Greensboro Massacre

GREENSBORO MASSACRE. An anti-Klan rally organized by the Communist Workers Party (CWP) in a black housing project in Greensboro, North Carolina, on 3 November 1979 was attacked by an armed nine-car caravan of Ku Klux Klan and Nazi Party members and supporters. The Klan-Nazi caravan was led to the rally site by a Klansman acting as a paid informant of the Greensboro police. After eighty-eight seconds of gunfire, five CWP members and supporters were dead or dying, seven others wounded.

The five murdered CWP members were: Dr. James Waller (president, Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union Local 1113-T), William Sampson, Sandra Smith, Cesar Cauce, and Dr. Michael Nathan. All were veterans of the radical student anti-war and black liberation movements of the late 1960s who became involved in the labor movement in the 1970s. In North Carolina, activists from both white and Black Left groups in Durham and Greensboro began organizing in textile mills and hospitals beginning in 1974. By 1977, these forces had been consolidated into the Workers Viewpoint Organization (WVO), a national communist grouping that became the Communist Workers Party in October 1979. The WVO initiated the Trade Union Educational League, which, in addition to gaining leadership in several local unions in North Carolina, organized support for six labor strikes across the state in 1978 and four in 1979.

The CWP’s anti-Klan rally was organized in the context of an upsurge of Klan and racist violence that swept across the Piedmont South during 1978–1979. Blacks organized armed self-defense patrols against the Klan in Tupelo, Mississippi; Decatur, Alabama; and China Grove, North Carolina. In China Grove, the CWP (WVO) assisted black residents in a militant confrontation at a Klan rally at the town’s community center on 8 July 1979. Retaliation for the humiliation at China Grove may have been one motive in the Klan attack on the Greensboro rally.

In organizing the Greensboro rally and conference that was to have followed, the CWP sought to consolidate anti-Klan activists in the South who upheld the right of armed self-defense, as opposed to the anti-Klan network of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, which promoted unarmed pacifist opposition and reliance on the police. The CWP (WVO) anti-Klan campaign was led by Nelson Johnson, a longtime Black community organizer from Greensboro, and Paul Bermanzohn, a Jewish doctor from Durham who suffered permanent injury from wounds received in the 3 November attack. Of the five CWP members who died, four were rank-and-file union leaders and organizers. After this, CWP activity in the unions in North Carolina declined.

On 11 November, more than a thousand people participated in the funeral march organized by the CWP and held under conditions of a state of emergency and a heavy National Guard presence. Three months later, on 2 February 1980, the twentieth anniversary of the Greensboro lunch counter sit-in, more than ten thousand marched in an anti-Klan rally organized by a broad coalition, including the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the CWP.

After two all-white juries acquitted Klan-Nazi defendants of criminal charges in the Greensboro murders, a third jury held two Greensboro police officers, the Klan police informant, and four Klan-Nazi gunmen liable for wrongful death in a civil suit that ended on 8 June 1985. As a result, the city of Greensboro paid $351,000 to Dr. Martha Nathan, widow of Dr. Michael Nathan, in the final settlement of the case.

In June, 2009 the Greensboro City Council issues a “statement of regret” and in 2015 the city established historical marker commemorating the 1979 events. In 2020, the city council approved a resolution making a formal apology.

Bermanzohn, Paul C, and Sally A. Bermanzohn. The True Story of the Greensboro Massacre. New York: Cesar Cauce Publishers, 1980.

Institute for Southern Studies. “Third of November.” Report. 1981.

Parenti, Michael, and Carolyn Kazdin. “The Untold Story of the Greensboro Massacre.” Monthly Review 33 (1981–1982).

Taylor, G. Flint. “Waller v. Butkovich: Lessons in Strategy and Tenacity for Civil Rights Litigation.” Police Misconduct and Civil Rights Law Report 1, no. 13 (January–February 1986).

Waller, Signe. Love and Revolution: A Political Memoir: People’s History of the Greensboro Massacre, Its Setting and Aftermath. London & New York; Rowman & Littlefield. 2002.

Wheaton, Elizabeth. Codename GREENKILL: The 1979 Greensboro Killings. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987.

Alvarez, Sallyann, and Carolyn Jung. Red November, Black November. Film, 1981.
Website: Civil Rights Greensboro. http://libcdm1.uncg.edu/cdm/landingpage/collection/CivilRights