Codename GREENKIL: the 1979 Greensboro Killings

Washington Monthly, Feb, 1988 by Jason DeParle

Wheaton does an impressive job of tracking the complicated legal details to the case and explaining the mechanics of the acquittal. The Klansmen got one break when the court assigned them top-notch (and liberal) attorneys who fashioned an argument around self-defense. Ironically, they got another when prosecutors pursued the death penalty. Since the law forbids death penalty opponents from sitting on such juries, prosecutors had to face a more conservative panel. In most murder trials, that works to the prosecutors' advantage. But not in this case, when the victims were communists. One of the jurors had fought against Castro at the Bay of Pigs.

The prosecutors' job didn't get any easier when the communist survivors refused to testify, denouncing the proceedings as a capitalist coverup. "I will never remain silent while the bourgeoisie brings fascism and world war on the heads of the American people," shouted widow Marty Nathan before bailiffs taped her mouth and dragged her from the courtroom. (She left behind a vial of foul-smelling oil.) Did the communists want to losw the trial? Wheaton doesn't speculate, and the answer isn't clear. But defense attorneys could hardly have asked for more. They portrayed their clients, Wheaton says, as "goodole-boys, who had been provoked beyond endurance and then attacked by gun-wielding communists" afraid to testify. The jury bought it.

The second tragedy

In North Carolina, where I was a Duke student at the time, many shrugged off the injustice of both the killings and the acquittals. That attitude wasn't confined to the Piedomont. When I proposed an article about it to a liberal magazine a few year later, an editor told me not to bother; the communists were courting trouble, he said. And so they were. But we shouldn't need reminders that the espousal of communist doctrine, however unappealing, doesn't merit deathby-posse in the Greensboro streets. Wheaton finds just the right image for the outrage: five dead and their killers free without so much as a fine for littering.

Still, the double injustice of murder and acquittal isn't the only tragedy of this tale. The second, more interesting and perhaps more instructive, is the tale of political dissolution among the Vanguard. After a social suicide, the relevance of these activists had died long before the Klan showed up.

The metamorphosis from reformer to revolutionary promised a grander stage--the transformation of the whole world instead of one sad corner. But it resulted instead in political undertakings of dismally minor significance. Signe Waller, who reiterated her devotion to the working class even as her husband was dying in her arms, carried on the struggle a year later by sneaking into the Democratic Convention and setting off firecrackers during Jimmy Carter's acceptance speech. "It had to be done," explained one fellow revolutionary widow.

What's stunning is the speed with which this group swapped its idealism for cynicism and hatred. When the world, like a difficult mistress, refused their advances, they scorned it in return. Though they spoke with disdain of their fastrack classmates who sought six-digit salaries and a convenient tee-off time, they bore a paradoxical similarity: the revolutionaries wanted it all and right away.