Program transcript:
Grant Reeher: Welcome to the Campbell Conversations. I'm Grant Reeher. My guest today is Aran Shetterly. He's a writer and editor and the author of a relatively new book on the Greensboro massacre in North Carolina titled, "Morningside: The 1979 Greensboro Massacre and the Struggle for an American City's Soul". Aran, welcome to the program and congratulations on the new book.
Aran Shetterly: Thank you. Great to be with you.
GR: Well, it's good to have you. So a really interesting book and an interesting timing on it, too. Let's just start with some basics for our listeners. Remind all of us what the Greensboro Massacre was.
AS: Well, we all need to be reminded because it's sort of left our public consciousness in a lot of ways. So in 1979, a multiracial group of activists was organizing in the mills in Greensboro, North Carolina. They were trying to bring black and white workers together. And these were still some of the largest textile mills in the whole world. I mean, Levi's dungaree jean material was made there for over a hundred years. And they were having trouble bringing people, white and black people together in those mills and felt that the Klan was perhaps, the Ku Klux Klan was perhaps interfering with their work. And so they decided to have a march to talk about why it's important to bring workers together, that they would have more power to advocate for better hours, better health care, better services, better pay. And they called it ‘Death to the Klan’ and they put up these posters. And they were organizing on November 3rd, 1979 setting up, putting up the sound truck, putting up posters, singing some freedom songs. And all of a sudden, a caravan of Klansmen and neo-Nazis drove up to the start of the march, picked a fight, started shooting, killed five of these activists and injured another ten, drove off, and no one was ever held criminally responsible for what happened. And when I found out about this, I thought, wait a minute, how do I not know about this and what is this story? I need to go deeper.
GR: Interesting. So one of the things that struck me, looking at your book and then what you just said to me right there, the name of the event in the march was ‘Death of the Klan’ and from what I've read, the marchers were chanting ‘death to the Klan’. What did they mean by that? And I know that, we'll get to this a little bit later, but some of the folks that that were charged pointed to that as kind of the notion that the antagonism was going in both directions.
AS: Yeah. I mean, that's a great question and some ways, the antagonism was going in both directions. But what they really meant was death to racism, death to an ideology that separates people in the way that the Klan has done. And that's, you know, later and after all the trials and after everything that took place, the leader of this march, Nelson Johnson, would say, I really regret that we didn't say death to racism, because that's really what we meant. And instead, the title made it seem personal in a way that they didn't really intend it to be.
GR: Right. And so you mentioned that no one was ever ultimately held criminally accountable for this. But there were people arrested, there were people caught, correct?
AS: Correct. And there were, I mean, almost by chance, though, because one of the curious things about this event was that the local police had decided to take a low profile approach. So they were out of sight, they weren't actually near where the marchers were. And yet they had an informant that was telling them that the Klan was actually going to show up that day and that they had guns. So it was a bizarre and very faulty, if not deliberately faulty decision that came from the top of that department. So at the last minute, some police swooped in and arrested 12 of these Klansmen, most of the shooters. And they were then tried in a state murder trial, then a federal criminal civil rights trial. And then finally there was a third trial, which was a federal civil trial.
GR: Okay. And were there any guilty verdicts or liabilities that were ultimately meted out here, even have a civil kind or no one was ever held accountable in any way?
AS: The third trial was really the most interesting trial, because the plaintiffs, you know, the activists were able to hire their own lawyers. And so instead of having the district attorney, prosecutors doing the state murder trial or the Justice Department lawyers doing the federal criminal civil rights trial, they had their own lawyers who could present the evidence and the arguments in the way that they wanted to. And not only that, there was this incredible judge. No judge in North Carolina would hear the federal civil trial. And so a judge from Richmond named Robert Merhige came down and camped out in Winston-Salem, North Carolina for six months and heard this trial. And Merhige was this incredibly fair judge who had also been responsible for integrating schools in Virginia in the early 1970’s, among other things, and admitting women to the University of Virginia. And he refused to let the jury in that civil trial be all white. The previous two juries had been all white. And there was one black man on that jury in the civil trial. And at the end of the day, there was a judgment in which Klansmen, neo-Nazis, the informant for the police department and Greensboro Police Department officers were found jointly liable for death. And as far as I know, that's the only judgment like that in American history that's held Nazis, Klansmen and police together jointly liable.
