The Greensboro Massacre

by Jack R Johnson 11.2024

88 seconds. Less than two minutes. That’s all the time it took to murder five activists and change the landscape of the alt-right to this day. 

Greensboro, North Carolina in 1979 was a place rife with racial and social tensions. On Saturday, November 3 of that year, the chant “Death to the Klan” swept over Morningside Homes, a mostly black housing project in Greensboro, North Carolina, as dozens of protesters readied themselves for a long anticipated protest march. 

It was an odd moment: many of the activists were Communist Workers’ Party (CWP) members and educated professionals with degrees from places like Harvard and Duke. They had decided to gather at Greensboro, the city where sit-ins helped launch the civil rights movement in 1960. The rally itself was an echo of an earlier incident from that July when the activists had protested a gathering of the KKK at a showing of Birth of a Nation, the 1915 racist epic by D. W. Griffith. The movie was to be shown at the China Grove Community Center in Greensboro, but before the first reel flickered on the screen, more than a hundred protesters, led by CWP activists from Durham and Greensboro, marched on the building, chanting “Death to the Klan!” and “Decease the rotten beast.” Many carried pipes and chains.

At the July protests, members of the China Grove police force created a makeshift human buffer, separating the activists from the Klan members who were led by their grand wizard, a man named Joe Grady. The Klan members were eager to fire on the crowd, but according to a Politico report from Shaun Assael and Peter Keating,  “a policeman […] walked up to  him  [Joe Grady] whispered that if they did [fire], the officers trying to keep the peace were the ones who would get hurt. Grady reluctantly agreed to move into the musty bingo hall, where women and children who had been watching the approaching crowd were hiding. Once the Klansmen retreated, a cheer rose up from the protesters, who burned a pair of Confederate flags.”

No doubt the activists who gathered on November 3 in Greensboro , were expecting the same compliant reaction. They even went so far as to taunt the Klan into attending their rally. On October 11, weeks before the gathering, they issued a press release saying the KKK “must be physically beaten back, eradicated, exterminated, wiped off the face of the earth.” And according to Assael and Keating, “they took exactly the wrong message from China Grove: that the Klan would be too cowardly to mount any resistance to them.”

The following weekend, as word spread, white supremacist groups including Neo-Nazis met in at least three different locations around North Carolina and agreed to head to Greensboro as well. Ominously, this was one of the first times neo-Nazis and the Klan began working together in concert. It would not be the last.

On the morning of November 3, a police informant inside the Klan named Dawson called his Greensboro Police contact to say that three dozen white supremacists from around the state were on their way to the rally. He told them they were heavily armed. The rally was scheduled to begin at noon at Morningside Homes housing project, and the Greensboro police chief had ordered his men to arrive at 11:30 to operate as a ‘buffer’ again.  As the Klansmen and Nazis made their way along Interstate 85, a Greensboro Police detective spotted the caravan and called in to ask if tactical units were in place. They were not. “His supervisor, showing no special concern, replied that there was still ‘another fourteen minutes by my watch’ for breakfast.”

At 11:22 am before the protesters could react, cars with Confederate-flag license plates began approaching. There were no cops in sight.

Four local TV news camera teams were there to cover the protest march. According to the Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission, “The two groups heckled each other, and some marchers beat the cars with picket sticks and kicks. The first shot came from the head of the KKK caravan, although it wasn't clear who fired the shot. Several witnesses reported that Klansman Mark Sherer fired first, into the air. Then six caravan members equipped themselves with long guns from the trunk of a Ford Fairlane and fired at the marchers, while the rest of the cars and their occupants fled. Marchers Bill Sampson, Allen Blitz, Rand Manzella, and Claire Butler fired back at the caravan members with handguns. Two of the first fatalities were Waller, shot by American Nazi Party (ANP) member Roland Wood and Klansman David Matthews, and CWP member Cesar Cauce, shot by Klansman Jerry Paul Smith. Both were unarmed at the time of their deaths. Unarmed marcher Michael Nathan was shot and mortally wounded by Matthews while running towards Waller's body. Sampson was killed while firing at the caravan members. Matthews shot and killed CWP member Sandra Smith while she was taking cover near Butler, who was firing at caravan members. Smith herself was unarmed. The final shot was fired 88 seconds after the violence first began.”

The filmed coverage of the shootings was carried on national and international news, and the event became known as the "Greensboro Massacre." 

On November 17, 1980, an all-white jury found the Klansmen and Nazis not guilty, reasoning the Nazis and Klansmen had acted in self-defense. “Anytime you defeat communism,” said Jerry Pridmore, one of the men acquitted, “it’s a victory for America.” 

The U.S. Justice Department then charged nine Klansmen and Nazis, this time including Griffin and Dawson, with conspiracy to violate the civil rights of the Greensboro victims. In April 1984, the federal jury, also all-white, refused to conclude the defendants had violated the law by acting out of racial rather than anti-communist political hatred. It too delivered not-guilty verdicts across the board.

Finally, in 1980, survivors of the massacre filed a civil suit in Federal District Court seeking $48 million in damages.  The complaint, filed by The Christic Institute alleged that law-enforcement officials knew "that Klansmen and Nazis would use violence to disrupt the demonstration by Communist labor organizers and black residents of Greensboro but deliberately failed to protect them."

The civil jury delivered a landmark yet narrow verdict: They found eight defendants liable for wrongful death: Dawson, five Klan and Nazi shooters, the Greensboro police detective who received advance word about the attack from Dawson and the lieutenant who was the GPD event commander at the massacre. But the jury applied that decision only in the case of Michael Nathan, the one murder victim who was not a CWP member at the time of the shootings. To avoid appeals, the city of Greensboro settled for $351,000, sending a check to Nathan’s widow, who split it among the survivors. After Greensboro, it became clear, as historian Kathleen Belew has written, that extremists “increasingly used anticommunism as an alibi for racial violence.”  In other words, in Greensboro, North Carolina, an alt-right neo-Nazi or Klan member could wrap himself in anti-Communist patriotism, and get away with murder.

In 2004, a group founded the Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the first of its kind in the United States, patterned after the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission. In its Final Report, the Commission noted the importance of the Greensboro Police Department's absence from the scene. 

On October 6, 2020, the Greensboro city council finally approved a resolution apologizing for the incident.