Subject: [AFIB] The Greensboro Massacre: Klansmen, Nazis & Government Complicity Date: Wed, 10 Nov 1999 10:24:49 -0800 From: Tom Burghardt To: afib@igc.topica.com _______________________________ ANTIFA INFO-BULLETIN News * Analysis * Research * Action _______________________________ SPECIAL EDITION November 10, 1999 * * * ______________________________________________________________________________ THE GREENSBORO MASSACRE: Klansmen, Nazis, and Government Complicity ______________________________________________________________________________ AFIB EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION: On November 3, 1979, a "United Racist Front" of Klansmen and Nazis gunned down five members of the leftist Communist Workers Party in cold blood, setting the stage for an explosion of murderous attacks during the eighties. Before the decade was out, neo-Nazis and their KKK allies were beginning to forge a new strategy, "leaderless resistance": terrorist violence undertaken by small, autonomous cells whose purpose is to wage racist war "by other means." In the wake of the 1995 attack on the Alfred P. Murrah federal building in Oklahoma City, the FBI and other agencies of government repression are focusing their gun-sights on the far-right. This too, follows a discernible pattern: when the far-right and their minions attack "appropriate" targets - leftists, trade unionists, people of color and queers, the state turns a blind eye; when the state itself or corporate elites are attacked, the full weight of the government's repressive apparatus is brought to bear against the perpetrators. This was amply demonstrated during the sordid "Iran-Contra" affair when several fascist and Christian Patriot outfits lent their paramilitary expertise to the National Security Council's "off-the-shelf" operations to illegally aid drug-tainted Nicaraguan Contras. It would be a dangerous strategy indeed for the anti-fascist movement to believe that this apparent "new turn" by the state represents a fundamental break with its repressive past. As we honor the Greensboro Martyrs, let us also study the history of repression against the left across North America; a legacy of nativist violence always close to the surface. Those today who urge a new generation of anti-racist activists to rely on cops, courts or legislative prescriptions to "defend" us from attack by armed neo-Nazis and their hooded brethren in the KKK, conveniently demonstrate political amnesia when the issue of state-fascist collaboration comes to the fore. We neglect this history at great peril. For further reading see: Ward Churchil and Jim Vander Wall, Agents of Repression: The FBI's Secret Wars Against the Black Panther Party and the American Indian Movement, 1990, South End Press, Boston; Ward Churchill and Jim Vander Wall, The COINTELPRO Papers: Documents from the FBI's Secret Wars Against Dissent in the United States, 1990, South End Press, Boston; Frank Donner, The Age of Surveillance: The Aims and Methods of America's Political Intelligence System, 1980, Knopf, New York; Frank Donner, Protectors of Privilege: Red Squads and Police Repression in Urban America, 1990, University of California Press, Berkeley; Ross Gelbspan, Break-ins, Death Threats and the FBI: The Covert War Against the Central America Movement, 1991, South End Press, Boston; Angus Mackenzie, Secrets: The CIA's War at Home, 1997, University of California Press, Berkeley. * * * GREENSBORO JUSTICE FUND PO Box 4 Haydenville, MA 01039-0004 E-mail: vfritzel@hotmail.com Web: http://www.gjf.org ----- ____________________________________________________________________ KLANSMEN, NAZIS, AND GOVERNMENT COMPLICITY IN THE GREENSBORO MASSACRE ____________________________________________________________________ By Marty Nathan http://www.gjf.org/Klansmen.htm When Klansmen and Nazis attacked the anti-Klan demonstrators on November 3, 1979, the surviving victims immediately suspected police complicity and declared so on the scene. They had been given a legal parade permit and been guaranteed police protection. In an unprecedented move, police had banned weapons from the march - unconcealed guns are legal in North Carolina. The police had promised march organizer Nelson Johnson that they would meet him at Carver and Everett Streets in Greensboro's black community at 10 O'clock a.m. Not only did they not show, but there were no police anywhere in the area when the Klansmen arrived at 11:18. Moreover, when police finally arrived after the attack, they arrested demonstrators rather than pursuing Klansmen. Organizer Nelson Johnson was immediately and brutally arrested for inciting to riot, and activist Willena Cannon and textile organizer Rand Manzella were also jailed. Meanwhile, eight carloads of Klansmen and Nazis escaped unimpeded. The ninth car, a van, was stopped by police only because it had stopped to pick up a wounded Klansman (shot by a fellow Klansman). The five murdered included the three leading textile union organizers in the local Communist Workers Party, all active at Cone Mills textile plants. Jim Waller had led a successful strike at the Granite Mill in Haw River in 1978, and he and Bill Sampson had been president of their ACTWU locals. Sandi Smith had led an organizing drive at a third mill. The coincidence was too remarkable to attribute to chance. In subsequent months, the demonstrators' suspicions were verified. The FBI revealed that it had begun an investigation of the North Carolina CWP in the weeks before the murders, ending the day before the murders. A textile