GR: Was there any money that ultimately got awarded to any families?
AS: A fraction of, you know, what they'd asked for. And they actually awarded the money only to one of the families who had suffered the death of one of their family members. And it was the only member who had not been a member of the Communist Worker's Party, which is what a lot of these activists were part of. And so it was a curious and somewhat political decision on the part of the jury to award $350,000 about to that one family. But what is interesting is what the activists did is they took most of that money back and put it into a fund that they have used then for decades to fund civil rights work at the grassroots level around the South.
GR: Interesting. You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher and I'm speaking with Aran Shetterly, and we're discussing his new book, it's titled, "Morningside: The 1979 Greensboro Massacre and the Struggle for an American City's Soul". So you mentioned there, right before the break the Communist Worker's Party being principal organizer of the labor action and the protest. So that has to change the dynamics of all of this. And this may be an overly simplistic question, but is this something about communism and anti-communism? Or is this something about race and racism or about labor more generally? I mean, how do you disentangle those things as a historian and a writer when you're trying to unpack what's going on back then?
AS: That's a great question, actually. And the thing is, at some point, you really can't. There's sort of like this Möbius strip, right? You're not sure which side you're on when you're trying to describe this at times. It’s particularly the animosity toward, right, that's being directed from the Klan and the Nazis. So what happened was, and this was one of the reasons they were acquitted in the first two trials, the state murder trial and the federal criminal trial, was that their defense lawyers very cleverly wrapped them in the flag. They said these are patriots, they weren't acting out of racial animus, they were going after communists, and you send them halfway around the world to fight communists in Vietnam and here they are trying to protect the United States from communism and you're going to hold them accountable? And, you know, there's something to that argument, right? It's like, well, it's okay to go fight it around the world, but here they're protected? It's a little confusing. And so, I mean, I don't believe that's right, but I'm just saying I can understand why it causes conflict in the minds of the shooters and the jury. So, yeah, that was a big part of what happened. What's interesting is that Judge Merhige even said, you know, you can't really disentangle these two things, race and communism in this trial. And what he meant by that is that a lot of times civil rights activists were being called communists when they weren't, you know? And anyone who was advocating for equal justice, for true equality, for full participation in our democracy would often get called a communist. And there have been all these witch hunts through our history. So in a way, whether they call themselves communists or not, the Klansmen, the Nazis, because of what they were advocating for, the labor justice across racial lines, we're probably going to consider them communists anyway.
GR: So you are pretty sure, and the way that you're talking to me today also suggests this, that the juries got this wrong, that that the folks that were on trial were the ones that did the shooting, were the ones that did the killing. And how do we know this? I mean, this may seem like a dumb question, but why are you so sure?
AS: Well…
GR: The cops grabbed them right away, like almost in the act? I mean, what would be the reason why, hey, we didn't get the wrong person? It seems like a silly question, but I just want to make sure.
AS: Yeah. What's very interesting is these trials were quite complex, to be honest with you. And what was clear was, the people prosecuting the trials were a little uncomfortable prosecuting in a sense, on behalf of people who called themselves communists. And so they made some decisions that compromised their ability to really prosecute the trial well. And the thing is, is that the marchers had a parade permit, they had a legal right. They'd gone to the police department, they'd gone to the city. They had a legal right to march that day. So when the FBI came in to investigate, they opened their investigation and it turned out this was the third largest FBI investigation in our nation's history at the time, they opened their investigation as a civil rights investigation because the marchers had gone through the proper channels and had their freedom of speech protected to march and to say whatever it was they wanted to say that day. The Klansmen and Nazis who drove up had no such permit. They were just confronting this march out of the blue. And so that really becomes down to, this was not sanctioned on both sides. It was it was sanctioned on one side and then ambushed by another side.
GR: Okay. And so the trials happen, in almost all instances these folks are not held accountable, except for this one instance that happened, you know, several years later, the civil trial.
AS: Right.
GR: How would you characterize what's going on in Greensboro between the end of these trials? And 2004, which is when is the sort of the positive part of your book, the Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission was established. What is life in Greensboro like on this issue during that time?
