Morningside: The 1979 Greensboro Massacre and the Struggle for an American City's Soul
“a narrative that’s deeply insightful and thoroughly convincing in its condemnation of the city of Greensboro, its police force, and the FBI for their complicity in a deadly Klan and Nazi assault.”
Donald Trump’s October 27 rally at Madison Square Garden marked the apotheosis of the so-called Alt-Right to date, raising the consolidated power and public profile of fully unmasked white supremacy well beyond the August 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville that signified its current ascendancy.
The Trump event’s foremost historical reference point was the German American Bund rally that packed the Garden in February 1939 and arguably helped scare the nation straight about the Nazi threat from within. However, the Bund rally didn’t represent the same convergence of once-disparate right-wing factions that emerged at Charlottesville, on January 6, and at subsequent Trump rallies.
Whether October 27 signals the beginning of the end or the end of the beginning for the Alt-Right remains to be seen, and that question will likely persist regardless of the imminent election’s outcome.
Charlottesville exposed the Alt-Right’s fusion of the formerly distinct strains of white supremacy in the explosion of media attention that followed the rally and the murder of counter-protester Heather Heyer. But the true beginnings of the modern white power movement are more accurately traced to an incident 38 years earlier and 200 miles south of Charlottesville in Greensboro, North Carolina.
On November 3, 1979, unarmed labor organizers assembled in Greensboro’s all-Black Morningside public housing development to launch a city-permitted “Death to the Klan” march in response to heightened Ku Klux Klan activity in the area. Forbidden by police decree to carry weapons during the march in spite of North Carolina’s open carry laws, the marchers were attacked by a caravan of nine cars and a van filled with Klansmen and Nazis. During an 88-second, almost entirely one-sided barrage of gunfire, five protesters were killed and 11 others injured in a targeted hit that felled several of the march’s key organizers. News cameras filmed the entire confrontation.
In Morningside: The 1979 Greensboro Massacre and the Struggle for an American City’s Soul, Aran Shetterly chronicles the tragic events of November 3, its origins, and its aftermath in a narrative that’s deeply insightful and thoroughly convincing in its condemnation of the city of Greensboro, its police force, and the FBI for their complicity in a deadly Klan and Nazi assault.
Morningside is not the story of the formation of the Alt-Right per se, although it does effectively pick up where David Cunningham’s Klansville, U.S.A.: The Rise and Fall of the Carolina Klan leaves off. It carries the story of the resurgent Ku Klux Klan in North Carolina forward from the various Klan organizations’ post-Brown v. Board of Education re-emergence through their late-’60s decline (where Cunningham’s book effectively ends) to their incipient alliance with other white supremacist groups like the American Nazi Party in the mid-to-late 1970s.
In advancing the story beyond where Cunningham takes it, Shetterly demonstrates how North Carolina’s deceptive veneer of civility and much-ballyhooed emphasis on economic opportunity over political or racial confrontation continued to mask powerful racist undercurrents in a state that had long harbored more Ku Klux Klan chapters than Georgia, Alabama, or Mississippi. Even with the city’s storied civil rights history this rang as true in Greensboro as anywhere in the state.
Recounting local union organizer Thomas “Big Man” Anderson’s take on Greensboro’s barely concealed racist power structure, Shetterly writes, “Despite Greensboro’s carefully cultivated reputation as a progressive southern city, Big Man’s experience led him to a different view. ‘Greensboro,” he believed, ‘is about the craziest city in the South. It’s worser than Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and Louisiana.’”
Morningside also demonstrates how Greensboro provides a unique lens into three other critical stories. First is the continuation of the FBI’s recklessly invasive counterintelligence attacks on American citizens and Black activists following the exposure of COINTELPRO by the findings of the Senate Church Committee investigations of 1975–76, after which the bureau cast off the COINTELPRO name and persisted in the same practices in the years that followed.
The book also explores how FBI informants in the Nazi Party and the Ku Klux Klan—most notably longtime Greensboro Klansman Eddie Dawson, who worked closely with the Klan, local police, and the bureau in the run-up to the November 3 march—continued to observe, abide, and abet violent crimes against Black Americans ostensibly in the gathering of evidence against Klan terrorists and Black activists. Dawson’s pivotal role in the Greensboro Massacre bears more than a passing resemblance to FBI informant Gary Thomas Rowe’s direct participation in the murder of white civil rights activist Viola Liuzzo as she shuttled a Black marcher back to Selma following the completion of the Selma to Montgomery voting rights march in March 1965.
What's more, the book also illustrates how the Greensboro Police Department, in much the same manner as police officers in Anniston and Birmingham, Alabama, during the Freedom Rides in 1961, coordinated efforts with white supremacist groups to hang back while the caravan attacked protesters and gave them ample time to do their damage and escape unobserved and mostly unpursued.
