[ The supremacists who emerged from the Greensboro trials
understood they were free. … Free to work together to stockpile
weapons, terrorize neighborhoods and commit violence up to and
including murder—so long as their opponents were communists.]
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THE MASSACRE THAT SPAWNED THE ALT-RIGHT  
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Shaun Assael and Peter Keating
November 3, 2019
Politico
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_ The supremacists who emerged from the Greensboro trials understood
they were free. … Free to work together to stockpile weapons,
terrorize neighborhoods and commit violence up to and including
murder—so long as their opponents were communists. _

Nazi leader Harold Covington holds news conference in 1980 praising
the acquittal of six Klansmen and Nazis charged with the slaying of
five Communists. KKK leader Virgil Griffin marches with other Klansmen
around the North Carolina State Capitol in 1982 , to protest the
imprisonment of a white man who bombed a black-owned newspaper in
1973. Getty Images // Politico

 

"Death to the Klan!” On Saturday, November 3, 1979, that chant swept
over Morningside Homes, a mostly black housing project in Greensboro,
North Carolina, as dozens of protesters—some donning blue hard hats
for protection—hammered placards onto signposts and danced in the
morning sun.

The American left had largely given up on communism by then, but these
demonstrators were full-on Maoists. Their ranks included professionals
with degrees from places like Harvard and Duke. And they were
descending on Greensboro, a city where sit-ins helped launch the civil
rights movement in 1960, to ignite another revolution. They danced to
a guitar player singing, “Woke up this morning with my mind set to
build the Party.” Their children dressed in tan military shirts and
red berets. They even brought an effigy of a Klansman, dressed in a
white sheet and hood, which kids from the neighborhood joined in
punching.

The communists planned to begin their march at noon, moving from the
housing project to a local shopping center. But just after 11:20, a
caravan filled with real Klansmen and Nazis surprised them, snaking
through the neighborhood’s narrow byways. As the protesters stood
their ground, a man in a white T-shirt leaned out the passenger window
of a canary-yellow pickup truck, and yelled, “You asked for the
Klan. Now you got ‘em!” The station wagon behind him carried four
Nazis. Seven more vehicles followed, carrying nearly 30 more men,
including an Imperial Wizard of the Klan.

What happened next took just 88 seconds, but still reverberates 40
years later. In a confrontation where white supremacists began firing
pistols, rifles and shotguns, and with television cameras rolling but
police nowhere to be found, five communists were shot dead in broad
daylight. Ten others were injured, some left to lie bleeding in the
streets.

Top: KKK members take weapons from the back of a car prior to shooting
members of the Workers Viewpoint Organization on Nov. 3, 1979. Bottom
left: A WVO member kneels by a victim in aftermath of shooting. Bottom
right: A man comforts his wife after the shooting. 
Greensboro News & Record  // Politico

 

But that November morning became momentous for more than the grotesque
video footage that still lives on the Internet: The Greensboro
Massacre, as it became known, was the coming-out bloodbath for the
white nationalist movement that is upending our politics today.

Before Greensboro, America’s most lurid extremists largely operated
in separate, mutually distrustful spheres. Greensboro was the place
where the farthest-right groups of white supremacy learned to kill
together. After November 3, 1979, it was suddenly possible to imagine
Confederate flags flying alongside swastikas in Charlottesville. Or a
teenager like Dylann Roof hoarding Nazi drawings as well as a Klan
hood in his bedroom while he plotted mass murder.

Today, white nationalism is closer to the mainstream of American
politics than ever before. The far right’s fears about
“replacement” of the white race and outsider “invasions” have
become standard tropes at conservative media outlets, and its anger is
routinely stoked by the president of the United States. At the same
time, right-wing violence is on the rise: Far-right terrorists
accounted for the overwhelming majority of extremist murders in the
U.S. last year, according to a January report by the Anti-Defamation
League.

The Greensboro Massacre, as it became known, was the coming-out
bloodbath for the white nationalist movement that is upending our
politics today.

