ICTJ in the News

May 5, 2003

Panel hopes for healing from 1979 shootings

The News & Observer (Raleigh, North Carolina)

By Martha Quillin

GREENSBORO -- More than 23 years after Ku Klux Klansmen and and Nazi sympathizers shot down five Communist labor organizers in the streets of Greensboro, it's too late for justice. It might be just the right time for truth.

Such is the hope of the Greensboro Truth and Community Reconciliation Project, a group of more than two dozen residents who believe that the events of Nov. 3, 1979, haunt the city. The group is planning the formation of a truth commission, which might be the country's first.

The project has the support of some city and county officials and has named a national advisory committee that includes the widows of two men who died as a result of the shootings and the wife of another who was injured. The panel also includes Nelson Johnson, who helped organize the ill-fated march and is now a minister.

Organizers say the Reconciliation Project does not seek belated punishment, something two criminal trials failed to achieve. Project members say they hope to gather information never made public and give people a chance to say how they feel about that day.

"We are seeking understanding," said Zeb "Z" Holler, a retired Presbyterian minister who is co-chairman of the group with a former Greensboro City Council member and mayor, Carolyn Allen. "Understanding, forgiveness, reconciliation and an appreciation for other people's points of view."

The group today will announce the selection process for commission members at a Greensboro news conference. The project is starting with a $ 125,000 grant from the Andrus Family Fund, a New York philanthropy that supports programs for foster children and efforts at community reconciliation. The fund has promised $ 330,000 over three years if the work goes well.

Once formed, the commission would ask people to come and talk. It would examine trial transcripts, evidence, newspaper clippings and television footage stored in a 100,000-item cache in the library at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. It would be part oral history project, part legal review, part scavenger hunt.

By 2005, the organizers say they hope to produce a report to be discussed over covered-dish church suppers or civic club meetings.

It is an ambitious effort, modeled after the truth commission that Archbishop Desmond Tutu has said brought healing to South Africa after apartheid.

"This may be a model for people to look at," said Lisa Magarrell, senior associate for the International Center for Transitional Justice, a New York-based nonprofit that consults with truth commissions around the world.

Some are skeptical

The idea has met resistance in a city working to market itself for business it desperately needs.

"I'm afraid that any way you slice this, it could be interpreted as a major negative," said Mayor Keith Holliday. "Right now, Greensboro is really doing all we can to present a good image to the rest of the world, not just to the nation and the state, to get people to come here for economic development, to live and to grow. ...

"I'm not saying there's not some deep wounds among family members on both sides that were involved that day," Holliday said. "But in the general public in Greensboro, I don't get the idea that there is a deep wound that needs to have the bandages taken off and be redressed."

Neither Holler, 74, nor Allen, 70, was involved in the violence of 1979 or had a stake in any of the three groups involved. But in their volunteer work, both say they have encountered a deep distrust between blacks and whites in the city, some of which can be traced to that November morning.

At the time, Greensboro was one of several places in the state where organizers had been working to unionize textile mills and cigarette plants. Some belonged to the Communist Workers Party, whose very name in those days aroused Cold War suspicions.

Besides agitating against mill management, the party had also taken on the Ku Klux Klan. The two groups had taunted each other for months, and the union organizers got a permit for a "Death to the Klan" march for Nov. 3.

Dozens of union sympathizers and residents of the predominantly black neighborhood showed up. Someone brought an effigy of a Klansman with a rope around its neck, and organizers urged children to beat it with sticks.

Before the parade, Klansmen from across the state, joined by members of the Nazi Party, arrived in a caravan of nine vehicles. They knew the route, it was later learned, because the city gave the Klan a copy of the permit before it issued it to the marchers.

Looking for answers

The confrontation was swift and violent: Parade organizers, who had been barred from bringing guns but smuggled in a couple nonetheless, pounded Klan and Nazi vehicles with their signs. Klansmen and Nazis poured out of the cars, carrying shotguns, semi-automatic rifles, handguns, ax handles and brass knuckles.

In 88 seconds, 39 shots were fired. Four Communist Workers Party members lay dead, and a fifth died later. Eleven other people were injured.

In the aftermath, they and others wondered: Why did this happen here? Where were the Greensboro police? Who knew about the march and of the plan to attack it?

Two trials gave little satisfaction to victims or their families. Although the killings happened in daylight and were captured by at least three TV crews, juries acquitted the men of murder and conspiracy. The only Klansman to serve time pleaded guilty in exchange for a lenient sentence.

Court proceedings showed that city officials knew armed Klansmen planned to attend the rally and might even have encouraged the violence.

Carolyn McAllaster, now a clinical law professor at Duke University, represented the victims in a $ 37 million wrongful death suit against the KKK, the American Nazi Party, the Greensboro Police Department, the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.

A jury found five Klansmen and two police officers liable, awarding $ 350,000, which was divided among the plaintiffs. The City of Greensboro paid the sum, part of which was used to start the Greensboro Justice Fund, which advocates racial justice and keeps the case alive on its Web site.

McAllaster said she likes the idea of a Truth Commission, which likely would consist of seven people to be chosen by a committee not yet formed. "Greensboro could still use some healing over this issue," she said.

Reopening old wounds

Much has changed since 1979. Labor organizing in the state took a long hiatus after the shootings. Most of the factories the organizers targeted are now closed. The once-fearsome Klan has been brought to financial ruin by a series of lawsuits. Even Morningside Homes, the housing project that was the shooting scene, has been demolished.

Some who were there would rather not relive the events.

"I'll not come. No way," said Jerry Paul Smith of Maiden, a colonel of security for the Klan back then. He was cleared of murder and conspiracy related to the deaths and suspects a Truth Commission would like to try him again. "They went through three trials, they know exactly what happened. No way I'd come."

Allen and Holler wish he would. They would like to know what he was thinking, how he felt later, why he joined the Klan.

They also want to hear from the gas station attendant who heard a conversation by marchers headed to the gathering, the mother who watched from her run-down government apartment, the emergency worker who peeled back the bloody clothes of the wounded.

They have the facts, Allen and Holler say. The truth has been more elusive.

"If we can create an atmosphere where people can tell their stories, how they have been affected, in a setting where they don't feel guilty or bad, it will put us in a better place to talk about the future," Allen said.