The Massacre at Morningside Homes

On the morning of November third, nineteen seventy-nine, organizers with the Communist Workers Party gathered at Morningside Homes, a predominantly Black public housing community on the east side of Greensboro, to begin a march they called Death to the Klan. The Communist Workers Party had spent the past two years organizing textile workers in Greensboro and in mill towns across the North Carolina Piedmont. They had targeted Klan activity in the region and had been publicly confrontational about it.

Klan and Nazi Party members knew about the march. A paid Greensboro police informant named Edward Dawson had been embedded in the Klan for years and had been in contact with both the FBI and the city police department. Days before the march, the Greensboro Police Department gave Dawson a copy of the parade permit, which showed the march's starting location and route. On November third, Dawson led a nine-car caravan of Klansmen and members of the National Socialist Party of America directly to Morningside Homes. The police officers who were supposed to be present at the rally's start had been reassigned.

At around eleven twenty in the morning, the caravan arrived at the rally. Within eighty-eight seconds, five people were dead.

Their names were Cesar Cauce, Michael Nathan, Bill Sampson, Sandra Neely Smith, and James Waller. Cauce had come to the United States from Cuba as a child and graduated magna cum laude from Duke University. Nathan was a pediatrician who ran a clinic serving Durham's Black community. Sampson had studied at Harvard Divinity School and had been organizing the union at Cone Mills' White Oak plant. Smith was a graduate of Bennett College, a former student-body president who had dedicated her career to labor organizing. Waller was a pediatrician, a co-founder of the Carolina Brown Lung Association, and the president of the Granite Finishing Plant's workers' union in Haw River.

The television cameras were there. The shooting was filmed. Klan and Nazi Party members were tried. The first jury, all white, acquitted them on state criminal charges. A federal civil rights trial in nineteen eighty-four, with nine defendants, acquitted them again. In nineteen eighty-five, a civil lawsuit found that the Greensboro Police Department and the defendants shared liability. Not a single person served prison time for the five killings.