Carolinian

Issue date: 3/3/03 Section: Campus News

Nelson Johnson at the body of Dr. James Waller, November 3, 1979, Greensboro, NC.

Author and activist Signe Waller returned to Greensboro this week to speak to UNCG students about the meaning and importance of activism - in her generation and theirs.

A survivor of the Greensboro Massacre - in which her husband and four friends were killed by heavily armed Ku Klux Klan and Nazi members before an anti-Klan rally - Waller said that 20 years later she's sharing what political action meant to her and her friends, and asking students to look at what it means in their own lives.

"[Cuban revolutionary] Che Guevara once said that every true revolutionary is motivated by the feeling of love," told a small crowd in Curry Auditorium on Monday night. "I had that sentiment in mind when I chose the name Love and Revolution for my book."

Waller's book, "Love and Revolution: A Political Memoir" recently published by Rowman & Littlefield, is the story of her life up to and after the Greensboro Massacre, with that tragic day as the book's dark center.

Before launching into her talk, entitled "We had a Bias For Action...," Waller showed a 10 minute video essay by photo journalist Jim Waters, who was sent by WFMY-TV November 3, 1979 to cover the anti-Klan rally. Waller said when a caravan of Nazi and KKK members arrived and began shooting many other cameramen ran for cover. Waters, a veteran of reporting in the war zones of Northern Ireland, captured the whole scene.

"The film is graphic, showing scenes of violence," Waller warned the crowd. "But it also suggests a context for the violent incident in the historical struggle for civil rights."

In the film Waller and her group, the Workers' Viewpoint Organization, had gathered a large crowd in a black housing project in Greensboro. As the protesters milled around and began organizing, a skirmish began and cars began rushing onto the scene, nearly hitting a number of people. When KKK and Nazi members with guns emerge and begin shooting the crowd scatters, but some rush forward to challenge them before being shot down.

"The most selfless of the crowd rushed forward without weapons to try to protect the others," said Waller. "Some of them with just sticks or their bare hands. They were killed for it."

The assailants hand each other shotguns and what appear to be automatic weapons from the trunks of their cars while firing at those who aren't hiding. Shortly after the KKK and Nazi members get back into their cars and speed away the Greensboro police arrive and begin arresting protestors, physically carrying many away from the scene.

In one scene Waller's late husband, Dr. Jim Waller, lies dying in the aftermath as she cries over his body.

"It's never easy to watch that film," Waller said. "I've turned away from it sometimes, because it takes me back and it's so real. But it's important for people to see it as it was."

Waller said that over the last 20 years there has been confusion over why and how the shooting happened - confusion she's hoping to dispel with her book.

"Why were we there?" asked Waller. "What brought us to that place? What was the struggle about and why did we join?"

Waller went on to explain why her story was not a terribly unusual one in the American South of the late 1970s. She and her group of friends - which included graduates of Ivy League colleges, doctors, lawyers, authors and factory workers - became radicalized by the Vietnam war and their view that even when the war ended, the problems that had caused it would continue.

"Many people became students of society willing to look deeply into the source of societal problems and to deal with problems at their root," said Waller. "The commitment to make a better world involves a great deal of student of history and social forces. There is little lasting benefit in actions for social justice that are purely reactive or are based on shallow thinking. We need more than a knee-jerk reaction to the obvious and obscene gap between rhetoric and reality."

Waller said that like many of that time, her friends' examination of society's ills led them to Marxism - and because of the social and economic injustice so many of them saw all around them, they became communists. Though they knew that "communism" had been a dirty word in America at least since the McCarthy Era, they chose not only to embrace it ideologically - but to put it into action.

"We did not merely study," said Waller. "We acted. We took to heart a maxim of Marxism that philosophers interpret the world but the point is to change it. We had a bias for action and sought to change society toward greater democracy and justice."

