Stop Trump From Ending Black History Education In Schools
White supremacists and neo-Nazis murdered five Black, Latino and white protesters in North Carolina 46 years ago, but news coverage was overshadowed because on the next day, the world was frozen with the news that Iranian revolutionaries took 52 Americans hostages that would not be released for 444 days.
It was an act of unintended censorship of one of the bloodiest attacks on protesters at an anti-KKK and American Nazi Party in what has become known as the Greensboro Massacre.
Now, in a blatantly intended attempt at censorship, the trump administration is threatening to withhold federal funds from schools that teach African American history. The administration is claiming that such instruction may violate trump’s orders to eliminate programs that exhibit “discriminatory equity ideology,” “racial indoctrination” and “gender ideology” and programs that espouse diversity, inclusion and equity or DEI.
Linda McMahon, trump’s nominee to lead the U.S. Department of Education, declined last week to say definitively that classes on subjects like African American history would be permissible under trump’s executive order on “radical indoctrination.”
Responding to a question at her Senate confirmation hearing about the fate of African American history courses, McMahon said she wants to “take a look at these programs and totally understand the breadth of the executive order” before she makes definitive statements about which programs are and aren’t appropriate.
Already, a new Advanced Placement course on African American history is in jeopardy as 17 states have passed laws limiting how teachers can discuss race and racism in their classrooms. In Florida, education officials banned the AP African American History pilot course for allegedly violating the state law restricting discussions on race. Last year, Arkansas said the course would not count toward credit for high school graduation while South Carolina rejected the course from its state roster for the current school year.
Now is a time when right wing forces under trump are trying to either sanitize or eliminate knowledge about the Black experience in America. It will be up to private historians, writers and bloggers to report the realities.
Greensboro Massacre
The Greensboro Massacre was brought to light with the death last week of Nelson Johnson, 81, a labor leader who was wounded in the attacks and later led a commission to investigate the violence. Johnson had also led protest marches supporting striking university cafeteria workers, and helped found the Greensboro Association for Poor People, which worked to support impoverished residents of East Greensboro.
In 1969, Greensboro’s white school board overturned the election of Dudley High School’s Black student president on the grounds that he was too radical. Johnson organized protests and the city responded by calling in the National Guard. It led to the Siege of A&T (North Carolina Agriculture and Technical State University), the largest military occupation of any campus in U.S. history. During two days of violence, one bystander, sophomore honors student Willie Grimes, was killed, although it was never determined if he was killed by police or protesters.
The Greensboro incident unfolded on Nov. 3, 1979. Johnson and his wife, Joyce were local leaders of the Communist Workers Party (later the Communist Workers Organization). The Communist Workers Party formed in 1973 in New York as a splinter group of the Communist Party USA. It was one of several groups which were established as part of a Maoist revival within the radical community. Its leaders intended to increase activism in what they called the Workers Viewpoint Organization (WVO), along the Maoist model.
That summer of 1979, the Communist Workers Party led a confrontation with members of the Ku Klux Klan in China Grove, a town near Charlotte, where the Klan was sponsoring a screening of “Birth of a Nation.” The 1915 silent film by director D.W. Griffith chronicles the Civil War and Reconstruction eras while casting the KKK as heroic saviors of the south and blacks in a demeaning, racist way.
After the protest in China Grove, the Jonsons organized a “Death to the Klan” march for November 3, 1979, through Greensboro. The city had been a site of major civil rights actions in the 1960s including historic sit-ins which forced the desegregation of lunch counters.
The march was scheduled to start around noon in a predominantly black housing project called Morningside Homes and to proceed to the Greensboro City Hall. The march was to be followed by a conference to unite Black and white workers in the surrounding textile mills and to facilitate community building between the workers and Greensboro’s broader Black population.
The group distributed flyers that called for radical, even violent opposition to the Klan, including one that said that the Klan “should be physically beaten and chased out of town. This is the only language they understand. Armed self-defense is the only defense.”
Camera crews from local television stations were on hand, and several marchers were armed. As the marchers gathered outside the housing complex, about 40 members of the Klan and the American Nazi Party, arrived in a caravan of nine cars.
The Klan and Nazi members were led by Virgil Griffin, the grand dragon of the North Carolina Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. Griffin was not charged at the Greenville mele but in 1965, Griffin and another man were convicted of posing as detectives investigating a racial incident at a school. In 1980, Griffin and another Klan members were charged for a cross burning in Lincoln County, N.C.
The two groups heckled each other, and some marchers beat the KKK and Nazi cars with picket sticks and kicks. Fights broke out, then the shooting. Within just 88 seconds, four marchers were dead and another 12 were injured, including one who later died. Johnson suffered a knife wound to his arm as the police stood by until the shooting stopped.
The first shot came from the head of the KKK caravan, although it wasn’t clear who fired the shot. Witnesses reported that Klansman Mark Sherer fired first, into the air. A second shot was fired into the air by Klansman Brent Fletcher, and shots three and four by Sherer, into the ground and a parked car.
KKK and American Nazi Party members got out of their vehicles and physically confronted the marchers. Communist Workers Party member James Waller got a shotgun from fellow marcher Tom Clark’s truck during the confrontation. Klansman Roy Toney spotted him and struggled with Waller for control of the shotgun, which went off during the struggle.
Six caravan passengers got three pistols, four 12-gauge shotguns and a semiautomatic rifle from the trunk of a Ford Fairlane and fired at the marchers, while the rest of the cars and their occupants fled.