AS: Well, this is why I call it really a, you know, a struggle for an American city soul in some ways. I mean, this was an incredibly divisive event that fractured Greensboro in a lot of ways, as these tragic events tend to do in our communities. And, you know, the very first thing and, you know, as a sort of investigative journalist-historian, what I get drawn to when I hear that the mayor at the time, the minute the shooting happened, says this has nothing to do with Greensboro, essentially. Don't even look here, you know, it's just some extremists who happened to pass through our city, I think, wait a minute, let's see what this has to do with Greensboro. But you have a big section of Greensboro’s residents who followed that mayor and believed this didn't have anything to do with us, you know? And we shouldn't even be talking about this, you know, we need to just sweep this under the rug and move on. And, you know, a lot of people in the city were traumatized by this event, but they weren't given the ability to process it, to talk about it. The justice system couldn't process it and come out with a verdict that anyone really trusted and so it festered. And the people, you know, who were the activists got blamed essentially for what had happened. Oh, you called it ‘Death to the Klan’, you baited the Klan in here, and they became pariahs in the city. And so there was a lot of pain and trauma and healing that needed to happen and still does, to be honest with you. It's a long process to recover from events like this.
GR: Yeah, I want to pursue that a little bit more when we come back from the break. You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher and I'm talking with Aran Shetterly. He's a writer and editor and the author of a new book titled, "Morningside: The 1979 Greensboro Massacre and the Struggle for an American City's Soul" and we've been discussing the book and the issues that it raises. So right before the break, we were talking about the Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission. How did this commission get established?
AS: So it's interesting, in a way it starts with art. A woman named Emily Mann wrote a wonderful play called, “Greensboro, a Requiem about the Massacre” and it was performed in Greensboro. And all of a sudden, people were able to start conversations about what had happened that they hadn't been having for at that point, almost 20 years. And coming out of that, Nelson Johnson, who's at the center of my book, who had become by then not a communist anymore, but a pastor and a remarkable activist, he continued, you know, being an activist his whole life, he just died this past February and truly a tremendous loss. But he saw this and he thought, wow, conversations can be had and when they're had, there's a healing aspect to that. And so he they started talking about this, and it was, happened to coincide with an American foundation that was interested in seeing if the South African model of a truth and reconciliation process could actually work in the United States. And so they came and said, we'll fund this. Let's see if we can you know, make something happen. Now, the city of Greensboro wanted nothing to do with it. And so what ends up happening is actually a pretty remarkable achievement to my mind, of Greensboro civil society. NGOs, churches, business leaders come together to put on a full scale truth and reconciliation process. Bishop Desmond Tutu visits Greensboro twice, members of the commission in South Africa participated fully in helping organize and structure this commission. And they held two years of basically studying what had happened and having open forums in which people who were participated or connected to it came to talk, including Klansmen and police officers and these activists and lawyers and judges. Quite a remarkable process that ran from 2004 to 2006 and produced this incredible report that basically laid out the history as they saw it, of what had taken place that day on November 3rd, 1979 and issued a whole set of recommendations for the city of Greensboro to try to prevent something like this from ever happening again.
GR: Wow. Let me interrupt there because I just heard you say that Klansmen or former Klansmen were part of this too. How did they generate that kind of trust across the board? I can see how you'd get one side or the other side, but my goodness, how did they thread that needle?
AS: Well, I think they tried to tell people that they were not controlling in the least what they said, they were going to invite them in to tell their stories. And what's interesting about that is two Klansmen came. One was reflective in a very interesting way. He said, you know what? I grew up in the South, I grew up with stories of the Confederacy. We had a frying pan that we said, you know, saved my grandfather's life because a union bullet hit it. And, you know, I eat my fried eggs out of that frying pan my whole, growing up. And he said, so, you know, I believe those ideas, if I had grown up in New York City, he said, maybe I would have been a communist.
GR: Wow.
AS: The other Klansman said to a shocked audience that was shocked into silence, God guided the bullets that day. So you saw that one was open and possibly changing to some degree in his mind, and the other one wasn't, but hugely informative to people listening about where things stood.
GR: If you've just joined us, you're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher and my guest is the writer Aran Shetterly. So you mentioned that the commission made recommendations and those were directed in part towards avoiding something like this in the future, making things better. What were the, can you summarize the recommendations?