The seeds for this iteration of white supremacy were planted 40 years
ago in Greensboro, when the white wedding of Klansmen and Nazis
launched a new, pan-right extremism—a toxic brew of virulent racism,
anti-government rhetoric, apocalyptic fearmongering and paramilitary
tactics. And this extremism has proven more durable than anyone then
could imagine.

SEGREGATIONISTS OF THE GREATEST GENERATION, who fought German soldiers
on the battlefields of World War II, would have thought it beyond
preposterous for the Klan and Nazis to make common cause. Adolf Hitler
drew inspiration from Jim Crow, but American southerners strongly
supported going to war against Nazi Germany. In 1946, a list of
American Nazi Party members, obtained by the U.S. Army, showed that
just two percent lived in the South. Nazis were dedicated to the
violent overthrow of the government, as part of their program of
genocidal fascism. Through the 1950s, most neo-Confederates considered
themselves patriotic Americans and had faith in the U.S. political
system, even as they believed in and practiced white supremacy.

But many southern traditionalists experienced the upheavals of the
next two decades as a series of betrayals. By the mid-1970s, federal
courts had embraced civil rights, and civic and business leaders were
dismantling legal segregation. Manufacturing, textile and tobacco jobs
were vanishing. Politicians on the cosmopolitan left and corporate
right were abandoning blue-collar voters. Vietnam veterans were coming
home unappreciated and embittered. In addition, the FBI, after years
of pursuing black nationalists, began infiltrating and undermining
local Ku Klux Klans through a program, largely forgotten today, called
COINTELPRO-White Hate. To be sure, only a small fraction of angry
southerners turned to terror groups. But the Klan’s membership grew
in the ’70s, and so did its public support. Gallup reported in 1979
that 11 percent of white Americans viewed the KKK favorably, up from
just six percent in 1965. And with that rebound came something more:
Those who were susceptible to recruitment were far more likely than
their parents or grandparents to see the U.S. government itself as an
alien force bent on destroying the white way of life.

 

Top left: William Luther Pierce in a high school military academy
uniform. Top left: A copy of "The Turner Diaries" written by Pierce
under the pseudonym Andrew Macdonald. Bottom: A secret gathering of
Klansmen in 1950s Georgia.
Wikimedia Commons; AP Photo; Getty Images  //  Politico

Meanwhile, American Nazis were expanding their public presence. Some
younger would-be fuhrers began trading armbands for sport coats and
toning down their rhetoric in media appearances in order to seem more
palatable. Other Nazi leaders, like William Pierce, head of the white
separatist National Alliance, started looking for partners and muscle,
hoping to turn far-right fanatics from vigilantes to insurrectionists.
In 1978, Pierce published _The Turner Diaries_, a futurist
fantasy-cum-blueprint for all-out race war. In Pierce’s novel,
oppressed whites join forces to create an underground organization
that bombs New York and murders thousands of black and Jewish people,
among many other horrific acts; the book’s protagonist ultimately
flies a nuclear warhead into the Pentagon. _The Turner Diaries_ was
a huge hit with the far right, and has influenced a wide spectrum of
racists—and inspired notorious hate crimes—ever since.

It wasn’t just avowed racists who gravitated to new extremes. In the
weird, unusually rootless time between Watergate and the election of
Ronald Reagan in 1980, America’s faith in public institutions
collapsed, cynicism soared and belief in a wide range of conspiracy
theories and cults, from UFOs to the Unification Church, sprouted in
popularity. But those rooted in racial resentment took hold in
especially bitter soil. White supremacists of all stripes came to
believe they faced annihilation, and they prepared to fight it on the
home front. The country, in other words, was primed for a fusion of
the ultra-right.

***

THE STORY OF THE GREENSBORO MASSACRE really begins with an episode
that occurred in the summer of 1979, in a tiny, working-class city 60
miles to the southwest, called China Grove.

Klan leaders in North Carolina had spent the first half of the year
stepping up their recruitment efforts by appealing to the heritage of
white supremacy. The Federated Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, for
example, staged a historical exhibit at the Forsyth County
Library—and in an early sign of what was to come, a group of Nazis
showed up to ogle the items on view, surprising the media.

