Greensboro massacre

The Greensboro massacre was a deadly confrontation which occurred on November 3, 1979, in Greensboro, North Carolina, US, when members of the Ku Klux Klan and the American Nazi Party (ANP) shot and killed five participants in a "Death to the Klan" march which was organized by the Communist Workers Party (CWP).

The event had been preceded by inflammatory rhetoric. The Greensboro City Police Department had an informant, Eddie Dawson, inside the KKK and ANP group whom the police had provided with the march permit with its unpublished starting location. The permit specified the police requirement that the marchers be unarmed. The federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms also had agent, Bernard Butkovich, who had embedded in the Nazis' organization three months earlier. The morning of the shooting, the Klan informant (Dawson) notified the police that the Klan was prepared for armed violence, and that a caravan of nine cars of Klan and Nazis with firearms were approaching the marchers gathering at the corner of Everitt and Carver Streets in Morningside Homes, a public housing project. The people killed included four members of the CWP, and one supporter. Three were Greensboro residents, and two lived in Durham, NC. The victims were activists involved in racial justice efforts and in unionizing textile industry and hospital workers in the area. In addition to the five deaths, nine demonstrators, two news crew members, and a Klansman were wounded.

Two trials of the Klan and ANP members were conducted, one criminal trial, and a second trial on federal civil rights violations. In the first trial, conducted by the state of North Carolina in 1980, six Klansmen and Nazis were charged with first-degree murder and felony riot. All of the defendants were acquitted by an all-white jury. In 1984, nine Klansmen and Nazis were acquitted in a federal civil trial, again by an all-white jury, although during the grand jury proceedings that led to the second trial, one Klansmen had pleaded guilty to firing the first shot. The second trial jury accepted the defense argument that the assaults by the defendants were not based on racial animus, but on hatred of communism. Neither of the first two trials engaged issues related to government negligence or complicity.

Eight defendants were found liable for the wrongful death of the one protester who was not a member of the CWP. A third federal criminal civil rights trial in 1984 was held against nine defendants. Again, all of the defendants were acquitted by a jury that accepted their claims of self-defense, despite reports of "vivid newsreel film to the contrary". News outlets, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the News & Record in Greensboro, North Carolina have remarked on the all-white juries which tried the 1979 and 1984 cases.

In 2004, 25 years after the event, a private organization formed the Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission with the intention to investigate the events of 1979. Though the private organization was limited in its investigation because it failed to secure authority or local sanction, its Final Report concluded that both sides had engaged in inflammatory rhetoric, but that the Klan and ANP members had intended to inflict injury on protesters, and the police department bore significant responsibility, along with the Klan and Nazis, by allowing anticipated violence to take place. In 2009, the Greensboro City Council passed a resolution expressing regret for the deaths in the march. In 2015, the city unveiled a marker to memorialize the Greensboro Massacre. On August 15, 2017 and again on October 6, 2020, the Greensboro City Council formally apologized to the victims for the massacre.

The incident marked a convergence of American neo-Nazi and Ku Klux Klan movements, which previously operated without cooperation.