The Greensboro massacre was a deadly confrontation that occurred on November 3, 1979, in Greensboro, North Carolina, when members of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) and National Socialist Party of America (NSPA) shot and killed five demonstrators in a "Death to the Klan" march organized by the Communist Workers Party (CWP).
The incident was preceded by inflammatory rhetoric and threats of violence, and marked a convergence of the KKK and American neo-Nazi movements, which had previously operated separately. It was later revealed that undercover law enforcement agents had infiltrated both movements and participated in planning the actions that day. Of the five people killed, four were CWP members, and one was married to a CWP member. The victims were activists involved in racial justice efforts and in unionizing textile industry and hospital workers in the area. In addition, nine other anti-Klan demonstrators, two journalists, and a Klansman were wounded.
In the ensuing criminal trials, the KKK and NSPA defendants were acquitted by all-white juries that were selected partly on the strength of their anti-communist views. Bermanzohn recalls that during jury selection, "They [the lawyers] asked questions like: Do you believe it's less of a crime to kill a communist? The potential jurors would answer yes. And they would be accepted by the prosecution, by those who were supposed to be our lawyers." At the federal criminal civil rights trial in 1984, the defendants claimed they had acted in self-defense, despite reports of "vivid newsreel film to the contrary," and were acquitted. In a subsequent civil lawsuit, eight defendants were found liable for the wrongful death of the one non-CWP protester.Maximilian Longley, "Greensboro Shootings" , North Carolina History Project, John Locke Foundation
Decades later, the Greensboro City Council formally apologized for the deaths. In 2004, a private organization, the Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission, was formed with the stated goal of investigating the events of November 1979. Though the Commission was limited in its investigatory authority, it concluded that both sides contributed to the tragedy, but that the Klan and NSPA members intended to inflict injury on protesters, and that the police bore significant responsibility for allowing the violence to take place. In 2015, Greensboro unveiled a marker to memorialize the massacre.
Background The Communist Workers' Party (CWP) had its origin in 1973 in New York as a Marxist formation originally known as the Workers Viewpoint Organization (WVO). The WVO was one of several groups established as part of a trend within the American left known as the new communist movement. These groups formed in the wake of the anti-Vietnam War protests, as young Marxist radicals joined with activists from the more militant elements of the black liberation movement. They rejected the old, pro-Soviet Communist Party USA as soft on capitalism, and studied the leaders and revolutionary movements in the developing world, including communist China. They opposed racism and sexism, and saw organizing multi-racial unions as a strategy for building toward a popular socialist uprising against monopoly capitalism.
In 1976, members of the WVO came to North Carolina and recruited local Black and White activists in Greensboro and Durham who were engaged in healthcare and textile organizing. The WVO members took jobs in the local textile and other manufacturing plants in an attempt to organize workers into unions. Among WVO members who worked in the textile mills was James Waller, who left his medical career to be a full-time organizer. He became president of the local textile workers' unions at Cone's Granite Finishing Plant in Haw River, North Carolina. In the Carolina Piedmont, the communists found some success with both White and Black textile workers, but especially among black workers, who had been excluded from these jobs for decades, and had only recently been hired for mill work since the passing of the federal Equal Employment Opportunities Act in 1972. WVO members were also active in Durham, Kannapolis, and Greensboro. As a result of these efforts, the WVO came into conflict with a local Ku Klux Klan chapter and the National Socialist Party of America, which were garnering public attention in the spring and summer of 1979 with campaigns and marches in Alabama and North Carolina. This group was a schism founded by Frank Collin of the original American Nazi Party. Although coverage of the NSPA frequently called it the American Nazi Party, that was not its official name.
The WVO learned that the Klan was organizing in the area, and in July 1979, WVO activists and local community members in China Grove, NC disrupted a screening of The Birth of a Nation, a 1915 silent film by D. W. Griffith which portrayed the end of the Reconstruction Era and the formation of the KKK in heroic terms, and characterized blacks in a demeaning, racist way.FRONTLINE WITH JESSICA SAVITCH: 88 SECONDS IN GREENSBORO (TV) - The Paley Center for Media Taunts and inflammatory rhetoric were exchanged between members of the groups during the ensuing months.
In October 1979, the WVO renamed itself the Communist Workers Organization. It planned to stage a rally and march against the Klan on November 3, 1979, in the city of Greensboro, the county seat of Guilford County. The city had been a site of major civil rights actions in the 1960s; sit-ins there resulted in the desegregation of lunch counters.