On July 8, the same North Carolina Klan faction tried to screen _The
Birth of a Nation,_ the 1915 racist epic that depicts heroic figures
in white hoods trying to beat back the scourge of Reconstruction at
the turn of the century, at the China Grove Community Center. But
before they could show the movie, more than a hundred protesters, led
by communists from Durham and Greensboro, marched on the building,
chanting “Death to the Klan!” and “Decease the rotten beast.”
Many carried pipes and chains.

White supremacists of all stripes came to believe they faced
annihilation, and they prepared to fight it on the home front. The
country, in other words, was primed for a fusion of the ultra-right.

The Grand Dragon of the Federated Knights, a pot-bellied mason named
Joe Grady, stood on the porch outside the building with some 20 men in
robes and white-power t-shirts, rifles drawn, while members of the
China Grove police force struggled to create a human buffer. Grady’s
men were eager to fire on the crowd, but a policeman who walked up to
him whispered that if they did, the officers trying to keep the peace
were the ones who would get hurt. Grady reluctantly agreed to move
into the musty bingo hall, where women and children who had been
watching the approaching crowd were hiding. Once the Klansmen
retreated, a cheer rose up from the protesters, who burned a pair of
Confederate flags.

Afterwards, once the crowd was gone and the screening cancelled, Grady
re-emerged to face the news cameras. Grabbing a shred of burned flag,
he vowed, “There will be revenge for this.” But while Grady put on
a brave face for the remaining television cameras, in the eyes of his
hooded peers, he had committed a cardinal sin. He had allowed himself
to look weak.

By that point, the Klan’s resurgence was already triggering
confrontations around the country. In Decatur, Alabama, in May 1979,
more than a hundred armed Klansmen blocked a civil rights march.
Later, that August, rock-throwing protesters pelted Klansmen at an
anti-immigration meeting in Castro Valley, California. None of those
episodes led to lethal retaliatory violence, however. China Grove was
different because it got the attention of a young Nazi named Harold
Covington.Born about 20 miles east of Greensboro, Covington had
attended an integrated high school in Chapel Hill, where he proudly
called himself the “school fascist.” Jowly and glib, Covington
traveled to South Africa where he built a minor reputation as a
soldier-for-hire who’d taken up arms to defend apartheid. By the
time he resettled in North Carolina and launched a losing but
surprisingly well-run campaign for Raleigh city council, Covington had
become an articulate, publicity-seeking ideologue, with a sideline
writing campy novels—a kind of L. Ron Hubbard of the racist
resistance.

 

Left: Virgil Griffin speaks at a KKK rally at the North Carolina State
Capitol in 1973. Right: Harold Covington.
Getty; Courtesy of SPLC  //  Politico
With a sense of himself as a global figure, Covington regarded most
Klansmen he met as boorish. The backlash to China Grove convinced him
they were also in disarray. And Covington saw no one in the
back-country klaverns of North Carolina capable of stepping into the
void. Long before he would become a YouTube provocateur by posting
white-power videos online, Covington decided to herd them into a
single white-power army himself.

In a preview of 8Chan, the message-board website that would become a
haven for white nationalists in the 2010s, he began bringing together
various strains of supremacists, or as he put it, “normalizing
relations.” His early attempts didn’t go well. The few Klan
members he was able to woo were largely fabulists who made up stories
to make themselves seem more violent than they really were. Deciding
he needed to get a better cut, Covington organized a racist retreat on
September 22 at a borrowed farm outside Louisburg, about 30 miles
northeast of Raleigh, and sent word through the bars, garages and
diners where “his people” hung out that they were all invited.

With the media dutifully attending what promised to be a freakshow, no
detail was too small for Covington to stage-manage. Kids milled around
a barbecue pit where a whole hog roasted, while parents doused a huge
cross in kerosene. Nazis wore uniforms budgeted at $25 for tailored
pants, $10 for boots and $2 for arm bands. The sound system alternated
bluegrass tunes and “The Ride of the Valkyries.” A cute blonde in
a “White Power” t-shirt sauntered with a Doberman and a rifle for
photographers. In a crib, a baby wore a small shirt that read
“Future Klansman.” For extra inspiration, a noose hung from a
tree.

