How Do You Reclaim a Massacre?

Greensboro didn’t have a “shootout” and Tulsa didn’t have a “race riot.” But it took decades of work for language to catch up to history.

On November 3, 1979, I learned of a group called the Ku Klux Klan. I was a five-year-old black child in kindergarten. I kept my days busy by making mud pies, cutting alphabet letters from construction paper, and practicing my writing with thick, footlong starter pencils. I remember surveying the room I shared with my middle sister in our brick ranch-style home in Greensboro, North Carolina, feeling pleased about its new pink shag carpet. That day, I learned the Klan was made up of men who sometimes wore white robes, and other times wore denim pantsuits made in Greensboro’s textile mills. I learned they would happily and hatefully kill.

Around 11 in the morning, a caravan of dozens of Klan members and members of the American Nazi Party drove to Morningside Homes, the second-largest public housing complex in the city, to disrupt a “Death to the Klan” rally organized by the Workers Viewpoint Organization, a multiracial group of social and labor activists. (The group planned to rename themselves the Communist Workers Party, or CWP, later that day, and is known by this name.) Law enforcement was conspicuously missing in action. A former Klan member and police informant, Eddie Dawson, told the police that a Klan contingent was planning to attend the event — a tip that earned him $50. A federal agent had also infiltrated the Klan’s ranks, and a police cruiser spotted and trailed the caravan to Morningside Homes. But at the rally itself, there was no police presence.

Months earlier, the Communist Workers Party had crashed a screening of the 1915 film The Birth of a Nation in a nearby county that was known as a Klan hotbed. When the CWP announced the November 3 march, the Klan took notice and shared details at a closed meeting on October 20 in Lincolnton, two hours away. Police informant Dawson urged attendees to travel to Greensboro for the march and primed the group for the conflict to come. (CWP members had also caught the attention of the FBI and Greensboro city officials when they attempted to organize blue-collar laborers across the city.)

That morning, CWP members and their allies arrived with a speaker system, posters, handouts, a first-aid car, and the local news media. A few arrived with clubs and pistols, minimally prepared for the possibility of assault. Children were also in tow, many sporting chic red berets, a gift from one of the adults.

The arrival of the nine-car Klan cavalcade surprised participant Sally Avery Bermanzohn, who recounted the experience in her 2003 book Through Survivors’ Eyes: From the Sixties to the Greensboro Massacre. “The cars were filled with whites, mostly men, some young, some middle-aged. Then I saw the Confederate flag license plate [on one of the cars] — it was the Ku Klux Klan! Fear swept over me. Where were the cops?” According to her account, a thin, white teenage girl locked eyes with Bermanzohn and started spewing anti-Semitic and racial insults: “Kike!” “N****r lover!”

That day, I learned the Klan was made up of men who sometimes wore white robes, and other times wore denim pantsuits made in Greensboro’s textile mills.

When the cars appeared, the marchers began to shout, “Death to the Klan!” and kicked or clubbed the vehicles. The cars stopped, and the white supremacists pulled weapons out of the trunks. They launched a fusillade into the crowd, firing nonstop for more than a minute. In a police report, a CWP member recalled voices yelling “Get the children out of the way!” and “I’s shot” before he was injured by birdshot pellets.

“The Klansmen and Nazis had high-powered rifles and shotguns,” said one white supremacist who was on the scene. “Also, many of the Klansmen and Nazis were military veterans, while the Communists were, for the most part, intellectual city types, with little or no training in firearms. The Blacks simply ran, hundreds of them.”

Nelson Johnson, one of the organizers of the march, thought he saw a clear strategy in the attack: a first shot to scare and push targets toward another “arsenal” car with shooters. Eyewitness reports and video show some CWP members facing attackers who planted themselves in the street to shoot or sometimes ran in pursuit of victims, but most scattered, dragging injured friends with them, darting behind cars for cover as bullets flew and blood spurted on the road and grass. After a minute, the Klan cars peeled off. The police only stopped the last vehicle.

Five people died that day: Cuban immigrant and poultry worker organizer César Cauce, who was shot point-blank, still gripping a protest sign; Sandra Smith, a textile worker and former student body president of the historically black Bennett College; Jim Waller, a white local union leader; Mike Nathan, a pediatrician at a clinic for low-income families; and Bill Sampson, a white former medical student who organized a union at one of Greensboro’s textile mills and who was one of the few who were armed on the CWP side. Some died from gunshot wounds that were obviously meant to be fatal: part of Nathan’s head was blown off. Ten more people were injured, including a TV cameraman, a pregnant woman, and a Klansman.

A member of the Communists Workers Party kneels with a pistol next to another participant in the rally, who was shot by the Ku Klux Klan, 1979. Credit: Bettmann/Getty

Two criminal trials would fail to convict the perpetrators, who claimed self-defense. In 1985, a civil court case held some of the police officers, Klan and Nazi members, and an informant responsible for the wrongful death of Mike Nathan, and required them to pay $350,000 in damages. The City of Greensboro paid the entire bill. Part of that money went to form the Greensboro Justice Fund, which gave small grants to racial-justice and workers rights initiatives until closing in 2009.

I learned all of this much later, when I became a journalist and historian interested in racial violence and how my own story intersected with this event. My mother had once been a nurse at one of the textile mills where the CWP was approaching workers. I went to school with some of the CWP members’ children, though they were older than me.

That day, my family had been at a football game less than five miles away, at North Carolina A&T State University, one of the city’s two historically black colleges. Someone told my father that roving cars of white men were shooting at Morningside, and my father rushed us out of the stadium. He piled the three kids and my mother into our station wagon, making us lie on the floor; he kept a gun in the car.

Later, at our house, the phone rang off the hook. Neighbors dropped by, unprompted. Some talked in low, urgent whispers, some talked loud. Our black male neighbors, older men who watched over us while we played in the street, counted how much ammunition they had, just in case white men with guns drove by and thought they could terrorize us without resistance. I watched my father take my sisters, then nine and 10, to the backyard to learn how to shoot a BB gun, “just in case.”

Greensboro would become known around the world for the event, labeled the “Klan-Nazi shootout” by media, implying the protesters shot back and that both parties were equally armed. Immediately after the bloodbath, local newspapers and TV referred to the event by saying Klansmen killed CWP marchers. By November 4 one of the city’s two newspapers, the Greensboro Daily News, ran a bold headline that called it the “Klan-Leftist Shootout.” And, according to a 1981 report from the progressive Institute for Southern Studies, the U.S. Justice Department’s community relations unit influenced the framing, with agents steering local officials to use terms such as “gun battle,” “shootout,” and “showdown.”

But since the first minutes after the murders, survivors and some community leaders have insisted that the event be called by another name: The Greensboro Massacre.