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Nowadays, we’re accustomed to images of people on the far right sporting both swastikas and confederate flags. But Neo-Nazis and neo-confederates weren't always pals. So when and why did they unite? The answer dates back to 1979 North Carolina:
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This week’s story comes from Bring the War Home, by Kathleen Belew, and The End of the Myth, by Greg Grandin. An article called The Massacre That Spawned the Alt-Right, by Shaun Assael and Peter Keating, offers a bit more bite-sized context on the massacre should you be interested.
Next time on Skipped History…
We’ll travel to Nicaragua in the 1980s where, during the Iran-Contra affair, the US unleashed radicalized vets like the ones we explored today. Stay tuned!
A central theme of Bring the War Home (which is a really, really frickin good book) is how courts, the military, and law enforcement have failed to prosecute members of white power groups for increasingly overt and violent activity. Next week, paying subscribers will learn how the GOP’s torpedoing of the January 6th Commission is only the latest example of this astonishing history. Sign up below!
Otherwise, see you in two weeks on our journey to Nicaragua ✈️🇳🇮
Your skipper,
Ben
This week’s transcript
Hello, I’m Ben Tumin, and welcome to Skipped History. Today’s story is about the Greensboro Massacre of 1979. I read about it in Bring the War Home by Kathleen Belew and The End of the Myth by Greg Grandin.
If I may jump right into some unpleasant imagery, today, pictures of people on the far-right sporting both swastikas and Confederate flags are common. But neo-Nazis and neo-Confederates didn’t always go together like gin and juice, or as they might say, like ranch and vichyssoise, a delicious cold potato soup (when you add ranch). Although Hitler took inspiration from Jim Crow Laws (southerners were that good at subjugating people), very few US white supremacists at the time supported the Nazis, and they still went to war against each other. So when and why did the divisions between white power groups fade away? To answer this question, let’s talk about the Greensboro Massacre, where “Ku Klux Klan members and American Nazis, on Nov. 3, 1979, shot and killed five Communist Workers Party members”—and managed to get away with it.
For context, let’s first revisit the year 1898. Then, as we saw in our episode about the Spanish-American War, the US launched its first major war abroad in the Philippines. The war acted as an opportunity for southern soldiers to prove their loyalty to the union after the Civil War without having to, y’know, atone for supporting slavery. There, and in each subsequent US military occupation, Greg Grandin writes, southern soldiers “could fight in the name of the loftiest ideals—liberty, valor, self-sacrifice, camaraderie—while [still] putting down people of color.” And that they did, killing tens of thousands of people of color in Nicaragua, Cuba, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic. Unsurprisingly, these military excursions created a fertile breeding ground for racism and sympathy for white supremacist projects like the Confederacy. As one newspaper wrote during the Vietnam War, “Judging by the display of flags for sale on a Saigon Street Corner, the Confederate flags seem more popular than the flags of several countries,” which is impressive considering that the Isle of Man’s flag depicts three dismembered legs wearing enviously fashionable slippers.
And these festering white supremacist sympathies started to take sharper form in the wake of Vietnam. People like Martin Luther King Jr. began to observe that war made things worse for people abroad while draining attention and resources away from issues at home like a "giant, demonic suction tube"—kind of like the one that got Augustus Gloop in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. Meanwhile, many soldiers, embittered by antiwar and antiracist sentiment at home, began to see anyone with left-leaning sympathies, whether it be Vietnamese troops or Civil Rights activists, as the enemy. As Klan Grand Dragon Gorell Pierce proclaimed in the late 70s, sure, “You take a man who fought in the Second World War, it’s hard for him to sit down in a room full of swastikas”—unless, of course, you add little feet to them—"but people realize time is running out” to defeat Communists and, “We’re going to have to get together.” He issued this statement at a meeting in North Carolina in 1979 where Klansmen and neo-Nazis pledged to share resources and form a new group called the United Racist Front.
From the get-go, the URF’s main target was North Carolina’s Communist Workers Party. Why? Well, the CWP consisted of everyone the hate groups had come to hate: labor organizers, Communist Jews from New York, and Black Power activists. The feeling was mutual: CWP loathed the far-right and took the position that organizing against the Klan required aggressive confrontation. Hence why, in July 1979, they protested a screening of the pro-Klan movie Birth of a Nation that was cohosted at a community center by Klansmen and neo-Nazis. The white power groups were so infuriated that the CWP interrupted what was set to just be a fun, sweet, genocide-supporting movie night that their pals in the URF studied photos of the demonstration to see whom to “beat up” at the CWP’s planned “Death to the Klan” demonstration in Greensboro a few months later.
On the day of the protest, CWP members showed up with hard hats and police clubs. The URF, which was essentially a paramilitary force and counted many Vietnam veterans among its ranks, took a different tact and caravanned to the demonstration armed with handguns, shotguns, nunchucks, hunting knives, ax handles, clubs, chains, tear gas, mace, and several dozen eggs to throw at their left-wing antagonists, apparently missing the memo that you don’t bring an egg to a gunfight. After the caravan swerved into the demonstrators, 12 URF members got out of their cars, distributed weapons, and shot into the crowd. By the time police arrived—they were, allegedly, still eating breakfast when the altercation broke out—five protestors lay dead or dying, and the white power gunmen were gone.
Given that the event was caught on film by news crews, it wasn’t hard for the Greensboro District Attorney Mike Schlosser to identify and charge the caravanners with murder, felony riot, and conspiracy. It was, however, much harder to convict them when the case went to trial in August 1980. At the time, North Carolina allowed “peremptory challenges,” which allowed defense attorneys to dismiss jurors without explanation. The practice, which was later banned for being racially prejudicial, ensured the defense could compose a sympathetic, all-white jury in the case. One of the jury members described the Klan as “patriotic” and Neo-Nazis as “strongly patriotic.” Even DA Schlosser, when asked about his ability to objectively prosecute the case, referenced his experience fighting in Vietnam, adding, “And you know who my adversaries were there.” We do: anyone who tried to teach you the definition of “objectively.”
Shockingly (but not), the jury returned a verdict of not guilty on all counts. When the case went to trial for a second time in January 1984 in federal court, the URF members walked free again, successfully arguing that they had acted under anti-communist political motivations, not racist motivations, which apparently was something that made it okay to kill people back in the 80s? When the case went to trial for the third time, this time in a civil suit, the jury did find some of the gunmen and absent policemen liable for the deaths but, notably, the only demonstrator whose death they ruled wrongful was the one who did not belong to the CWP. In other words, the court condemned killing unless you killed communists, in which case ranch, vichyssoise, do your thing.
Hate groups got the message and began to unite nationwide. Klansmen in California soon sang, “If the Nazis don’t get you, the Klan will.” Neo-Nazis in Detroit marched with signs reading “Smash Communism: Greensboro AGAIN.” And as another white power member wrote, “We must increase activity… while jurors made up of god-fearing white people free our street activists such as in the Greensboro case.” By the mid-1990s, far-right-leaning militias consisting of the newly entrenched blend of Nazis and white supremacists counted as many as five million members and sympathizers, matching the largest ever surge of the KKK in 1924 and proving once again that you should always flush egg-loving bullies when you get the chance.
Otherwise, they start running rampant, and the boundaries between who their enemies are and where they fight them begin to fade away. And you end up with a twisted cycle of soldiers fighting people of color at home, then killing them abroad, then bringing the war home again—a cycle that took an unexpected turn in 1986.
Tune in next time to learn more about that bit of Skipped History.
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