worker friend of Sandi Smith in Kannapolis, North Carolina, came forward saying that she had been frightened from going to the march when, the week before the march, two plain-clothed policemen she believed to be FBI came to her and asked her to identify a picture of Sandi and a bearded white man whom she later identified as Jim Waller. Investigative journalists opened the doors to understanding police and federal involvement. Greensboro Daily News reporter Martha Woodall revealed the role of federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (BATF) agent Bernard Butkovich, who in July, 1979, came to North Carolina for the stated purpose of investigating the presence of illegal automatic weapons in the Winston Salem Nazis. He promised to show them how to make such weapons and explosives, and encouraged them to kill a rival Klansman. He was present at the critical meeting of Klansmen and Nazis in Louisburg, North Carolina, in September, 1979, when the "United Racist Front" was formed between North Carolina Klansmen and Nazis. Unknown to the CWP, these traditional rivals joined forces at this rally explicitly to plan a response to "the communists" after the CWP successfully rallied the China Grove community against them in July. Butkovich encouraged Nazis to go to the attack in Greensboro, was present at al the known Nazi planning meetings for the attack, but then did not go himself. In the Klan, the pivotal figure was Klansman/police informant and previous FBI informant Edward Dawson. After CWP organizers had applied for the parade permit for the November 3rd march, policeman Jerry "Rooster" Cooper had approached Dawson and paid him to find out what the Klan's response to the march would be. Dawson proceeded to create that response, meeting with Klansmen at rallies around the state, urging them to come to Greensboro, and simultaneously meeting with Cooper. He also had at least two meetings with his old FBI agent contact and told him about his work. On November 1, two days before the murders, Dawson went to the Greensboro Police Station and was given a copy of the parade permit by a police lieutenant, even before the permit had been granted to the demonstrators. On the night before the attack, Dawson and North Carolina Klan leader Virgil Griffin rode the route drawn on the parade permit, to select a site of attack. One the morning of the attack, Nazis and Klansmen gathered at the home of Dawson's friend, Brent Fletcher. There Dawson oversaw the loading of guns into the arsenal car, and according to Klansmen, was clearly in charge. He made two calls to Cooper, his police contact, and reported the presence of weapons. Then Cooper and a police photographer watched and photographed the formation of the Klan-Nazis caravan. When the caravan took off, Dawson was in the lead car with the CWP parade permit obtained from police, and the nine cars of Klansmen and Nazis were openly trailed by a tenth car - the Greensboro police car containing officer Cooper and the and the police photographer. It was at this time that the police tactical squad, assigned to protect the marchers, was sent to early lunch. When the Klansmen and Nazis arrived at the corner of Carver and Everett Streets in the heart of Greensboro's Black neighborhood, unsuspecting demonstrators were chanting and singing and preparing for their march. Dawson stopped the front car. Nazis and Klansmen poured out with sticks, clubs and knives. Shots were fired from the front of the caravan, driving demonstrators to the back. From there, Klansmen and Nazis pulled their rifles and shot guns and, with cigarettes dangling from their mouths, in no obvious hurry, they fired. Five demonstrators were killed, and nine were wounded, two critically. Another Klansman and a member of the media were also injured. Cooper watched and his photographer took pictures. After the shooting had stopped and the attackers had left, squad cars finally arrived. Three trials followed in the next six years. In 1980, six Klansmen and Nazis were tried for murder by the Greensboro district attorney. An all-white jury was picked whose foreman was an anti-Castro Cuban who stated that it was less of a crime to kill communists than to kill others. Another juror had been the next door neighbor and friend of a Klan leader. Nazis and Klansmen claimed self-defense. The FBI's sound witnesses supported them stating that they could not tell where some of the early shots came from - they might have come from demonstrators. The prosecutors referred to the murdered as "the alleged victims" and had charged a total of six demonstrators for felony riot, stating that all evidence in the Klan/Nazi trial could be used against those surviving demonstrators. Consequently, CWP witnesses refused to testify. The district attorney never called Dawson or Butkovich to the stand. The jury was never advised of the extensive evidence of premeditation - to have done so would have exposed the government complicity in the attack. All six Klansmen and Nazis had been recorded by TV cameras gunning down demonstrators, with their real appeal racism and anti-communism they were found not guilty. Outraged demonstrators across the South called for federal prosecution of the murderers. The Reagan Justice Department, under fire for its lack of response to increasing racist violence, responded with a grand jury which indicted nine Klansmen, including Dawson. However, the call by Greensboro African American leaders to employ a Special Prosecutor to investigate government impropriety was denied. Though