Late in the afternoon, a caravan of 20 Klansmen pulled into the farm
led by a gaunt mechanic with a plunging jawline named Virgil Griffin.
Griffin carried the title of Imperial Wizard of a backwoods klavern
known as the Invisible Empire in Mount Holly, close to the South
Carolina border. But he was also something of a joke on the national
stage. His rallies, unlike Covington’s barbecue, were often
threadbare affairs that dissolved into chaos. At one event, he’d
been shouted down by protesters singing the theme song from “The
Mickey Mouse Club,” according to an account from a community
journalist, Elizabeth Wheaton, who covered radical politics around
Greensboro.

If Covington looked in the mirror and saw a worldwide revolutionary,
Griffin viewed himself as a backwoods patriot. After the China Grove
debacle, he concluded that local Klans needed better leadership and
more action, and believed he could provide both. Covington was only
too happy to help feed such ambitions, elaborately making the Imperial
Wizard feel like an honored guest among the other extremists—who
also included the Klansmen who had peeled off from the Grady’s
Federated Knights after China Grove, and a Nazi-curious crew from
Winston-Salem.

“YOU TAKE A MAN WHO FOUGHT IN THE SECOND WORLD WAR, IT’S HARD FOR
HIM TO SIT DOWN IN A ROOM FULL OF SWASTIKAS,” A KLANSMAN TOLD THE
ASSOCIATED PRESS. ... “BUT PEOPLE REALIZE TIME IS RUNNING OUT.
WE’RE GOING TO HAVE TO GET TOGETHER.”

The extremists nattered about where to buy guns and how to deal with
the summer heat—Klan robes were sweatier than Nazi uniforms. And
they found common ground.

“You take a man who fought in the Second World War, it’s hard for
him to sit down in a room full of swastikas,” a Klansman told the
Associated Press, which published a report about the event called
“North Carolina United Racist Front Forms.” Then he added: “But
people realize time is running out. We’re going to have to get
together.”

***

WHAT VIRGIL GRIFFIN DIDN’T KNOW was that one of his closest allies
was keeping the cops informed about this new alliance.

Unlike the years after 9/11 when American law enforcement took its
focus off white nationalism to fight Islamist terror, the 1960s and
’70s were a period of robust intelligence-gathering in the
supremacist underground. One of North Carolina’s most charismatic
Klansmen, a car salesman named Bob Jones who recruited 12,000 members
to his state chapter, was undone by an aide whose information led to
him being dragged before Congress and held in contempt. In the case of
Griffin, law enforcement’s material came from a chain-smoking
handyman named Eddie Dawson.

Born in New Jersey, Dawson cut an odd figure for a Southern Klansman.
He spoke with a twitchy northern accent and had an uncanny resemblance
to the Hollywood actor William Holden. Having drifted down to
Greensboro in the early ’60s—a time when black activists were
staging sit-ins at segregated lunch counters—he managed to get
invited to a meeting of the Klan, and quickly established himself as
an enthusiastic recruit. In one career-building episode, he took an
armed joy ride through a poor black neighborhood that he peppered with
rifle fire.

Dawson, however, blamed the KKK for letting him get sentenced to nine
months in jail after he was convicted of assault with intent to kill
for the joy ride. He was still bitter when an FBI agent approached him
at a coffee shop after he got out in 1969, and offered to pay him $25
every time he told the Bureau about a Klan meeting. Dawson shook hands
on the deal.

His time with the FBI ended the way most of his relationships
did—unhappily. But Dawson resumed his double life a few weeks after
Covington’s barbecue, when leaflets began appearing around
Greensboro that announced a “Death to the Klan” march. The posters
were the work of a group called the Workers Viewpoint Organization
(WVO), which was filled with professionals who had elite-school
degrees, identified as Maoists, and used revolutionary rhetoric to
match. They had attempted to organize local textile workers, then
tried direct action by taking part in the anti-KKK protest at China
Grove. Now, they were itching for another, more visible confrontation
with the Klan.

