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When Aran Shetterly’s new book was released this month, he had no illusions about how it would be received in Greensboro. Morningside: The 1979 Greensboro Massacre and the Struggle for an American City’s Soul, re-opens a dark chapter of the city’s history many have struggled to definitively close.
“I fully expect that a lot of people in Greensboro will dismiss me,” Shetterly told The Assembly in an interview this week. “‘Oh, here comes another outsider trying to tell this story he doesn’t understand.’ It’s going to happen.”
Still, nearly 45 years later, Shetterly felt the story needed to be revisited with new eyes.
“This story is vast,” Shetterly said. “What I realize now is, you could write 100 books about this from different perspectives and each one would have something interesting to say in it.”
On November 3, 1979, members of the Communist Workers Party met at the largely Black Morningside Homes public housing project for what they billed as a “Death to the Klan” rally. Members of the Klan and American Nazi Party arrived with a cache of guns, killing five protesters and injuring at least ten more.
The rally was controversial from its planning stages and its result prompted a never-ending debate. Was it an ambush or a shootout? Who fired the first shot? Did a group of well-educated, upper-middle-class communists instigate this fight in one of Greensboro’s poorest Black neighborhoods? Did city leaders, the police, state and federal law enforcement let it happen—even conspire to be sure it did?
In the 1980s, two all-white juries acquitted the men accused of the killings while a civil jury found six members of the Klan and American Nazi party liable for wrongful deaths—along with two Greensboro police officers it found had foreknowledge of the attack but failed to prevent it.
It took until 2009 for the city council to release a carefully worded “statement of regret” that explicitly absolved the city from any liability. In 2015 the council was divided over whether to support a historical marker, arguing over both its value and use of the word “massacre.”
A full statement of apology from the city didn’t come until October 2020, after the twin punches of the deadly “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, and the murder of George Floyd at the hands of a white Minneapolis police officer had sent the nation into a fierce—but ultimately brief—period of “racial reckoning.”
From his family’s home in Charlottesville, Shetterly watched the Unite the Right rally and the vehicle attack on counter-protesters that killed one person and injured 19 others. He had been considering a book since meeting Rev. Nelson Johnson, a survivor of the Greensboro massacre, and Johnson’s wife, Joyce, during a visit to Greensboro in 2015. It seemed more relevant than ever.
“The relevance is not just timely but timeless,” Shetterly said. “It is part of who we are and how we think about things. We’re a country founded in revolution and in political violence in a lot of ways.”
Shetterly isn’t the first author to tackle the Greensboro Massacre and doesn’t flatter himself that his book is definitive.
“I don’t feel there is or probably ever will be a last word on this,” Shetterly said. “In the same way, you know, will there ever be a last word on the sort of racial, class, and culture conflicts in America?”
“But I can tell you how and why I decided to write the book I did,” Shetterly said. “And what perspectives I thought had been left out to some degree and that it was important to insert those perspectives more fully into the conversation.”
Shetterly is set to do just that on Monday, October 21, when the Greensboro History Museum hosts a conversation between Shetterly and Dr. Love Jones, executive director of the city’s Human Rights department.
Wrestling with History
Shetterly first became aware of the story of the Greensboro Massacre when his father, the painter Robert Shetterly, had an exhibit of his paintings at the International Civil Rights Center and Museum downtown. One of the organizers told him there were two people he had to meet. Over a meal at Manny’s Universal Cafe, Nelson and Joyce Johnson told Shetterly the story of the Greensboro Massacre from their perspective—and all that has happened since.
“How in the heck did I not know anything about this?” Shetterly recalls wondering after the meeting.
It was 2015, the same year a young white supremacist named Dylann Roof shot and killed nine parishioners at a Black church in Charleston, South Carolina.
“I thought, ‘You know, this really is a story, not just a local story, but it’s a story about who we are as Americans,'” Shetterly said. “We are still trying to resolve some of these issues, and there’s a lot of political violence involved in trying to resolve them. And I thought this is a really essential story that’s going to teach me more about this country.”
