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. 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. 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. 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. Eight defendants were found liable for the wrongful death of the one protester who was not a member of the CWP. 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". 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.
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.
The incident marked a convergence of American neo-Nazi and Ku Klux Klan movements, which previously operated without cooperation.
Background
The Communist Workers' Party (CWP) had its origin in 1973 in New York as a splinter group of the Communist Party USA. "The CWP was one of several groups which were established as part of a Maoist revival within the radical community. To the Maoists, the pro-Soviet Communist Party USA was soft on capitalism and it also lacked militancy." Its leaders intended to increase activism in what they called the Workers Viewpoint Organization (WVO), along the Maoist model. In 1979, members of the CWP came to North Carolina in an attempt to organize textile workers. In the South, the communists had achieved little success with white workers, so they shifted much of their attention to black textile workers, who had long been excluded from these jobs in previous decades. As a result of these efforts, the CWP came into conflict with a local Ku Klux Klan chapter and the American Nazi Party. Some CWP members also worked in the textile mills, including James Waller, who left his medical practice to do so. He became president of the local textile workers union. WVO members were active in Durham and Greensboro.
The WVO resisted the continuation of racial discrimination in North Carolina by confronting a local KKK chapter. Hostility between the groups flared up in July 1979, when protesters in China Grove, North Carolina, disrupted a screening of The Birth of a Nation, a 1915 silent film by D. W. Griffith which portrayed the end of the era of Reconstruction and the formation of the KKK in heroic terms, and portrayed blacks in a demeaning, racist way. Taunts and inflammatory rhetoric were exchanged between members of the groups during the ensuing months.