CODENAME GREENKIL: THE 1979 GREENSBORO KILLINGS - ELIZABETH WHEATON

AVAILABLE

Some of those that work forces…, etc. As a person who grew up in North Carolina, with family that’s lived in North Carolina for literal centuries, I’m always interested in NC history and culture, especially the parts of it that weren’t taught in schools and connect up with my other historical interests. The Wilmington Coup or the Battle of Hayes Pond come to mind. I’ve been aware of the Greensboro massacre for a while but it’s never been really explained to me, and most people in NC don’t seem to be aware of it at all, despite the fact that it happened less than 50 years ago in a town about 45 minutes from where I grew up. It’s hard to get information on the event; this book is out of print, so I had to order it from a specialty bookstore. The basics of the story is that a group of communists and anti-racists was engaged in a years-long campaign to unionize and improve working conditions at piedmont area textile mills, a campaign that was opposed by the owners of these mills as well as local klansmen and nazis. There were a handful of confrontations, which mostly involved shouting at one another, while armed, which culminated in a Nov. 3, 1979 march through Greensboro which the Communist Workers Party billed as a “Death to the Klan” event. On the march, in a Black housing project called Morningside Homes, a caravan of Nazis and Klansmen showed up and killed 5 of the marchers. There was both a State and Federal trial against 5 and 9 (respectivly) Nazis/Klansmen, both trials ended in aquitals. Pretty horrible shit on its face, but it gets weirder. The Klansmen/Nazis (part of this book is about the ways in which these two groups come together to form a sort of racist Voltron) side was lousy with Federal and local police informants. Ed Dawson, a Klansmen who worked with both the local police and the FBI as part of COINTELPRO, was in the first car of the caravan and was given a map of the route by the local police. He claims that he twice called officer “Rooster” Cooper on the morning of the shooting that they, the Klansmen, were about to show up armed and pissed and that Police Captain Thomas called him afterwards to thank him for a job well done. There was also a ATF agent, Bernard Butkovich, who’d infiltrated the Nazi side, as part of an investigation looking for illegally modified machine guns, who other Klansmen say was the main promoter of bringing guns to the counter-protest. Butkovoich claims he never alerted the local police or ATF that his group intended to show up armed to confront the march. Despite the fact that both the Nazi caravan and the march itself were under police surveillance, no law enforcement agents intervened in the shooting and allowed the Nazis to leave. In fact, in the aftermath, they arrested a few of the communists. Their claim, which this book repeats without challenging, is that they, the police, were afraid of going into this housing project due to the tension between the residents and police (an insane suggestion if you’ve ever seen the way the police treat people who live in housing projects). Finally, the most enigmatic character in all this to me, and a fellow Chapel Hillian (and Chapel Hill High school alum), is Harold Covington a Nazi that was in the US Army, leaves to go to South Africa in the 70’s, moves to Rhodesia where he was perhaps a mercenary (he says he was, there seems to be some doubt though), before being so racist he was deported from Rhodesia (amazing) returns to NC where he leads various Nazi parties and eventually gets 43% of the vote in a Republican primary for State Attorney General before leaving NC and the South to live out the rest of his life in the Pacific Northwest. Interestingly, both the Nazis and the Communists came to believe he had some ties to the CIA and/or FBI given his racist globetrotting and seeming immunity from prosecution. This book has a lot of good info about a really important event but it falls short in a lot of ways. Wheaton engages in a lot of both-sideism and tries to come off as evenhanded in a way that, for me, obscures what actually happened. Towards the end of the book she literally writes that there are no pure heroes in the story. One side was trying to organize workers against deadly and exploitative working conditions, including in some cases leaving lucrative medical jobs to get dangerous jobs in a textile mill to be closer to the action, and then stood up aggressively to a murderous gang and the other side is literal Nazis and Klansmen. There’s a pretty clear “pure hero” to me in that story. She tries to go out of her way to illuminate the ways in which the communists were out of touch or off-putting to people and overly aggressive, all of which I’m sure is true, but this comes dangerously close to victim blaming to me. If the communists made a mistake, it was not being better armed at the march. She’s also to quick to believe that the police actions (and lack of action) as well as the subsequent aquitals were the result of incompetence and honest fuck-ups instead of something more sinister. I think if you look at goverment intervention in right-wing groups, from the various Klan informants who were involved in killing Civil Rights workers in the 50s and 60s to their role using these groups to kill Civil Rights leaders to the OKC bombing to contemporary stuff like their entanglement in the millitia movement and things like the Jan. 6th riot, a darker image presents itself that Wheaton is shying away from. I could have used a lot more suspicion and investigation w/r/t the real relationship between the Government agencies and the Klansmen. Either way, I’d recommend the book, this is a very important historical incident that has been completely memory-holed. Those who forget the past, etc. 88 Seconds