Shetterly’s book is the first on the Greensboro Massacre from a major publisher—Amistad, a division of HarperCollins. But in 1981, the writer Elizabeth Wheaton first delved into the events for the Institute for Southern Studies and Southern Exposure magazine, a project she would turn into the 1987 book Codename: Greenkil – The 1979 Greensboro Killings. Published by the University of Georgia Press, the book was hailed as “a definitive, evenhanded account” by Kirkus Reviews and “a painstaking investigation―at times a minute-by-minute reconstruction―of the fatal assault” by the Journal of American History.
But survivors of the massacre and their supporters felt Wheaton, in her desire to appear even-handed, tended toward letting law enforcement and the city off the hook for its complicity in the tragedy.
Shetterly said he came to agree.
“She left out some essential things,” Shetterly said.
Her initial Institute for Southern Studies report in 1981 was extensive and included information that had never been reported, Shetterly said. But some damning details about the role of law enforcement were left out of the final book, he said, which also had a new tone.
“When you get to her ‘87 book, there’s an animosity there, it seems to me, toward the [Communist Workers Party] folks in an effort to diminish them that I found kind of surprising,” Shetterly said. “I don’t know why that shift, why that became so important to her in those intervening years.”
In the prologue to her book, Wheaton—who had spent years pursuing interviews with anyone even tangentially involved in the story—said she came to reject the simple, black-and-white narrative some seemed to want.
“The full story of the Greensboro killings may never be revealed,” Wheaton wrote. “Not because there is a lack of information but because there are a multiplicity of perspectives from which we can view the available facts.”
“It is as though we were looking through a kaleidoscope and the events fell into one pattern when viewed through the [Communist Workers Party]’s perspective, and through that of the Klan and the Nazis, and yet another through that of the police and federal agents,” Wheaton wrote. “Each pattern has its own logic, but when they are superimposed, the image becomes a jumble of contradictions and conflict. One can only see that there are no heroes in this story; there are many, many fools.”
Wheaton died in 2018 before Shetterly could speak with her.
But she spoke about the Greensboro Massacre and her work over the years, including in a new afterward for a 2009 edition of her book.
“This really is a story, not just a local story, but it’s a story about who we are as Americans.”
Aran Shetterly
As a reporter for the News & Record, the city’s daily newspaper, I interviewed Wheaton several times. She expressed frustration that the Communist Workers Party survivors, and those they were in a position to influence, became less cooperative with her research when they realized she wasn’t writing a story of their heroism and martyrdom.
“I could see why they wanted that, but that wasn’t what I was there to do,” Wheaton told me in 2015, as the debate raged over a historical marker. “But in my research, I found that even in the lead-up to November 3, they were always pretty absolutist with people in that way.”
“They were their own worst enemies in those days, as some of them later admitted,” Wheaton said. “They would insult even the people who were on their side if they didn’t agree with them completely.”
It’s easy to see why Wheaton might have had that experience, Shetterly said, given how recent the events were when she began her research.
“They had just lost friends and loved ones and were still in the thick of some of the trial stuff then,” Shetterly said. “Their sense of victimization was different. They were still trying to figure out how to flip this into political advantage, I think, at that point. Whereas, there’s a little bit of that now, but not with the same intensity.”
It’s easy and appropriate to demonize people involved with the KKK and neo-Nazi groups, Wheaton said. But during her reporting, she found the members of the Communist Workers Party willing to justify all of their speech and actions—however they may have courted danger for themselves and others — because of the vileness of their opposition.
Events months before the Greensboro Massacre set the stage, Wheaton said.
In July 1979, members of the group went to China Grove to break up a Klan recruitment event and a showing of the 1915 pro-Klan film Birth of a Nation.
The protest attracted around 100 people, including most of those who would later die on November 3. They marched to the China Grove Community Center, some waving bats, sticks, and lengths of pipe, as they chanted “death to the Klan.”
