad police surrounded the mourners as helicopters hovered overhead. They arrested 34 people for carrying guns, 26 of whom were CWP comrades, according to the CWP newspaper, Workers Viewpoint.

The template for the Greensboro commission was South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Beginning in 1996, the South African hearings amnestied the enormous crimes of the apartheid-era butchers and torturers and assisted the transition to neo-apartheid capitalist rule under the African National Congress regime. Likewise, the purpose of the Greensboro commission was to encourage “reconciliation” with the brutal racist reality of American society. In fact, the commission gave a platform to “Imperial Wizard” Klansman Virgil Griffin, who was in the car caravan of murderous fascists, to spew his racist filth.

Nevertheless, many hardline racist politicians opposed any revisiting of the November 1979 events. The white mayor and every white member of the Greensboro city council opposed the commission. Union members and others fearing retaliation refused to testify openly. Commission file cabinets were broken into. In the course of the hearings, it was revealed that police wiretaps were used to monitor the white director of the commission, Jill Williams, and several black community leaders, including Nelson Johnson, a survivor of the 1979 massacre who was a prominent backer of the commission.

The commission’s recommendations include standard liberal sops like “healing workshops,” “anti-racism training” for the cops and a “permanent police review board.” The intent of the commission’s police “reform” schemes is to repair “the damaged credibility of the police department”—i.e., bolster the authority of the police, who daily perpetrate racist terror. The Greensboro Massacre refuted in blood the liberal notion that the cops—the hired guns of the racist capitalist rulers—can be reformed to serve the interests of workers and the oppressed. In Love and Revolution: A Political Memoir (2002), Signe Waller writes that the CWP supporters themselves had fatal illusions in the neutrality of the capitalist state:

“We overlooked government and police complicity with the Klan….

“Was it that the police are not supposed to do this sort of thing in a democratic society? In one of those third world dictatorships maybe, where the police collaborate with civilian death squads, but not in the democratic United States. And so, although we were students of history, our democratic illusions disarmed us figuratively, so that the police could do so literally” (emphasis in original).

The long, murderous history of police/Klan terror in the South includes the 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, which took the lives of four young black girls. FBI informant Gary Rowe was in on that—the same informant who, two years later, was in the car from which civil rights worker Viola Liuzzo was shot to death near Selma, Alabama. In 1964 Mississippi cops handed civil rights workers Andrew Goodman, James Earl Chaney and Michael Schwerner over to their Klan killers.

As we wrote in “Greensboro Massacre: We Will Not Forget!” (WV No. 835, 29 October 2004) concerning the Truth and Reconciliation Commission: “‘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.” The fascists can and must be stopped in their tracks. But that requires mass mobilizations drawing in the black masses and all those targeted by Klan/Nazi terror behind the social power of the integrated labor movement.

One week after the Greensboro Massacre, when the Klan announced it would “celebrate” the killings in downtown Detroit, the Spartacist League and militant auto workers made sure that did not happen, mobilizing 500 strong in a labor/black rally whose message was: “The Klan Won’t Ride in the Motor City!” We had to fight against liberal Democratic Party mayor Coleman Young, who threatened to arrest the anti-Klan protesters. Meanwhile, the response of the bulk of the left to Greensboro was silence. As Alexander Cockburn noted at the time in a Village Voice (19 November 1979) article titled “Silent as the Graves”:

“Dignity would at least have required labor and its liberal allies to issue some proclamation of grief, some demand for justice, if not revenge. Courage would demand issuance of a call for anti-fascist demonstrations in every major city—like the one sponsored by the Spartacists in Detroit…. Action against native fascism is left in the hands of the Trotskyists and other sectarians, who at least can understand the meaning of murder when they see it.”

In the years since, the Spartacist League and Partisan Defense Committee have initiated labor/black mobilizations that have spiked Klan/Nazi provocations in a number of major cities. These mobilizations give a taste of the social power of the working class and point to the need to forge a workers party to lead the fight for a socialist revolution. That is the only way to get rid of the fascist murderers once and for all—by doing away with the racist capitalist system that breeds them. No more Greensboros!