November Third, Nineteen Seventy-Nine: The Greensboro Massacre

On the morning of November third, nineteen seventy-nine, members of the Communist Workers Party gathered in the Morningside Homes public housing complex on the eastern edge of Greensboro. They were organizing a march called Death to the Klan, aimed at the textile workers they had been trying to unionize across the North Carolina Piedmont.

At eleven twenty-three in the morning, a caravan of nine cars and a van arrived carrying members of the Ku Klux Klan and the American Nazi Party. They had driven in from across the state after reading about the march in newspapers. Their car trunks held shotguns, rifles, and pistols.

The shooting lasted eighty-eight seconds. Five demonstrators were killed, ten more were wounded. Television cameras caught much of it on film.

What followed exposed something more troubling than the attack itself. The Greensboro Police Department had a paid informant, Edward Dawson, embedded in the Klan group that planned and carried out the attack. The federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms had its own undercover agent, Bernard Butkovich, among the Nazis. Both informants had participated in planning sessions. Neither agency intervened. Police were not stationed at the march site when the shooting began.

In nineteen eighty, a state murder trial before an all-white jury acquitted all defendants. In nineteen eighty-four, a federal civil rights trial produced the same result. But in nineteen eighty-five, a civil lawsuit succeeded: a jury found the Klan, the Nazi Party, and the Greensboro Police Department all liable, and awarded roughly three hundred fifty thousand dollars in damages, a fraction of what was sought but a legal finding of responsibility that the criminal courts had refused to deliver.

In twenty twenty, the city of Greensboro issued a formal apology for the police department's role. Four decades is a long time to wait for an apology.