The Massacre That Spawned the Alt-Right

Forty years ago, a gang of Klansmen and Nazis murdered five communists in broad daylight. America has never been the same.

By SHAUN ASSAEL and PETER KEATING
November 03, 2019

Shaun Assael is a New York Times-bestselling author. He can be seen in a documentary based on his latest book, The Murder of Sonny Liston, at 9 p.m. on Nov. 15 on Showtime.

Peter Keating is an investigative writer in Montclair, N.J.

“Death to the Klan!” On Saturday, November 3, 1979, that chant swept over Morningside Homes, a mostly black housing project in Greensboro, North Carolina, as dozens of protesters—some donning blue hard hats for protection—hammered placards onto signposts and danced in the morning sun.

The American left had largely given up on communism by then, but these demonstrators were full-on Maoists. Their ranks included professionals with degrees from places like Harvard and Duke. And they were descending on Greensboro, a city where sit-ins helped launch the civil rights movement in 1960, to ignite another revolution. They danced to a guitar player singing, “Woke up this morning with my mind set to build the Party.” Their children dressed in tan military shirts and red berets. They even brought an effigy of a Klansman, dressed in a white sheet and hood, which kids from the neighborhood joined in punching.

The communists planned to begin their march at noon, moving from the housing project to a local shopping center. But just after 11:20, a caravan filled with real Klansmen and Nazis surprised them, snaking through the neighborhood’s narrow byways. As the protesters stood their ground, a man in a white T-shirt leaned out the passenger window of a canary-yellow pickup truck, and yelled, “You asked for the Klan. Now you got ‘em!” The station wagon behind him carried four Nazis. Seven more vehicles followed, carrying nearly 30 more men, including an Imperial Wizard of the Klan.

What happened next took just 88 seconds, but still reverberates 40 years later. In a confrontation where white supremacists began firing pistols, rifles and shotguns, and with television cameras rolling but police nowhere to be found, five communists were shot dead in broad daylight. Ten others were injured, some left to lie bleeding in the streets.


Top: KKK members take weapons from the back of a car prior to shooting members of the Workers Viewpoint Organization on Nov. 3, 1979. Bottom left: A WVO member kneels by a victim in aftermath of shooting. Bottom right: A man comforts his wife after the shooting. | Greensboro News & Record

But that November morning became momentous for more than the grotesque video footage that still lives on the Internet: The Greensboro Massacre, as it became known, was the coming-out bloodbath for the white nationalist movement that is upending our politics today.

Before Greensboro, America’s most lurid extremists largely operated in separate, mutually distrustful spheres. Greensboro was the place where the farthest-right groups of white supremacy learned to kill together. After November 3, 1979, it was suddenly possible to imagine Confederate flags flying alongside swastikas in Charlottesville. Or a teenager like Dylann Roof hoarding Nazi drawings as well as a Klan hood in his bedroom while he plotted mass murder.

Today, white nationalism is closer to the mainstream of American politics than ever before. The far right’s fears about “replacement” of the white race and outsider “invasions” have become standard tropes at conservative media outlets, and its anger is routinely stoked by the president of the United States. At the same time, right-wing violence is on the rise: Far-right terrorists accounted for the overwhelming majority of extremist murders in the U.S. last year, according to a January report by the Anti-Defamation League.

The Greensboro Massacre, as it became known, was the coming-out bloodbath for the white nationalist movement that is upending our politics today.
The seeds for this iteration of white supremacy were planted 40 years ago in Greensboro, when the white wedding of Klansmen and Nazis launched a new, pan-right extremism—a toxic brew of virulent racism, anti-government rhetoric, apocalyptic fearmongering and paramilitary tactics. And this extremism has proven more durable than anyone then could imagine.​

The Massacre That Spawned the Alt-Right

 

SNL did a skit on it nearly after ... too soon ...

 

Damn...look at what those DemonRAT KKK members did.... yes many of us were alive back then and revised history is mocked!

 

NewsVine_Mariyam

What is your definition of "alt-right"?

 

I don't see that event as the MOST SIGNIFICANT EVENT of the 20th century upon the ethos of America and the current mess.

 

And you're still here, just as useless as ever, other than as a target for mockery due to your actual history lol.

 

Greensboro massacre
The Greensboro massacre is the term for an event which took place on November 3, 1979, when members of the Communist Workers' Party and others demonstrated in a "Death to the Klan" march in Greensboro, North Carolina, United States. The CWP, which advocated that Klan members should be "physically beaten and chased out of town", exchanged gunfire with members of the Ku Klux Klan and the American Nazi Party. The CWP and supporters had handguns, while KKK and Nazi Party members are visible on news footage from the event getting rifles from a car trunk and opening fire on CWP members. Four members of the Communist Workers' Party and one other individual were killed, and eleven other demonstrators and a Klansman were wounded. The CWP supported workers' rights activism among mostly black textile industrial workers in the area.Wikipedia

So the communist came out to stop free speech with violence and got shot lol

GOOOOD HAHA
Who cares what they were and we allow rap music that says the most Racist vile anti-American anti-white women anti-police anti-black people On the air and we don’t shut that down. Allow people to speak its America

 

Look at these hippies,, the poor black girl in the middle shouldn’t have listened to these whites.

 

They called for violence, and the locals delivered. Who doesn’t like a happy ending?