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Greensboro massacre

Greensboro Massacre
LocationGreensboro, North Carolina, US
DateNovember 3, 1979 (1979-11-03)
Target"Death to the Klan" march
Attack type
Deaths5
Injured12
Perpetrators

The Greensboro massacre was a deadly confrontation which occurred on November 3, 1979, in Greensboro, North Carolina, US, when members of the Ku Klux Klan and the American Nazi Party (ANP) shot and killed five participants in a "Death to the Klan" march which was organized by the Communist Workers Party (CWP).

The event had been preceded by inflammatory rhetoric. The Greensboro city police department had an informant within the KKK and ANP group who notified them that the Klan was prepared for armed violence. As the two opposing groups came in contact with each other at the onset of the march, both sides exchanged gunfire. The CWP and its supporters had handguns, while members of the KKK and the ANP had a variety of firearms.[1] The people who were killed included four members of the CWP, who had originally come to Greensboro to support workers' rights activism among mostly black textile industry workers in the area.[2] In addition to the five deaths, nine demonstrators, two news crew members, and a Klansman were wounded.

Two criminal trials of several of the Klan and ANP members were conducted by state and federal prosecutors. In the first trial, conducted by the state, five were charged with first-degree murder and felony riot. All of the defendants were acquitted, albeit one pleaded guilty earlier to a conspiracy charge for firing the first shot. In 1980, the surviving protesters, led by the Christic Institute, filed a separate civil suit against 87 defendants. The suit alleged civil rights violations, failure to protect demonstrators, and wrongful death.[3] Eight defendants were found liable for the wrongful death of the one protester who was not a member of the CWP.[3][4] A third federal criminal civil rights trial in 1984 was held against nine defendants. Again, all of the defendants were acquitted by a jury that accepted their claims of self-defense, despite reports of "vivid newsreel film to the contrary".[5] News outlets, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the News & Record in Greensboro, North Carolina have remarked on the all-white juries which tried the 1979 and 1984 cases.[6][7][8]

In 2004, 25 years after the event, a private organization formed the Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission with the intention to investigate the events of 1979. Though the private organization was limited in its investigation because it failed to secure authority or local sanction, its Final Report concluded that both sides had engaged in inflammatory rhetoric, but that the Klan and ANP members had intended to inflict injury on protesters, and the police department was complicit with the Klan by allowing anticipated violence to take place. In 2009, the Greensboro City Council passed a resolution expressing regret for the deaths in the march. In 2015, the city unveiled a marker to memorialize the Greensboro Massacre. On August 15, 2017 and on October 6, 2020, the Greensboro City Council formally apologized for the massacre.[9][10]

The incident marked a convergence of American neo-Nazi and Ku Klux Klan movements, which previously operated without cooperation.[11][12]

  1. ^ "1979 Greensboro Shooting, Jan 22 2015 | Video | C-SPAN.org". www.c-span.org. Retrieved February 17, 2019.
  2. ^ Cite error: The named reference Civil was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  3. ^ a b Assael, Shaun; Keating, Peter (November 3, 2019). "The Massacre That Spawned the Alt-Right". Politico Magazine. Retrieved November 6, 2019.
  4. ^ Cite error: The named reference nchp was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  5. ^ Cite error: The named reference acquittal was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  6. ^ Harris, Art (November 21, 1980). "'Agonizing' Verdict in Greensboro". Washington Post. ISSN 0190-8286. Retrieved June 3, 2022.
  7. ^ "'Carolina Widow Gets $351,500 in Klan Killings'". New York Times. November 17, 1985. Retrieved July 21, 2023.
  8. ^ McLaughlin, Nancy (November 2, 2019). "Forty years later, the tragedy of the Greensboro Massacre still hurts for some". Greensboro News and Record. Archived from the original on December 5, 2021. Retrieved June 3, 2022.
  9. ^ "Greensboro City Council apologizes for 1979 Greensboro Massacre". Triad City Beat. August 15, 2017.
  10. ^ Cite error: The named reference Barron was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  11. ^ Belew, Kathleen (April 9, 2018). "3. A Unified Movement". Bring the war home: the white power movement and paramilitary America. Cambridge (Mass.): Harvard University Press. pp. 55–79. ISBN 9780674286078.
  12. ^ Shaun Assael and Peter Keating (November 3, 2019). "The Massacre That Spawned the Alt-Right". Politico.

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