circumstances had improved for this prosecution - inclusion of Dawson, victims no longer in jeopardy of prosecution - the prosecutors were strapped by their own political motivations. Prosecuting the Klan under the reconstruction-era federal civil rights laws, they chose a statute that required proof of racism as animus (motive). However, with their chief investigator the same FBI agent, Thomas Brereton, that had been present in the Greensboro office investigating the CWP prior to the murders, the U.S. Attorneys had every reason to avoid the sensitive issue of official complicity with the Klan and Nazis in the massacre. The federal trial took place in 1984. The Klansmen and Nazis again pleaded self defense, but the FBI sound experts reversed themselves and testified that all of the first eleven shots originated from Klan/Nazi guns. However, the racists were able to plead successfully to this all-white jury that, no matter what they did, their motive was not racial, it was political. They were only out to shoot communists that day, and therefore were not guilty of the charges against them. Once again they were acquitted. This second failure to jail men recorded by four TV cameras committing murder was a devastating blow to racial and labor justice. In this setting, the Greensboro Civil Rights Suit took on new urgency. Using the civil statutes of the federal civil rights laws as well as state wrongful death and assault, the widowed, injured, and jailed demonstrators sued for damages against Klansmen, Nazis, Greensboro police and city officials, BATF and FBI agents and officials with prior knowledge of the attack. Specifically included in the Greensboro Civil Rights Suit were Dawson, Cooper, Butkovich and Brereton. The suit drew the legal involvement of Flynt Taylor of the People's Law Office of Chicago (responsible for the successful Fred Hamton/ Mark Clark Black Panther Suit against Chicago Police), Lewis Pitts and Dan Sheehan of the Christic Institute (who had waged the successful Karen Silkwood Suit against Kerr-McGee), and local counsel Carolyn McAllaster and Gayle Korotkin. Discovery and court testimony in the Civil Rights Suit brought new revelations of government involvement. Bernard Butkovich's role in the Nazis was only made seamier by exposure. Butkovich not only was present at the Louisburg September United Racist Front - he was wearing a taped listening device during his meetings with head Nazis and Klansmen. In testimony all too reminiscent of Watergate's Rosemary Woods, Butkovich complained that his tape battery ran out during those meetings. However, his ATF partner, listening at the time, recalled no breaks in the tape throughout Butkovich's Louisburg operation. TV footage was produced of Nazis gathered in Winston-Salem the night before the murders. In it Butkovich is caught in Nazi regalia at the meeting in which he urged Nazis to participate with Klansmen and to bring guns to Greensboro. (Footage of this, as well as the November 3rd shootings can be seen on the PBS Frontline series documentary "88 Seconds in Greensboro"). Startlingly, the ATF revealed that there were actually two agents working with the Nazis in Winston-Salem. The other was a pilot, and though Butkovich was not present in the Klan/Nazi caravan on the morning of November 3rd, this agent testified that he was flying with Butkovich "in the vicinity of Greensboro" (!) that morning. As to why Butkovich's operation ended coincidentally on the morning of November 3rd and he did not go with Nazis to Greensboro to pursue the possible presence and use of illegal automatic weapons by the Nazis, he testified that he had found no such weapons and there was no further need to investigate. ATF officials all testified to a lack of guidelines for undercover agents in regard to provocation of illegal acts of violence and duty to protect potential victims of that violence. Finally, Butkovich and ATF records verified that he had reported on his operations to his superiors and the ATF had communicated and coordinated with FBI and local police since the beginning of the operation. More evidence of FBI prior knowledge was uncovered. Klansman Dawson testified that he told his old FBI control agent Len Bogaty about his concerns regarding impending violence. Bogaty's response was to advise Dawson not to go to Greensboro. As for the FBI investigation of the CWP, for the first time the textile worker's testimony of targeting of Sandi Smith and Jim Waller entered court records. The Bureau vigorously denied the incident. It admitted, however, that there was an FBI informant in the CWP working in Durham. He had become close to victim Paul Bermazohn, a local CWP leader, and had knowledge of the lack of guns and preparedness for armed attack on the part of the CWP. Meanwhile, others outside officialdom were getting wind of the impending violence and trying to stop it. Jewish Defense Organization leader Mordechai Levi had learned through sources about the Nazi plot. He called the Raleigh FBI agency in Greensboro and , assuming that the agent was Jewish (as it turned out, he was not), asked to speak to Agent Goldberg. Levi informed Goldberg specifically that the Nazis were going to attack an anti-Klan demonstration in Greensboro on November 3rd and kill demonstrators. When Goldberg was questioned under oath, at first he denied having received the call, then he testified that he did not report it because he did not think that it was important. Finally, then-U.S. Attorney H.M. Michaux testified that on the evening of November 