A WVO flyer announces the November 3, 1979 'Death to the Klan' march
and conference to be held in Greensboro.
Greensboro History Museum  //  Politico
The leftists had plausible reasons for choosing to organize and
demonstrate in North Carolina. At the end of the ’70s, the state
ranked 49th in the U.S. in blue-collar wages and dead last in the
percentage of workers who were unionized. But neither Duke educations
nor medical training nor Maoist ideology prepared them to comprehend
the culture of electricians, loggers or sheet-metal workers—jobs
held by some of the men who would ride the caravan into
Greensboro—beyond seeing them as either recruitable proletarians or
irredeemable racists. The communists used language even more
incendiary than the words on their flyers. On October 11, for
instance, they issued a press release saying the KKK “must be
physically beaten back, eradicated, exterminated, wiped off the face
of the earth.” And they took exactly the wrong message from China
Grove: that the Klan would be too cowardly to mount any resistance to
them.

Instead, WVO’s leaflet lit a flame under Griffin and the Klan. It
also alarmed the police in Greensboro. Soon, a detective who knew
Dawson’s FBI past was talking with him about disrupting local
meetings of communists, which made perfect sense. After all, the KKK
rated communists about the same as black people. But Dawson had
another angle, too: He could help the police investigate the Klan.
With a highly-developed sense of grievance that often left him feeling
under-appreciated and under-used, he saw a chance to become the one
who was pulling the strings—both as an informant and as an
instigator—as confrontations heated up.

On Saturday, October 20, when Griffin marched his Invisible Empire
through the fairgrounds in Lincoln County, about 100 miles southwest
of Greensboro, and told a crowd of 150 that if they cared about their
children, they would “kill a hundred niggers and leave them dead in
the street.” At a members-only meeting afterward, he introduced
Dawson to talk about the planned WVO march. Towering over the 5-foot-6
Griffin, Dawson started out by warning that the communists were
recruiting busloads of black college students to flood into
Greensboro. Asked whether it would be a good idea to bring guns, he
demurred. “I’m not your father,” he replied. “But if you carry
a gun, you better have damned bond money.”

The vote among those in the audience was unanimous: They’d go to
Greensboro to make their presence felt. The following weekend, as word
spread, white supremacist groups met in at least three different
locations around North Carolina and agreed to head there, too.

Dawson earned $50 by telling the Greensboro PD about the October 20
meeting. And he let them know Griffin was planning to come to town and
looking for allies. But Dawson neglected to mention his own starring
role, or the fact he subsequently drove around Morningside Homes in
his Cadillac late at night, pasting leaflets over the “Death to the
Klan!” posters. His replacements featured a dark figure hanging from
a noose and the phrase, “It’s time for some old-fashioned American
Justice.”

The Nazi camp, meanwhile, was getting just as frothy. At a November 1
event that Covington staged for the media in the garage of a
sheet-metal worker named Roland Wayne Wood, a dozen of his recruits
mugged through a made-for-TV roast of the disgraced China Grove
wizard, Joe Grady.

Once the cameras departed, the united racists got down to the business
of how they planned to crash the communists’ party in Greensboro.
One suggested throwing eggs. Another went further, saying he had a
pipe bomb that would be effective if thrown into a crowd. At 11:00
p.m., the group gathered around a television to watch themselves on
the local news, only to become infuriated when a press conference held
by the WVO’s members got more airtime. As the screen showed one of
the march leaders calling the KKK “scum,” Jerry Paul Smith, the
Klansman with the pipe bomb, took his gun and pointed it at the TV.

Police reports would later quote Wood as saying that he heard Smith
mutter, “Kill the communist.”

***

ON THE MORNING OF NOVEMBER 3, Dawson called his Greensboro Police
contact to say that three dozen supremacists from around the state,
including Virgil Griffin, were assembling at a house owned by one of
Dawson’s Klan pals, a few miles from the Morningside Homes march
site.