Greensboro police—in an uncharacteristic move for any organized political demonstration in Greensboro, particularly one with majority-Black marchers—were nowhere in sight as the march was set to begin. One Black officer received a direct order to leave the scene shortly before the caravan of Klansman and Nazis arrived.
Finally, and most importantly, in the central figures of Nelson Johnson, his wife Joyce, and their comrades in the Workers Viewpoint Organization in North Carolina—which controversially reconfigured itself as the Communist Workers Party (CWP) weeks before the march in October 1979—Morningside traces the nearly 20-year arc of Black and labor activism in Greensboro from nonviolent agitation for civil rights and integration in the early/mid-1960s to Black Power in the late ’60s and early ’70s to a Marxist, multiracial struggle for textile workers’ rights and proletarian revolution by the late 1970s.
Morningside is in large measure the story of Nelson Johnson, his unflinching commitment to justice, his evolving approach and perspective, his work with other area organizers, and his involvement with a long-evolving racial and class struggle in Greensboro against the city’s municipal and industrial power structure and largely unrestrained white supremacist groups that led to the fateful Death to the Klan march.
As Shetterly writes, “This multiracial CWP group in the Carolina Piedmont wouldn’t have existed without the Promethean gift of Nelson’s hopeful fire, his vision of a more equal future, his resilient network of personal and professional relationships in Greensboro’s Black community, and his talent for knitting together coalitions across class and age, among Black professionals, students, and the poor—and, more recently, across race.”
Nelson Johnson, long an FBI COINTELPRO target considered the most dangerous man in Greensboro, was wounded but not killed in the November 3 attack. Shetterly argues that Johnson’s alliance with white organizers in the years leading up to the Death to the Klan march put him more squarely than ever in the FBI’s crosshairs—even before the Workers Viewpoint Organization adopted an explicitly Communist name.
Describing the FBI as an organization that continued to follow the dictates of its longtime director years after his death in 1972, Shetterly writes, “The Ku Klux Klan wasn’t the only institution that bristled at race mixing. J. Edgar Hoover had feared a merger between white and Black leftist organizations . . . He’d directed COINTELPRO operations to neutralize that possibility.”
The book also narrates the long aftermath of the Greensboro Massacre, and its enduring impact on the survivors, many of whom (including Nelson) persisted in the struggle. He also describes in painstaking specificity the 1979 and 1984 trials that produced the acquittals of all five Klan and American Nazi Party members charged in the case despite the evidence of extensive news footage. He also details the eventual wrongful death civil trial ruling that culminated in awarding damages to one survivor, Marty Nathan, whose husband Michael was murdered by Klansman David Matthews on November 3. (Matthews, four Nazis and Klansmen—among them informant Eddie Dawson—and two Greensboro police officers were found jointly liable for Nathan’s death.)
“For what may have been the first time in American history, a southern jury found police officers and Klansmen jointly liable for a wrongful death,” Shetterly writes. But the verdict also left unanswered the question: “Why had only Mike Nathan’s death been deemed by the jury to be worthy of a reward?”
He adds, “Though the City of Greensboro denied any responsibility for the murders, it paid the full $351,000 award to Marty Nathan on behalf of not only the police officers but also the Klansmen, Nazis, and Eddie Dawson.”
The book also follows the story through the convening of the Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in 2004–6 that brought together many of the survivors and their attackers in public hearings captured in a poignant 2015 documentary, Greensboro: Closer to the Truth.
In his TRC testimony, Nelson Johnson, by then an ordained minister and Executive Director of Greensboro’s Beloved Community Center, reflected powerfully and thoughtfully on his role in the Massacre, conceding that “Death to the Klan” was “an unfortunate, ill-advised slogan,” both inordinately provocative and a poor reflection of the march’s true purpose, which might have been more accurately expressed as “Death to Racism.”
But he also reiterated perhaps the most damning lingering questions regarding the Greensboro Police Department’s appalling abdication of responsibility at the time of the massacre: “Why did Detective Cooper and his photographer take pictures and send radio reports but fail to stop the violence once it started? Why were all but one caravan vehicle allowed to leave the scene of a known crime scene without a police pursuit?”
What might be the documentary’s most revealing moment happens as it captures the TRC testimony of Klansman and November 3 gunman Virgil Griffin, who declares his ongoing opposition to mixed marriage and integration, and unfurls a litany of unreconstructed protestations of white victimhood. After insisting that there had been equal shooting on both sides (an assertion the evidence clearly refutes), he provides a simple answer to the question of why only marchers died at Morningside, to the visible and heart-rending chagrin of nearly everyone in the room: “Maybe God guided the bullets.”
Everything old is new again.