A lofty goal for a group of young people in any era - but in the turbulent 1970s, with the momentum of the 1960s carrying them, Waller said she and her friends believed something like "revolution" was entirely possible.

According to Waller, who spoke in an interview from her home on an organic farm in Indiana, she and her husband Jim were working to organize poor workers in North Carolina's textile mills - a cause Jim had taken up while teaching at Duke University Medical School.

"He began to see Brown Lung Disease - which is like the Black Lung Disease of miners, but it's the product of cotton manufacturing," Waller said. "He got so involved that he began to see the larger problems - it was less profitable for the corporations to run the mills safely, to protect the health of the workers."

Quitting his prestigious job, Jim co-founded the Carolina Brown Lung Association and went to work in a Cone Mills textile plant in Haw River. From inside he helped organize and eventually became vice president of the AFL-CIO union local. Among other things he led a strike in 1978 that helped the union grow from about 25 members to almost 200.

Waller said she realizes that to many, leaving a teaching position at one of the nation's top medical schools might seem insane - but in the context of the times, it wasn't so unusual.

"We felt that society needed revolutionaries more than doctors of lawyers," said Waller. "We felt the need not just to hold jobs with power but to work toward something, to accomplish something on behalf of society."

1978 was a year of triumphs for the Wallers - Jim and Signe were married that year and were happily raising her two children while fighting racism within the mills and throughout the state. They were successfully standing against threats from Nazis, the KKK and mill owners who resented the unions. But tension continued to grow, the government began to take an interest in the Wallers and the Workers Viewpoint Organization, and their brand of revolution was headed for dark days.

"The FBI had men going around the textile mills and showing people pictures, asking for their identification," said Waller. "Many of the pictures were of people who were later killed in the Greensboro Massacre, and one of them was Jim's."

It's the sort of strange twist one would expect to find in a Tom Clancy spy novel but, Waller said, court records do show both the FBI and Greensboro police department had plants inside the KKK. As the men were armed, the attack planned and carried out city officials were fed every detail - and chose to do nothing.

Further complicating matters, Jim was fired from his job at the textile mills shortly after the strike - ostensibly for lying about his education and failing to tell his employers that he was a doctor.

"As bad as conditions are around this place, the company should be glad to have a doctor working here," Waller remembers her husband saying to her.

Waller said Jim continued to be a union leader even after he was fired, and was elected president of the Amalgamated Clothing & Textile Workers Union Local 1113-T in defiance of mill owners and union higher-ups. He then helped found and lead the Trade Union Education League - a group that would build strong, rank and file-led unions and unite workers in the South, where unions had traditionally been weak.

"I think a lot of the workers, many of whom were poor and black, didn't have an education that taught them to hate communism," said Waller. "People who have that ideological view, who just hate communism and everything it stands for, are usually the products of educations that have brainwashed them into that type of thinking."

With textile workers behind them and their group - the Workers' Viewpoint Organization - growing, Waller said they began to look more and more like a threat - especially to racist groups who balked at blacks, whites and communists working together to build strong unions.

That year, a wave of racist violence swept the Piedmont South and blacks began forming armed self-defense patrols against the Klan in Tupelo, Miss., Decatur, Ala. and China Grove, N.C.

At China Grove on July 8. 1979, the WVO stood with black activists in a confrontation with the clan at the town's community center. Waller said the Klan left humiliated - and may have had retaliation on their minds when the rally in Greensboro was announced.

"In response to KKK threats we were going to hold a rally and afterward an educational conference," said Waller. "One of its purposes was to announce that our group, the Workers' Viewpoint Organization, was becoming the Communist Workers' Party. We had decided to try to act as an actual political party to effect things. Jim took a leading role in organizing the rally."

Waller said a series of strange things happened before the rally - but one, in hindsight, was a dark foreshadowing.

