Guns, Torches and Badges: The 1979 Greensboro Massacre, the Charlottesville Unite the Right Rally, and the Lasting Impacts of Racial Violence on Black and anti-Racist Communities

Abstract

One of the most tragic examples of extreme racial violence occurred in Greensboro, North Carolina, on November 3, 1979, when the multi-racial Communist Workers Party (CWP) planned a demonstration to protest against the notorious Ku Klux Klan (KKK). As protestors gathered for the “Death to Klan” march, a group of Nazis and Klansmen drove through the protest site in a nine-car caravan. The Nazis and Klansmen unloaded eighty-eight seconds of gunfire into the crowd killing five Communist Workers Party members. That same hatred and violence in Greensboro perpetuated by neo-fascists appeared again on August 12th, 2017, in an eerily identical fashion when Heather Heyer, a thirty-two-year-old, White woman, was killed in Charlottesville, Virginia. Heyer lost her life after white supremacist, James Fields, Jr., plowed his car into demonstrators protesting at a “Unite the Right” rally that had been orchestrated by white nationalists. In an instant following Heather Heyer’s murder, Charlottesville became reminiscent of Greensboro and 2017 blatantly mirrored the dawn of the 1980s, a troubling period of racial conflict and frayed politics. The case study of Morningside Homes illuminated a disregard and invisibility that black communities often suffered at the hands of law enforcement, city officials, white supremacists and other community members. The tragedy of Charlottesville illustrated not only the continuation of that invisibility, but also the traditional hindering of political organizing as a result of trauma, fear, and distrust of those sworn to protect the communities in which they serve. Despite how progressive America attempts to position itself, local histories continue to reflect national divisions of race and politics that relentingly facilitate rage, violence, and white supremacy in an alleged Post-Racial Society.