Codename GREENKIL: the 1979 Greensboro Killings

Washington Monthly, Feb, 1988 by Jason DeParle

Five dead, none convicted in Greensboro

ON POLITICAL BOOKS

You Say You Want a Revolution by Jason DeParle

On a sweater-weather morning in November 1979, a group calling themselves the Communist Workers Party gathered in a Greensboro, North Carolina housing project for a "Death to the Klan" rally. This was not an assemblage of great interest to the housing project residents. They gazed on quizzically, a few kids in football uniforms standing by their moms, a drunk man in a fake leather jacket. But the spirits of the revolutionaries sored. As local newsmen watched, they unloaded their placards and readied their sound truck. They passed out leaflets and dragged out a Klansman in effigy. The children of the Revolutionary Youth League positioned themselves at the front of the gathering march, joined by the neighborhood kids in football jersey. They began singing "We Shall Not Be Moved," we're told, combining the spiritual with a good pummeling of the Klan straw man: "'Just like a tree' --whap-- 'standing by the wa-ter'--blam -- 'we shall....'"

Then the real thing arrived. "Death to the Klan," the demonstrators began to chant as they caught sight of an eight-caravan of Klansmen and Nazis. "Shoot the niggers," yelled back a baby-faced gunman as he and the others opened fire on the interracial crowd. During the confusing clash that followed, one Klansman stood at his car trunk, nonchanlantly handing out weapons while a cigarette dangled from his lip. Another wrested a two-by-two from a protestor and split open her skull. A few of the demonstrators pulled pistols from their pockets and returned the fire.

Eighty-eight seconds and 39 shots later, the neighborhood lawns were littered with dead and wounded protestors. Unharmed and unhurried, the Klansmen piled their shotguns, pistols, numchucks, knives, and brass knuckles back in their cars and drove off. Bending over the body of her slain comrade husband, Signe Waller raised a clenched fist. "Long live the Communist Workers Party," she screamed. "Long live the working class!"

Television cameras captured the casual slaughter, and millions watched it replaced on national news. But two juries acquitted the killers, first on state murder charges and later on federal charges of civil rights violations. The events of that morning left five dead, none convicted, and many confused. Revelations, of ties between the Klan and the Greensboro police caused even the skeptics of conspiracy theories to wonder if the communists were right in calling themselves the victims of a government set up.

Elizabeth Wheaton, who covered the trials for the North Carolina Independent, offers a detailed account of the Greensboro killings.* Though she finds no evidence of conspiracy, she finds plenty of other disturbing things, like old-fashioned incompetence among the police. But the most interesting element of this story concerns neither cops nor killers nor the terrible injustice rendered. Most intriguing is the bizarre personal and political odysseys of the victims, form liberal idealists to raging Leninists conviced they were on the verge of tearing down the capitalist state. That journey is one that speaks to the ancient tensions between radicals and reformers and caries lessons for activists of many stripes.

What was to be done?

It was Duke University Medical School, of all places, that brought most of these future revolutionaries together. Like most of their classmates, they arrived with fistfuls of academic honors. Paul Bermanzohn, the son of Holocaust survivors, had been student body president at City; College of New York. Mike Nathan, the son of a struggling widow in Washington, D.C., had been at Duke since his undergraduate years, scraping by on works-study wages and scholarships. Bill Sampson had Harvard Divinity School and the Sorbonne behind him. Though their class backgrounds and worldly experiences differed, they and a few others shared a zeal for social action that put them in sharp contrast to most of their classmates.

That zeal took different forms. Nathan spent much of his undergraduate career living in a rundown Durham neighborhood where he helped residents demand improved housing. He and a number of other student activists lent their support to a 1968 drive to unionize the university's service workers, most of whom were black. The drive had its militant moment when several hundred students surrounded the administration building and sent a delegation to the home of Douglas Knight, the Duke president, confronting him with their demands. Knight turned them down, and police dispersed the crowd.

Bermanzohn devoted himself to the cause of neighborhood health clinics. When officials proposed building a new Durham Country General Hospital on the outskirts of town, he and other health activists charged it was being located there to benefit realtors, developers, and doctors but not the poor people who needed it most. They enlisted the help of a state health department official. "We thought he was there to help us," Bermanzohn said, "... he screwed us, just didn't do any of the things he said he was going to." Bermanzohn felt the betrayal deeply.