"When we filed a parade petition for the rally, it came back approved with the stipulation that we could have no weapons, concealed or otherwise. Even sticks of a certain length weren't permitted," said Waller. "We hadn't planned to carry weapons in the parade, so we were sort of confused. But we knew that in North Carolina anyone can carry weapons as long as they're not concealed - so it was strange and unprecedented. We should have seen what was coming then."

Waller said the police offered protection to assure no one was hurt - but never materialized. Instead nine cars full of Klan and Nazi members crashed the rally shooting. Though Waller said security for the rally had one handgun among them, they weren't able to get off a shot.

Five lay dead - Dr. James Waller William Sampson, Sandra Smith, Cesar Cauce, and Dr. Michael Nathan. All five were WVO members and four were rank-and-file union leaders and organizers - facts that many believe point more toward a mass assassination than a random drive-by shooting.

"To really understand this you have to go back to where these people come from and who's helping them," said Willena Cannon, another survivor of the attack.

"On that day the Greensboro police were there and they left. Everyone who was there knows that. The FBI actually showed these people how to use their guns. They were found to have grenades from Fort Bragg. It was not a random attack. It was well planned."

To those at the rally it was cut and dry - but to two all-white juries, things weren't so clear. After Klan and Nazi defendants were twice cleared of criminal charges - first at a criminal trial and then a Federal civil rights trial - Waller said she knew that for she and her friends the judicial process wouldn't work.

"These weren't real trials in any sense," Waller said. "The juries were all white. The jurors admitted to having anti-communist biases, and a few to sympathizing with the Klan. They were joke trials and we really didn't want any part of them."

In the end, Waller said, she and her friends had to bring a civil suit to see justice done.

"In the civil suit, in 1985 - six years after the fact - we finally got a fair deal," said Waller. "The jury, which this time wasn't all-white, found two Greensboro police officers, their Klan informant and four of the Klan and Nazi members liable. That was the first time in legal history that the Klan and police officers were found liable for violence in the same suit."

The city of Greensboro had to pay $351,000 to the widow of Dr. Michael Nathan - some of which was used as seed money for grassroots progressive organizations, Waller said.

But the story didn't end there, said Waller - because the legacy of the Greensboro Massacre is in question.

"A lot of people don't understand what happened that day, really," said Waller. "There are a lot of wrong idea out there. People will say that we planned it, that we were looking to create martyrs for our cause. That's one of the ones that probably hurts the most, because we lost people. They were family."

Waller said that some people -then and now - accused the protestors of instigating the fight.

"I'm not sure how anyone figures we instigated it," said Waller. "We were assembled peacefully. Our militant rhetoric was held up as proof we'd caused the whole thing. But we didn't shoot anyone. We didn't attack. We were attacked, and killed. But a lot of people couldn't admit to the larger problems of why it happened, and when you can't admit who's responsible, you need a scapegoat."

Twenty years later Waller said she hopes her book - culled from extensive research, interviews and her own first person account, will help to set the record straight.

Another way of trying to understand what happened on November 3, 1979 is brand new - the Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation project.

The project plans to investigate the events of that day and the social and political context. In a report the group will try to explain why the police failed to prevent the confrontation, though they knew it was coming and why the killers have never been sentenced, though a video of their crime exists.

Only a year and a half old, the project has drawn fire already.

Greensboro mayor Keith Holliday told the News and Record he wishes the project "wasn't happening right now" while councilman Tom Phillips said he's afraid the project is an attempt to "rewrite history."

But Waller said that's not what the project's about at all.

"The project's name tells the whole story," said Waller. "We want to uncover some more truth about how and why this happened and we want to begin to heal the community with that truth. No healing can happen while there are still lies, while there are still omissions."

Signe Waller's book Love and Revolution: A Political Memoir: People's History of the Greensboro Massacre, Its Setting and Aftermath (New Critical Theory), is now available in bookstores.

For more information on The Greensboro Massacre, the Greensboro Justice Fund and the Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Project, go to http://www.gjf.org/History.html.

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