A little later, Dawson called again to warn that the place was chock
full of firearms. But that information never made its way to the shift
commander, who wrapped up a daily briefing at about 10:30 that morning
by reminding his men the parade permit listed a start time of noon.
The officers could get breakfast, he said, so long as they were on the
route by 11:30.
 

A WVO member kneels beside a victim of the shooting.
Greensboro News and Record  //  Politico
As the Klansmen and Nazis made their way along Interstate 85 into
Greensboro, a Greensboro Police detective spotted the caravan and
called in to ask if tactical units were in place. His supervisor,
showing no special concern, replied that there was still “another
fourteen minutes by my watch” for breakfast.

The leftists planned to line up their crew at 11:00, then begin
marching at noon. But at 11:22, a frightening transmission came over a
CB radio: Klansmen were talking about closing in. Before the
protesters could react, cars with Confederate-flag license plates
began approaching. There were no cops in sight.

Dawson, who was leading the convoy, would later tell police and
reporters that he merely wanted to put a scare into the Maoists before
driving on to the spot at the shopping center where the march would
end. It was Dawson who yelled, “You asked for the Klan. Now you got
’em!”

But then Griffin’s white LTD screeched and swerved, nearly hitting a
marcher. The caravan came to a stop. The communists went from singing
to swinging, banging their placards on the cars. Members of the convoy
poured out, punching through the melee, grabbing weapons. Dawson told
his driver to get the hell out of there—and since they were in the
first car of the caravan, they were able to split.

The WVO had packed a few weapons, but were seriously outgunned. One of
the WVO leaders, a physician named Jim Waller, lunged for a 12-gauge
shotgun he’d stashed in a car, but a Klansman flew toward him before
he could fire. The two rolled in the grass, fighting nose-to-nose over
the weapon until others started piling on top of them and the pump
mechanism snapped. Waller screamed as the pump-action crushed the
bones in his shooting hand.

 

WVO signs lay on the ground as a wounded person is taken away by
medics.
Greensboro News and Record  //  Politico
Amidst the chaos, other white supremacists lined up their shots. A
Nazi named Jack Fowler opened the trunk of a blue Ford Fairlane and,
with a cigarette hanging from his mouth, handed out rifles and
shotguns. David Matthews, from Griffin’s Klan, stood behind the door
of a van and nailed his first target, a bookish pediatrician named
Mike Nathan. Then Matthews took down an organizer named Jim Wrenn, who
was crawling on his belly. Bill Sampson, a former Harvard Divinity
student, tried to give Wrenn rifle cover but took two fatal shots in
the heart.

Roland Wayne Wood observed Waller writhing from his crushed hand.
Coolly aiming his shotgun, the Nazi delivered a blast into the
physician’s right side. Matthews, the Klan member, finished the job
with another blast into Waller’s back.

The convoy sped away, with Matthews’ van the last to leave the
scene. Climbing aboard, Matthews let the rest of squad know: “I got
three of ’em.” Moments later, police intercepted the van, but
didn’t get to Morningside Homes until the shooting was over.

***

EIGHTY-EIGHT SECONDS OF GUNFIRE in Greensboro marked the worst
violence in the South since the 1960s. And for the men who shot their
enemies dead, November 3, 1979, was just the beginning of a new era of
notoriety and collaboration. The botched trials and political response
that followed ensured that white nationalism would grow to become more
dangerous than ever today.

The legal system took three whacks at the Greensboro conspirators.
First, police rounded up 14 Klansmen and Nazis, and the state of North
Carolina charged most of them with first-degree murder and felony
riot. Prosecutors lined up eyewitnesses, videotapes, weapons and FBI
ballistics analysis. But they couldn’t convince the surviving
revolutionaries—who were stubbornly convinced the cops had conspired
to leave them unprotected—to cooperate.

 

A group of the Klansmen and Nazis who faced murder charges for the
Greensboro shooting, photographed before an arraignment hearing in
1979.
Greensboro News and Record  //  Politico

 

At trial, the Klansmen and Nazis wrapped themselves in the American
flag and argued self-defense. “They acted like men to aid someone in
distress,” Wood’s lawyer claimed. “They would not have been
worthy of anyone’s respect if they had done otherwise.” He added
that his client just wanted to sing, “My country ’tis of thee,
sweet land of liberty, from every mountainside, let freedom ring.”

