The Greensboro Massacre: 88 Seconds That Left Five Dead and a City Covering Up

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Collage of a Death to the Klan flyer for the 3 November 1979 Greensboro march and a newspaper front page headlined Klan Kills Five

On a Saturday morning in November 1979, a ragtag crowd of left-wing activists, mill workers and kids gathered in a Black housing estate in Greensboro, North Carolina. They were there to march under a banner that read "Death to the Klan". Within minutes a convoy of cars rolled up, men climbed out with rifles and shotguns, and five protesters were dead or dying on the tarmac.

News crews caught the whole thing on film. Everyone involved was acquitted anyway. And it later emerged that one of the men who led the gunmen to the scene was on the local police payroll.

Quick Answers

What was the Greensboro massacre? A shooting on 3 November 1979 in which Klansmen and neo-Nazis killed five members of the Communist Workers Party at an anti-Klan rally.
Where did it happen? Outside the Morningside Homes public housing estate in Greensboro, North Carolina.
How many died? Five were killed and around ten more were wounded.
Was anyone convicted? No. All-white juries acquitted the shooters in a 1980 state trial and a 1984 federal trial.
Did the city ever apologise? Yes, but not until October 2020, 41 years later.

A Feud That Started at a Film Screening

The bad blood went back to the summer of 1979. In July, members of a Maoist group called the Workers Viewpoint Organisation turned up in the small town of China Grove, about an hour south of Greensboro, where the Klan was showing the racist 1915 film The Birth of a Nation. They heckled the Klansmen, burned a Confederate flag and sent them scuttling inside. The Klan didn't forget it.

Original poster for D W Griffith's 1915 film The Birth of a Nation showing a hooded Klansman on a rearing horse

By the autumn the group had renamed itself the Communist Workers Party. Many of its members weren't stereotypical radicals. They were organising unions in local textile mills and hospitals, and plenty were college graduates who'd chosen factory jobs so they could recruit from the shop floor.

The party announced a "Death to the Klan" march for 3 November. Its flyers didn't mince words, saying Klansmen should be beaten and chased out of town, and it published an open letter daring Klan leaders to show up. Klan member Eddie Dawson went round sticking Klan flyers over the top of the party's posters, warning traitors to beware. Unfortunately, the Klan accepted the invitation.

The Informant Who Knew Everything

Here's where it gets murky. Eddie Dawson wasn't just a Klansman. He was a former FBI informer who was being paid by the Greensboro Police Department to tell them what the Klan was planning. And he told them plenty.

Two days before the march, police handed Dawson a copy of the parade permit, which included the route and the start point. He passed it straight to the Klansmen and Nazis. On the morning of the march, he rang Detective Jerry Cooper to say armed men were gathering at a Klansman's house and getting ready for trouble.

Meanwhile, an undercover agent from the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms called Bernard Butkovich had wormed his way into the local American Nazi Party. He sat in on meetings where the attack was allegedly discussed, and it was later claimed he'd helped supply some of the weapons. The ATF cleared him of any wrongdoing.

So between them, the local police and at least one federal agency had a fairly clear idea of what was coming. What they did with that knowledge is the bit nobody's ever properly explained.

What Happened on 3 November 1979

The marchers started gathering outside Morningside Homes, a mostly Black public housing estate, at around 11am. Children were milling about. Local TV crews were already there with cameras rolling, waiting for the march to set off.

There were no uniformed police anywhere near. The tactical unit assigned to watch the march was elsewhere, and one officer later told the civil trial she'd been given an odd order to clear the area shortly before 11.

Then a convoy of about nine or ten cars pulled up, led by Dawson. The two sides traded insults and some marchers kicked and hit the cars with sticks. A man from the convoy opened a car boot and weapons were handed out. Then the shooting started.

It lasted 88 seconds, with 39 shots fired. A few demonstrators had brought handguns and fired back, but police experts later testified that more than a dozen shots came from the convoy before anyone shot at them. When the guns went silent, the convoy drove off. Police arrived just after it was all over.

The Five Who Died

The people killed that morning weren't faceless militants. Most of them had walked away from comfortable careers to organise workers.