The CWP publicized their protest as the "Death to the Klan" March. The event was scheduled to start in a predominantly black Greensboro housing project, known as Morningside Homes, and then proceed to a community center for a conference. The CWP distributed flyers that called for radical, even violent opposition to the Klan. One flier 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." Communist organizers publicly challenged the Klan to attend the march.
Rally Four local TV news camera teams arrived at Morningside Homes at the corner of Carver and Everitt streets to cover the protest march. Members of the CWP and other anti-Klan supporters gathered to rally and march. As the marchers gathered, a caravan of nine cars and a van filled with an estimated 40 KKK and NSPA members drove in front of the housing project at around 11:20 AM. The two groups heckled each other, and some marchers beat the cars with picket sticks and kicks. The first shot came from the head of the KKK caravan. Several witnesses reported that Klansman Mark Sherer fired first, which he later admitted. A "thick blue smoke" was spotted after the first shot, consistent with the discharge from a black powder pistol Sherer owned. 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. Some KKK and NSPA members exited their vehicles and engaged in a physical confrontation with marchers. CWP member James Waller ran to retrieve 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.
The first shots wounding and killing individuals were discharged soon after, primarily by caravan members. Six caravan members equipped themselves with long guns 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. Two of the first fatalities were Waller, shot by NSPA member Roland Wood and Klansman David Matthews, and CWP member Cesar Cauce, shot by Klansman Jerry Paul Smith. Both were unarmed at the time of their deaths. Unarmed marcher Michael Nathan was shot and mortally wounded by Matthews while running towards Waller's body. Sampson was killed while firing at the caravan members. Matthews shot and killed CWP member Sandra Smith after she pulled children to safety inside a community member's apartment, and took cover near Butler, who was firing at caravan members. Smith herself was unarmed. The final shot was fired by Blitz 88 seconds after the violence first began.
Four CWP members were killed at the scene and Nathan died of his wounds at the hospital two days later. Twelve others were wounded. The filmed coverage of the shootings was carried on national and international news, and the event became known as the "Greensboro Massacre." Smith was black, Cauce was Cuban-American, and the other three men killed were white, two of them Jewish. Both blacks and whites were among the wounded, including one KKK member and two news crew members.
Casualties Died: All but Michael Nathan were CWP members and rank-and-file union leaders and organizers. Nathan was sworn into the CWP on his deathbed. Cesar Cauce, whose family immigrated as refugees from Cuba when he was a child, grew up in Miami, Florida and graduated magna cum laude from Duke University; he worked in the anti-war movement, as a writer for Workers Viewpoint, and as a union organizer at Duke Hospital in Durham, North Carolina. He was the brother of Ana Mari Cauce, who served as president of the University of Washington from October 2015 to June 2025; James Waller, elected as president of a local textile workers union; was a pediatrician. He taught at Duke University and was a co-founder of the Carolina Brown Lung Association (for textile workers); he had left his medical practice in North Carolina to organize textile workers; William Evan Sampson, a graduate of the Harvard Divinity School and medical student, who became active in civil rights; he worked to organize the union at Cone Mills' White Oak Plant in Greensboro; Sandra Neely Smith, born and raised in South Carolina, was a civil rights activist and president of the student body at Greensboro's Bennett College; was planning to become a nurse, but postponed her studies to organize textile workers and improve health conditions at the plant; and Michael Nathan, chief of pediatrics at Lincoln Community Health Center, a clinic for children from low-income families in Durham, North Carolina. Wounded in the shooting, he died two days later at the hospital. He was not a member of the CWP but was supporting his wife, Marty Nathan, who was also wounded that day.
Wounded survivors: Paul Bermanzohn, CWP organizer and physician, required brain surgery, suffered permanent paralysis on the left side of his body; Thomas Clark, marcher; Martha "Marty" Nathan, CWP member and physician, widow of Michael Nathan; Nelson Johnson, organizer and CWP member; James Wrenn, CWP member, critically wounded, required brain surgery; Frankie Powell, CWP member, struck by birdshot in legs; Claire Butler, CWP member; Don Pelles, marcher, struck by birdshot in face; Rand Manzella, marcher; Harold Flowers, KKK member, shot in the arm and left leg; Matt Sinclair, WTVD reporter, struck by birdshot; and David Dalton, news cameraman;
Role of the police