Charlotte television cameras captured the march’s climax as protesters faced down Klansmen armed with shotguns on the porch of the community center. Police officers trying to prevent a clash between the groups convinced the Klansmen to retreat into the center as protesters burned their Confederate flag.
The anti-Klan protesters declared victory. Klan leadership vowed revenge. When posters advertising the November 3 anti-Klan event in Greensboro began to appear, they urged people to “organize to physically smash the racist KKK wherever it rears its ugly head,” and challenged the Klan to appear, promising “we will show you no mercy.”
That sort of rhetoric led generations in Greensboro, including members of the city council then and now, to see the Communist Workers Party as instigators of the conflict.
“I certainly don’t think those people deserved to die,” said then-Greensboro Councilman Mike Barber in 2015, during the historical marker debate. “But if you go and poke a bunch of rednecks who have guns and you print ‘Death to the Klan’ fliers, that puts you in the stupid category if you ask me.”
It was a case of political passion overpowering responsibility and good sense, Wheaton came to believe.
“They had every right to go to their meeting at China Grove and to chant and call them names,” Wheaton said in a 2015 interview. “They had every right to basically issue a fatwa and say they were going to confront and smash the Klan.”
“But they also had a responsibility to the people of those neighborhoods they were walking and marching through,” Wheaton said. “They created a situation that was dangerous not only for them, but for other people. You would hope that people would have a little more sense than to do that.”
‘Stuck In That Moment’
Arguments over the Communist Workers Party’s rhetoric have for too long framed the terms on which people have discussed the Greensboro Massacre, Shetterly said.
“One of the things I’m trying to do in the book a little bit is change those terms,” he said. “I think that’s very important to try to do for a number of reasons. But the first reason, I’d say, is I feel like there were mistakes made by the CWP members. There’s no question—and they’ve admitted them. Their level of self-reflection seems to be different than some of the people on the other sides of this at times.”
Both the rhetoric and peoples’ reaction to the term “communist” have come to obscure the work the group was trying to do, like unionizing textile plants in the area and championing anti-racism, that many would support without that baggage.
“Calling them stupid and more importantly communist, we get stuck in that moment, in a sense,” Shetterly said. “It’s like a wall that comes up. We don’t look past that to see what they were really about and what they were trying to do.”
What’s been largely left out of the conversation, Shetterly said, is the work they were doing before November 3, and the degree to which everyone from city leaders to law enforcement was threatened by it.
“I think we underestimate the impact that this group of activists had and was having and I wanted to rescue that,” Shetterly said. ”I think that’s part of what made them ‘dangerous,’ in the words of [former Greensboro Mayor] Jim Melvin.”
With distance and perspective, some of the former Communist Workers Party members have come to reconsider their rhetoric, Shetterly said. But that same distance and perspective should also lead to a new appreciation of their work in the late 1970s.
“There’s a way in which they’re incredibly patriotic,” Shetterly said. “They are trying to hold us to the standard of our American ideals. They truly want to believe in equality. They truly want to believe in life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for every single person in this country. And while their tactics might be wrong, I don’t feel we should just dismiss their goals because of their tactics.”
The fact that the argument over the events of that day endures 45 years later is a sign of the power and relevance of the ideas being expressed and work being done, Shetterly said, as well as the fierce opposition to them.
“Part of the reason the book took me so long was negotiating the high passions that still exist on different sides of this issue,” Shetterly said. “And trying to find my own way and trying to figure out what I felt was as true as I could write.”
“I think I’ve done that.”
Correction: The original version of this story misidentified former Greensboro Mayor Jim Melvin. We regret the error.
Joe Killian is The Assembly’s Greensboro editor. He covered cops, courts, government and politics at Greensboro’s daily paper, The News & Record, for a decade. He joined us from NC Newsline in Raleigh, where he was senior investigative reporter.