The Greensboro Acquittals and What They Said

The shooting at Morningside Homes on November third, nineteen seventy-nine was one of the most documented killings in the history of American political violence. Television cameras were rolling. The footage showed the caravan arriving, the men getting out, the shooting, the bodies. The footage was broadcast nationally.

Fourteen members of the Klan and the National Socialist Party of America were indicted on state charges. Their defense was self-defense. The jurors, selected partly for their anti-communist views, deliberated. In November of nineteen eighty, about a year after the killings, the jury returned not guilty verdicts on all charges.

Federal civil rights charges were filed. In nineteen eighty-four, a second trial produced a second set of acquittals. The defense again argued self-defense. The jurors again agreed. Not a single person served a day in prison for five killings that had been recorded on film.

In nineteen eighty-five, a civil lawsuit brought by survivors and the families of the dead finally produced a different outcome. A civil jury found that the Greensboro Police Department, the Klan defendants, and the Nazi Party defendants shared liability in the deaths. The city of Greensboro paid the plaintiffs three hundred fifty one thousand dollars in damages. The individuals convicted paid nothing additional.

The acquittals are part of the history. So is the filmstrip of the shooting that the defense managed to render legally irrelevant. The Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission's two-thousand-six report did not reopen the criminal cases; that was not within its authority. What it did was name, in public, what the documented record showed: that the killings were foreseeable, that law enforcement had information that could have prevented them, and that the criminal justice system, twice, had declined to hold the perpetrators accountable.