On November 17, 1980, an all-white jury found the Klansmen and Nazis
not guilty. “Anytime you defeat communism,” said Jerry Pridmore,
one of the men acquitted, “it’s a victory for America.”

The U.S. Justice Department then charged nine Klansmen and Nazis, this
time including Griffin and Dawson, with conspiracy to violate the
civil rights of the Greensboro victims. In April 1984, the federal
jury, also all-white, refused to conclude the defendants had violated
the law by acting out of racial rather than political hatred. It too
delivered not-guilty verdicts across the board.

 

The massacre immediately raised questions about why Greensboro police
had not been present to prevent the violence. In this 1981 report, the
Durham-based Institute for Southern Studies demanded a federal
investigation of the city — even as it voiced skepticism of the
 U.S. Justice Department by calling it “a fickle friend of
politically unpopular radicals.” 
Clippings from the 1981 Institute for Southern Studies Report  //
 Politico
Finally, the victims filed a $48-million lawsuit against 87
defendants, including the city of Greensboro, the state of North
Carolina, the Justice Department and the FBI. Wood, now on trial for
the third time, felt confident enough to give a Nazi salute when sworn
to testify.

In June 1985, the civil jury delivered a landmark yet twisted verdict:
They found eight defendants liable for wrongful death: Dawson, five
Klan and Nazi shooters, the Greensboro police detective who received
advance word about the attack from Dawson and the lieutenant who was
the GPD event commander at the massacre. But the jury applied that
decision only in the case of Michael Nathan, the one murder victim who
wasn’t a WVO member at the time of the shootings. To avoid appeals,
the city of Greensboro settled for $351,000, sending a check to
Nathan’s widow, who split it among the survivors.

Strike three.

The supremacists who emerged from the Greensboro trials understood
they were free. Free not just to stay out of prison, or to keep
burning rags and kvetching about the price of jackboots. Free to work
together to stockpile weapons, terrorize neighborhoods and commit
violence up to and including murder—so long as their opponents were
communists.
 

Police records of the bullet spray and weapons carried during the
massacre.
courtesy of authors  //  Politico
“The Klan and Nazis felt emboldened,” says Patricia Clark, a
veteran Klan watcher who served on the Greensboro Truth and
Reconciliation Commission, which local citizens set up in the
mid-2000s to investigate the massacre. “They thought they won the
fight.”

By 1980, membership in Klan-Nazi fusion groups began to outnumber that
of old-school Klans. And as horizons of hate broadened and merged,
alliances deepened around the country. As just one example, four
months after Greensboro, the California Knights of the Ku Klux Klan
rallied in the city of Oceanside and beat counter-protesters with
baseball bats. The marchers brayed a version of “Sixteen Tons,”
the old coal-mining song. Their rewritten lyrics celebrated the
Greensboro killings and ended, “If the Nazis don’t get you, a
Klansman will.”

By 1980, membership in Klan-Nazi fusion groups began to outnumber that
of old-school Klans. And as horizons of hate broadened and merged,
alliances deepened around the country.

The increasing unity of far-right factions was more than tactical. By
transfusing “blood and soil” into American racism, it led to what
historian John Drabble called in a 2007 study “the Nazification of
the Ku Klux Klan.” That was bad news for hustlers like Eddie Dawson.
Dawson managed to dodge Klan retribution for informing. But he soon
found it much harder to profit from playing different extremists
against one another. Greensboro turned Dawson into a relic—and the
hardening ideology of right-wing terror networks that followed made
them harder for the FBI to penetrate.

Meanwhile, new doors swung wide open for fanatics like Frazier Glenn
Miller, a Covington acolyte and former Green Beret who rode in the
Greensboro caravan. Miller founded the Carolina Knights of the Ku Klux
Klan in 1980. And by merging Klan and Nazi symbolism while instilling
paramilitary discipline in his followers, he quickly built the
strongest white-power group in the state.

