The Truth About Reconciliation

Can America heal itself? The reckoning after the Greensboro Massacre provides some lessons.

- By Peter Keating and Shaun Assael

Last October, the city council in Greensboro, North Carolina, met for a special session. The meeting was held at 7 p.m. over Zoom, and with most of the nine commissioners connecting from their living rooms, it had all the ambiance of an online poker game.

Greensboro, a mill city located an hour west of the university-heavy Research Triangle, helped birth the civil rights movement. In 1960, Black protesters sat down at the lunch counter at the Woolworths on Elm Street and refused to leave. The building is now a historic landmark and the home of the International Civil Rights Center and Museum.

On this autumn night, Greensboro’s city council was going into a special session to confront an incident that had clouded that civil rights legacy: the November 3, 1979, killing of five leftists by white supremacists during an anti-Klan protest in a local housing project. Gunned down in the street, four protesters died under a late-morning sun, in front of newspaper photographers and TV news cameras, and before emergency crews could arrive; one perished two days later at a local hospital.

It was the worst Southern violence in a decade. But the Greensboro Massacre, as it came to be known, quickly disappeared from the front pages of national newspapers. The next day, 52 US hostages were taken in Iran, and America had a larger crisis to worry about—one that birthed, among other things, 24-hour news. Greensboro, however, has been grappling with the massacre ever since. No one was ever convicted. And two criminal trials that ended in acquittals left disturbing questions about whether police steered the communist protesters into a fatal ambush.