2, office-mate FBI Agent Brereton announced to him that on the following day there was going to be "fireworks" in Greensboro. Greensboro police documents revealed that department officials had met several times to discuss the pending attack and Police Chief Swing himself knew that up to one hundred Klansmen were coming, bringing guns and possibly a machine gun. In the days before the attack, Dawson, possible possessed by guilt or fear, went to police officials and even the police attorney to ask if he could get an injunction against the anti-Klan march. Police officials told him there was nothing to be done. Dawson's parting shot to police was "Next time I'll bring you a bucket of blood!" On the morning of the murders, as demonstrators were gathering unaware at the corner of Carver and Everett, the police tactical squad designated to protect them met at police headquarters in full knowledge of Rooster Cooper's report from Dawson that Klansmen were gathering in Greensboro with guns to attack the anti-Klan march. Therefore, ignorance was no feasible defense for the lack of police presence in the Morningside community. However, it was the testimony of former police officer April Wise that sealed the issue of collusion with the Klan and Nazis in refusal to protect the demonstrators. On the morning of November 3rd, Wise had been sent to the community to settle a domestic dispute. In the minutes before 11:00, she received a call from the dispatcher asking if she was finished with the task, and requesting that she "Clear the area!" Wise remember the incident because it was unusual and incomprehensible, unless police deliberately wanted no presence near the anti-Klan marchers. Though the call was mysteriously absent from police dispatcher tapes and records, a cb radio fan, scanning the police frequencies at the time, verified its occurrence under oath. For the first time all this evidence was presented to the jury. And in the courtroom, in an oddly open display of solidarity, U.S. Attorneys defending federal agents and police attorneys adopted a strategy of defending the Klansmen and Nazis. Once again, the FBI sound officials reversed themselves, and reiterated their previous analysis that shots number 3,4, and 5 might have come from the demonstrators. The Klansmen and Nazis were friendly witnesses for the federal and police attorneys, whose job it was to crucify the plaintiffs as unpatriotic race mixers and dangerous troublemakers who would conspire to martyr their own in the interest of the communist revolution. This time it did not work. This time, finally, the victims had their own prosecutors, unfettered by the necessity to cover up official wrongdoing. This time, for the first time, they were presented as human victims of a bloody massacre. This time police and constitutional experts testified about the unlawful nature of agents provocateurs and the lawful duty of police to protect citizens. And this time, there was a lone Black man on the six-person jury. On June 8, 1985, 7 Klansmen and Nazis, Edward Dawson, Officer Jerry Cooper and police tactical squad leader Lieutenant P.W. Spoon were found liable for the wrongful death of Michael Nathan and $350,000 was awarded to his widow and 6-year-old daughter Leah. Those Klansmen and Nazis, but not police, were found liable for the assaults on demonstrators Tom Clark and Paul Bermanzohn. In a final and fitting irony, the City of Greensboro paid all the damages for the death of Michael Nathan, permanently and legally establishing their collusion with the Klan. The legacy of the struggle for justice in the Greensboro Massacre is one of the power of political action in the face of tremendous odds. The victims of Greensboro were, on November 3, 1979, isolated marginalized and in legal jeopardy. All attempts to organize for justice were met by North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation disruption tactics (See Institute for Southern Studies report, "The Third of November.") Yet through persistence and reliance on those who understood that the denial of rights to any group was a threat to democracy for all; and by the willingness to take those demands for justice to the streets, into the courts, to City Hall, to Congress, and to jail, a modicum of justice has prevailed in Greensboro. The damages paid by the City of Greensboro to Martha Nathan were divided among all the plaintiffs. A portion was donated back by those plaintiffs to the Greensboro Justice Fund. It formed the seed for the foundation that has, since 1987, given more than $75,000 in grants to groups fighting against racism in the South. It is a fitting tribute to the memories of five brave young people who died on that sunny Saturday morning in Greensboro. * * * ANTIFA INFO-BULLETIN (AFIB) 750 La Playa # 730 San Francisco, California 94121 To subscribe: afib-subscribe@igc.topica.com To unsubscribe: afib-unsubscribe@igc.topica.com Inquiries: tburghardt@igc.org On PeaceNet visit AFIB on pol.right.antifa Via the Web --> http://burn.ucsd.edu/~aff/afib.html Archive --> http://burn.ucsd.edu/~aff/afib-bulletins.html ANTI-FASCIST FORUM (AFF) Antifa Info-Bulletin is a member of the Anti-Fascist Forum network. AFF is an info-group which collects and disseminates information, research and analysis on fascist activity and anti-fascist resistance. More info: E-mail: aff@burn.ucsd.edu; Web: http://burn.ucsd.edu/~aff Order our journal, ANTIFA FORUM, cutting-edge anti-fascist research and analysis! 4 issues, $20. Write AFF, P.O. 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