Forty years ago, a gang of Klansmen and Nazis murdered five communists in broad daylight. America has never been the same.
The Murder of Sonny Liston“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.
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.
Top left: William Luther Pierce in a high school military academy uniform. Top left: A copy of"The Turner Diaries" written by Pierce under the pseudonym Andrew Macdonald. Bottom: A secret gathering of Klansmen in 1950s Georgia. | Wikimedia Commons; AP Photo; Getty ImagesAmerican Nazis were expanding their public presence. Some younger would-be fuhrers began trading armbands for sport coats and toning down their rhetoric in media appearances in order to seem more palatable.
White supremacists of all stripes came to believe they faced annihilation, and they prepared to fight it on the home front. The country, in other words, was primed for a fusion of the ultra-right. By that point, the Klan’s resurgence was already triggering confrontations around the country. In Decatur, Alabama, in May 1979, more than a hundred armed Klansmen blocked a civil rights march. Later, that August, rock-throwing protesters pelted Klansmen at an anti-immigration meeting in Castro Valley, California. None of those episodes led to lethal retaliatory violence, however. China Grove was different because it got the attention of a young Nazi named Harold Covington.
And Covington saw no one in the back-country klaverns of North Carolina capable of stepping into the void. Long before he would become a YouTube provocateur by posting white-power videos online, Covington decided to herd them into a single white-power army himself. If Covington looked in the mirror and saw a worldwide revolutionary, Griffin viewed himself as a backwoods patriot. After the China Grove debacle, he concluded that local Klans needed better leadership and more action, and believed he could provide both.
Unlike the years after 9/11 when American law enforcement took its focus off white nationalism to fight Islamist terror, the 1960s and ’70s were a period of robust intelligence-gathering in the supremacist underground. One of North Carolina’s most charismatic Klansmen, a car salesman named Bob Jones who recruited 12,000 members to his state chapter, was undone by an aide whose information led to him being dragged before Congress and held in contempt.
A WVO flyer announces the November 3, 1979 'Death to the Klan' march and conference to be held in Greensboro. | Greensboro History Museum The vote among those in the audience was unanimous: They’d go to Greensboro to make their presence felt. The following weekend, as word spread, white supremacist groups met in at least three different locations around North Carolina and agreed to head there, too.
A little later, Dawson called again to warn that the place was chock full of firearms. But that information never made its way to the shift commander, who wrapped up a daily briefing at about 10:30 that morning by reminding his men the parade permit listed a start time of noon. The officers could get breakfast, he said, so long as they were on the route by 11:30.
The WVO had packed a few weapons, but were seriously outgunned. One of the WVO leaders, a physician named Jim Waller, lunged for a 12-gauge shotgun he’d stashed in a car, but a Klansman flew toward him before he could fire. The two rolled in the grass, fighting nose-to-nose over the weapon until others started piling on top of them and the pump mechanism snapped. Waller screamed as the pump-action crushed the bones in his shooting hand.
The convoy sped away, with Matthews’ van the last to leave the scene. Climbing aboard, Matthews let the rest of squad know: “I got three of ’em.” Moments later, police intercepted the van, but didn’t get to Morningside Homes until the shooting was over.in Greensboro marked the worst violence in the South since the 1960s. And for the men who shot their enemies dead, November 3, 1979, was just the beginning of a new era of notoriety and collaboration.
On November 17, 1980, an all-white jury found the Klansmen and Nazis not guilty. “Anytime you defeat communism,” said Jerry Pridmore, one of the men acquitted, “it’s a victory for America.” In June 1985, the civil jury delivered a landmark yet twisted verdict: They found eight defendants liable for wrongful death: Dawson, five Klan and Nazi shooters, the Greensboro police detective who received advance word about the attack from Dawson and the lieutenant who was the GPD event commander at the massacre. But the jury applied that decision only in the case of Michael Nathan, the one murder victim who wasn’t a WVO member at the time of the shootings.
Top: Nazi leader Harold Covington holds a news conference in 1980 praising the acquittal of six Klansmen and Nazis charged with the slaying of five Communists. Bottom: KKK leader Virgil Griffin marches with other Klansmen around the North Carolina State Capitol in 1982 to protest the imprisonment of a white man who bombed a black-owned newspaper in 1973. | Getty Images
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