Marchers Bill Sampson, Allen Blitz, Rand Manzella, and Claire Butler fired back at the caravan members with handguns. The firsts to die were Waller, shot by Nazi Party member Roland Wood and Klansman David Matthews, and Communist Workers Party member Cesar Cauce, shot by Klansman Jerry Paul Smith. Both protesters were unarmed at the time of their deaths.
An unarmed marcher, Michael Nathan, was shot and killed by Matthews while running towards Waller’s body. Sampson was killed while firing at the caravan members. Matthews shot and killed Communist Workers Party member Sandra Smith while she was taking cover near Butler, who was firing at caravan members. Smith was unarmed.
The Greensboro city police department did not interfere even though they had informants within the KKK and the American Nazi Party who had notified them that the Klan was prepared for armed violence.
The dead included four members of the Communist Workers Party. Wounded were nine demonstrators, two news crew members, and one Klansman.
Those killed were Communist Workers Party members and rank-and-file union leaders and organizers. Michael Nathan was sworn into the party on his deathbed. The dead were:
- Cesar Cauce, 25, whose family immigrated as refugees from Cuba when he was a child. He grew up in Miami, Fla., and graduated magna cum laude from Duke University. Cauce worked in the anti-war movement, and as a union organizer at textile mills in North Carolina. His sister is Ana Mari Cauce, president of the University of Washington since 2015.
- Dr. James Waller, 36, of Chicago, was elected as president of a local textile workers union. He originally taught at Duke University and was a physician but left his medical practice in North Carolina to organize textile workers. Waller was a co-founder of the Carolina Brown Lung Association for textile workers. He provided textile mill workers with health screenings for byssinosis (or brown lung) and helped develop health clinics. He trained as part of the Lincoln Hospital Collective in New York, and organized medical aid to American Indian Movement activists under siege at Wounded Knee, S.D., in 1973. His activism continued in the South. In 1976, Waller left the medical profession to become a textile mill worker at the Granite Finishing Plant in Haw River, N.C.
- William Evan Sampson, 31, was born in Delaware was active in the anti-war movement as an undergraduate student at Augustana College in Rock Island, Ill. Sampson spent his junior year studying at the Sorbonne in Paris, received a Masters in Divinity degree from Harvard in 1971 and then studied medicine at the University of Virginia, where he organized health care workers to support liberation struggles in southern Africa. He left medical school to help organize workers.
- Sandra Neely Smith, 29, was a civil rights activist and president of the student body at Greensboro’s Bennett College. She became a nurse and worked to organize textile workers and improve health conditions at the plant.
- Michael Nathan, 32, was chief of pediatrics at Lincoln Community Health Center, a clinic for children from low-income families in Durham, N.C. He was wounded at the Greenville shooting and died two days later at the hospital. He was not a member of the Communist Workers Party but was supporting his wife, Marty Nathan, who was also wounded that day.
Two criminal trials of several of the Klan and American Nazi Party members were led by state and federal prosecutors. In the first state trial in 1979, five were charged with first-degree murder and felony riot. All were acquitted, although one had pleaded guilty earlier to a conspiracy charge for firing the first shot.
In 1984, nine defendants were charged with federal civil rights violations. Again, all of the defendants were found not guilty by a jury that accepted their claims of self-defense, despite reports of “vivid newsreel film to the contrary.”
In each case the juries were all white.
In 1980, the Greensboro Civil Rights Fund (GCRF) was organized by the families and friends of the deceased Communist Workers Party members and raised about $700,000 to prosecute the Ku Klux Klan, the Nazi Party, the Greensboro Police Department, the FBI, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (BATF). The suit, led by the Christic Institute, alleged civil rights violations, failure to protect demonstrators, and wrongful death. Eight defendants were found liable for the wrongful death of the one protester, Michael Nathan, who was not a member of the Communist Workers Party.
The Christic Institute was a public interest law firm founded in 1980 by Daniel Sheehan, his wife Sara Nelson, and their partner, William J. Davis, a Jesuit priest, after the successful conclusion of their work on the Karen Silkwood case.
Inspired by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in post-apartheid South Africa, the Johnsons spent years calling for a similar program to look into the Greensboro Massacre. Government and many private groups resisted, supposedly worried that it would reopen old wounds. But Johnson and his wife did not give up and in 2005 formed a seven-member fact-finding commission.
“These deep wounds live just beneath the surface,” Mr. Johnson said in a 2005 interview. He said that refusing to create a commission was “really not recognizing why this city hasn’t come to terms with racial oppression and the treatment of people. Here’s an opportunity to be truthful.”
The commission took testimony from many witnesses, including former Klansmen, and concluded in 2006 that the violence was intensified by the non-involvement of police.
The city of Greensboro did not participate in or support the truth and reconciliation commission, and it long resisted Johnson’s call for an official recognition of the event. Finally, in 2015, city officials relented and placed a historical marker near the site. On August 15, 2017, and on October 6, 2020, the Greensboro City Council formally apologized for the massacre.
The Commission found that both the Communist Workers Party and the Klan contributed in varying degrees to the violence. It said that the Communist Workers Party did not intend to use handguns for anything other than self-defense. The Commission concluded that the KKK and Nazi Party members went to the rally intending to provoke a violent confrontation, and that they fired on demonstrators with intent of injury.
The Commission noted the violence escalated in part because of the inactivity of Greensboro Police on the scene. Testimony at the Commission noted that the Greensboro Police Department had infiltrated the Klan and, through a paid informant, knew of the white supremacists’ plans and the strong potential for violence that day. The FBI was also aware of the impending armed confrontation.
The incident marked the first convergence of American neo-Nazi and Ku Klux Klan movements. The groups were previously antagonistic to each other and had refused to cooperate in rallies.