1981 commemoration poster from Maplewood Cemetery with photos of Sandi Smith, Mike Nathan, Jim Waller, Bill Sampson and Cesar Cauce

Sandi Smith, a former student body president at Bennett College, a historically Black women's college in Greensboro. She'd been helping get children out of harm's way and was shot in the head.
Dr Jim Waller, who'd trained as a doctor before taking a job in a textile mill to lead a union drive. He was shot in the back.
Cesar Cauce, a Cuban-born Duke University graduate who'd been organising hospital workers. He was knocked to the ground and shot in the back of the neck.
Bill Sampson, a Harvard Divinity School graduate turned mill worker, who was shot in the heart while firing back.
Dr Michael Nathan, a doctor who looked after children at a health clinic in Durham. He'd come to support the march and was shot in the head. He died two days later.

Among the wounded was Dr Paul Bermanzohn, who took bullets to the head and arm and was left partially paralysed. Another protester, Jim Wrenn, was shot multiple times while trying to help Nathan and survived.

Caught on Camera and Still Acquitted

You'd think having the killings on film would make the trials straightforward. It didn't. In 1980, six Klansmen and Nazis went on trial for murder and rioting in front of an all-white jury. They pleaded self-defence and every one of them walked free.

The federal government had a go in 1984, charging nine men, Dawson among them, with violating the victims' civil rights. After a four-month trial, another all-white jury acquitted the lot.

It didn't help that the story was buried almost as soon as it happened. The very next day, students stormed the US embassy in Tehran and the Iran hostage crisis swallowed the headlines for the next 444 days.

The Civil Case That Finally Landed a Blow

The survivors and families didn't give up. They brought a civil lawsuit against the Klansmen, the Nazis and the police, arguing there'd been a conspiracy to let the attack happen.

In 1985 a jury in Winston-Salem threw out the conspiracy claim, but it did find two Greensboro police officers, Dawson and five Klansmen and Nazis liable for the wrongful death of Michael Nathan. Oddly, it found nobody liable for the other four deaths.

The City of Greensboro paid $351,000 to settle the judgment, covering the Klansmen's and Nazis' share as well as its own officers'. So in a strange twist, the taxpayers of Greensboro ended up footing the bill for the men who'd done the shooting. Nathan's widow, Marty, gave the money to the Greensboro Justice Fund, which went on to support civil rights work across the South.

America's First Truth Commission

For years the city's official line was that this was a shootout between two extremist groups that had nothing to do with ordinary Greensboro. Survivors spent decades pushing back against that.

In 2004 a group of residents set up the Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission, modelled on the one in post-apartheid South Africa. It was the first commission of its kind in the United States, and the city council voted against backing it.

Its final report, published in May 2006, put most of the blame on the police. It found that officers knew the Klan and Nazis were coming armed and chose not to act, and described the absence of police as the "single most important element" that led to the bloodshed. It also criticised the Communist Workers Party for its inflammatory rhetoric and for putting local residents in danger.

An Apology 41 Years Late

In 2015 the state unveiled a highway historical marker near the site. The streets where the shooting happened have since been rebuilt and the original junction no longer exists, so the marker stands nearby on McConnell Road.

Front page of a 1979 Southern Struggle special edition with the headline Klan Kills Five, Feds, City Aid Racists

Then, in October 2020, Greensboro City Council voted 7-2 to formally apologise for the police department's role. The resolution admitted the police knew about the planned attack. The city also set up five annual scholarships in the victims' names, each worth $1,979 and awarded to a senior at nearby Dudley High School who writes an essay on racial and social justice.

The five who died are buried in Maplewood Cemetery in southeast Greensboro. The back of their memorial tells the story of the party and the shooting in their own words. The public monument at the site that the truth commission called for still hasn't been built.

The Greensboro massacre sits in an uncomfortable spot in American memory. The victims were self-declared communists, which made it easy for a Cold War public to shrug. But strip that away and you're left with five people gunned down on camera in broad daylight, a police force that saw it coming and stayed away, and not a single criminal conviction. It's a story that belongs alongside other dark chapters of the American South, from the murder of Emmett Till to the lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith. For a very different way of taking on the Klan, it's worth reading about Daryl Davis, the musician who talked 200 Klansmen out of the hood.