Location: Greensboro 🌎

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 the fact that the contemporary New York Times opinion page described newsreel film footage of the massacre as “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 had colluded 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.