AS: Well, there were a bunch. There were a bunch about sort of economic equality, to be honest, and fair housing, about equal pay, about, you know, issues that, you know, sort of fester in communities and lead to tensions that eventually can explode. There were also recommendations around the police force in establishing an independent oversight commission, right, to look at police actions. That's been something that's been much more difficult to truly achieve in Greensboro. But I have to say that Greensboro, you know, has made some progress on a bunch of these recommendations. It's not perfect, but they are sort of moving in that direction. In fact, you know, I was impressed when my book came out that the first conversation I had in Greensboro was led by the director of the Human Rights Office for the City. And we had over 200 people who came and she asked great questions about this history. So, you know, the history, it's opening up.
GR: I have to confess, I know a bit about North Carolina and where its politics have been in in recent years and how it is changing dramatically in terms of, you know, who it votes for, for president and that kind of thing, or at least the some of the internal politics of different congressional districts, but I don't know these individual towns all that well. So tell me tell me where Greensboro sits in North Carolina today.
AS: Greensboro is in what's called the Piedmont, it's the foothills. And so it's not far from Durham and the triangle area, which we think of as Durham, Chapel Hill and Raleigh. And it was a city that had big aspirations. You know, it thought it could be the Charlotte, essentially, of North Carolina at one point. But the banks decided to relocate to Charlotte, and that's what made Charlotte, you know, this massive city is the banking industry. So Greensboro had a troubled transitioning from the textile mills and run essentially as a company town of the mills into this modern era. But it has five colleges and universities there, including the state's flagship black university, North Carolina A&T, which has had a played a huge role in terms of the city's activism and the way the city has had to deal with the issues that it's been confronted with.
GR: So it sounds like it's within a transitional state. It's kind of a transitional town, and…
AS: It's a transitional town.
GR: Being both sort of a piece of rural, but near what we would think of as the liberal epicenter of North Carolina.
AS: Exactly. I think that's actually very well put, that it sort of struggles between being sort of a more liberal town and a more reactionary town and where the center is in that, just like the rest of us are trying to figure that out.
GR: Well, I have to apologize, I'm only giving you about 3 minutes to wrestle with this last big topic. But I wanted to ask you the obvious question here at the end of, are there lessons for us where we are now as a country politically, or otherwise that you think come from this event and its aftermath and the commission? I mean, what should we be thinking about in terms of where we are nationally and what you've taken a deep dive into historically and bringing it up to the present?
AS: So, two days ago I got a text from a Greensboro police officer who I talked to while I was doing this research, and he said, Aran, can you talk? I said, sure. And he called me up and he said, I'm in tears. I just finished your book, and he said, and I feel so ashamed that I bought the line, the story that Nelson Johnson was to blame for that massacre and I'm so sorry that I never got the chance to meet him. And so one of the things that I feel like I've learned over and over, and that was a powerful example of it, is that if we try to sweep these complex histories under the rug, they don't go away. You know, they fester, they continue to caused division in our society and we really need to face them and process them. And it took that guy courage not just to read the book, but then to call me up and actually tell me how he felt. And I really appreciated that courage. But one of the things that we talked about, and this is interesting, is he had been, after he left the police force, he was a private investigator for Oliver Stone on the JFK assassination movie, his JFK movie. And so this cop said, you know, I see a line from JFK to Greensboro, he said, when we don't openly discuss these traumas and tragedies, when things feel like they're hidden, we lose faith in our government. And I think, honestly, that he's on to something that without the accountability, right, of who was to blame for what happened in Greensboro, really accountable and held accountable for it, who is to blame for these different things, we end up where we are today with cynicism and a leader for whom there's no accountability or barely any accountability. We're struggling to find it and clawing that back is difficult. So I think that's something that we can take away from this.
GR: And maybe thinking of the future, perhaps some sort of variation of the way that Greensboro dealt with this is something that will be I thinking, about ten, twenty years from now, who knows.
AS: Absolutely. In 2020 in the depths of COVID, the Greensboro City Council held a Zoom meeting in which they apologized for the city's complicity in the murders that day, that the police department should have been there and they weren't. And it was a very powerful moment. And that's the kind of reckoning we need with all sorts of aspects of our history, I think.
GR: Well, we'll have to leave it there. That was Aran Shetterly and again, his new book is titled, "Morningside: The 1979 Greensboro Massacre and the Struggle for an American City's Soul". And, when you search for that book, I want you to note that Aran is spelled A R A N. Aaron is really interesting book, and thanks so much for taking the time to talk to me about it.
AS: Thank you, Grant, really enjoyed it.
GR: You've been listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media, conversations in the public interest.