As an emboldened white-power movement spread, Miller connected its
dots. The Greensboro veteran held public marches, harassed local black
residents and amassed huge caches of explosives. In 1987, he issued a
revolutionary “Declaration of War” filled with calls for
assassinations. He coordinated with The Order, a violent extremist
group inspired by _The Turner Diaries_. And he sought allies through
voluminous racist literature and eventually on the Internet, where he
extolled the mass shooting by Anders Behring Breivik in Norway. Miller
returned to racist murder in 2014, when he targeted a Jewish community
center in Overland Park, Kansas, and killed three people. That landed
him on death row, where he sits today.

Greensboro’s aftershocks held their most important lessons for
mainstream opportunists. By the end of the 1970s, southern
nationalists had spent more than a decade trying to re-code their
racism to make it more palatable. As master political consultant Lee
Atwater put it: “You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘Nigger, nigger,
nigger.’ By 1968, you can’t say ‘nigger’—that hurts you,
backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights.”

Republican politicians soon realized they could go even farther. After
Greensboro, it became clear that, as historian Kathleen Belew
has written
[[link removed]],
extremists “increasingly used anticommunism as an alibi for racial
violence.” And by targeting the far right’s dual
paranoias—federal authority and socialism—GOP operatives were able
to harness its nativism while hanging onto the votes of establishment
conservatives.

The supremacists who emerged from the Greensboro trials understood
they were free. … Free to work together to stockpile weapons,
terrorize neighborhoods and commit violence up to and including
murder—so long as their opponents were communists.

Over the next 30 years, Republicans racked up spectacular gains in
state legislative seats, governorships and U.S. Senate elections
across the South by hammering cultural issues that the far right
recognized as approving winks. A decade after Greensboro,
establishment candidates were already posing in front of rebel flags
and openly courting “white heritage” groups like the United
Daughters of the Confederacy. The GOP advanced most in counties where
the Klan had been active in the ’60s, according to a 2014 study by
political scientists from Notre Dame, Brandeis and Yale.

During the administration of President Barack Obama, the new
generation of conservative politicians had the extremists’ backs. In
2009, the Department of Homeland Security issued a report forecasting
a rise in racist violence. Republicans objected so vociferously that
DHS rescinded the projection and silenced its domestic terrorism unit.
Mike Pompeo, then a congressman from Kansas, said it was
“dangerous” to track homegrown violence.

By that point it was hard to tell who was co-opting whom on the right.
Republicans were playing to the fringe without worrying where their
most incitable elements might channel their anger.

 

A memorial marker displays the names of the victims of the November 3,
1979 massacre.
Greensboro News and Record  //  Politico
And you know what happened next: Jonah turned the whale inside out.
Donald Trump’s bald invocations of racial and working-class
grievances made him a hero to the ultras; “MAGA” is the most
common word in Twitter user profiles among members of the alt-right,
according to a study by J.M Berger of the research network VOX-Pol.
From Charlottesville to Pittsburgh to El Paso, right-wing attacks have
surged. The latest evidence: The FBI made almost 100 arrests related
to domestic terrorism by July of this year, more than in all of 2018,
according to agency director Christopher Wray, who told Congress the
majority of cases involved “white supremacist violence.”

In Greensboro, private citizens tried to find a way forward by
empaneling a Truth & Reconciliation Commission—the first in U.S.
history. But today’s political landscape, where the language and
resentments of white nationalism have taken deeper root than ever,
raises the question: What happens when there is no reconciliation in
truth?

Twenty-six years after the massacre, Virgil Griffin surprised everyone
at the Greensboro Commission by showing up and taking questions.

Asked why no Klansman was killed in the shootings, he answered:
“Maybe God guided the bullets.”

_[Shaun Assael is a New York Times-bestselling author. He can be seen
in a documentary based on his latest book, The Murder of Sonny Liston,
at 9 p.m. on Nov. 15 on Showtime._

_Peter Keating is an investigative writer in Montclair, N.J.]_

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