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Thread ID: 20446 | Posts: 1 | Started: 2005-09-29
2005-09-29 10:22 | User Profile
Testimony lacks new information
By Margaret Moffett Banks Staff Writer
Virgil Griffin, resident of Mount Holly, N.C. and Imperial Wizard of the Cleveland Knights Ku Klux Klan, voices his dislike of communism to the Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission during their second day of public hearings.
GREENSBORO--The hair was thinner, the shoulders slouched, but otherwise it was the same Virgil Griffin remembered from 26 years ago.
The Klansman was defiant -- gleeful, even -- as the Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission peppered him with questions about the violent morning in 1979.
Capt. Rick Ball of the Greensboro police department speaks about the police's response to the shootings.Commissioner Barbara Walker: "Don't you think it's strange that no Klansman was even shot on Nov. 3?"
Griffin: "No, ma'am, I don't."
Walker: "Why do you say that, please?"
Griffin: "Well, them communists might be doctors and they may be lawyers, but my boys in the Klan, they were deer hunters and things. They hunt for food. Maybe them city slickers didn't. Maybe they don't have as tough a time as poor people.
"Maybe God guided the bullets. I don't know."
Nov. 3 has come and gone 25 times, but time has tempered none of Griffin's vitriol.
The same can be said for surviving members of the Communist Workers Party. They are older, thicker around the middle, but just as zealous -- still using phrases like "right-wing death squad" to describe the killings and "backward, right-wing jurors" to describe the men and women who failed to convict the killers.
This summer, 32 people have testified before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which is gathering evidence about the city's most notorious crime: the shootings between the Klan, Nazis and the CWP at Morningside Homes.
The last hearings begin Friday. In the spring, the commission plans to report its findings and suggest ways the community can heal.
A News & Record analysis of the testimony has discovered few, if any, new details about the shootings and little sense the hearings have mended old divisions.
There have been no tearful apologies. No startling revelations. No acceptance of responsibility.
Testimony to the commission sounds far from conciliatory.
Surviving members of the CWP hold firm that high-ranking Greensboro leaders allowed the Klan to attack the march, and that the cover-up continues.
"The Klan had and still has behind-the-scenes supporters in corporate and governing circles that promote the Klan's racist ideology and, at times, support its violent acts," said Signe Waller, whose husband was killed in the shootings.
Meanwhile, representatives of "official Greensboro" -- lawyers, a judge, a police officer -- maintain it was the CWP's violent rhetoric, and its refusal to cooperate with the police and the court system, that caused the killings and kept those responsible out of prison.
"It seems that 25 years later, there's an effort to try to wash away any of the ideology advanced by those people back in 1979," said retired lawyer Robert Cahoon, who defended a Klansman in a criminal trial.
And Griffin, the only Klansman present at Morningside who testified before the commission, remained unrepentant. When asked by a commissioner what mistakes the Klan made that morning, Griffin said: "I don't think we made any.
"We all came out alive."
The facts of Nov. 3, 1979:
Griffin and carloads of armed Klansmen and Nazis crashed a "Death to the Klan" march. Protesters, members of the CWP, also were armed.
Five communists were killed -- Cesar Cause, 25; Dr. Mike Nathan, 32; Bill Sampson, 31; Sandy Smith, 28; and Dr. Jim Waller, 36. An additional 10 were injured.
An all-white jury did not send any Klansmen or Nazis to prison. A federal civil suit eventually found the city of Greensboro and the police department liable for one death and two injured victims.
The versions of events that have been told this summer could not differ more.
To hear Griffin talk, the communists started it. Two CWP members, Nelson Johnson (now a local minister) and Paul Bermanzohn, issued a challenge to the Klan weeks before the march:
"We invite you and your two-bit punks to come out and face the wrath of the people."
During his testimony in July, Griffin suggested those words, more than anything, sparked the violence.
"Said we was hiding under rocks," he said, his voice quivering with anger. "We was scum. I'm not scum. I'm as good as any man that walks on this earth."
Survivors remember it differently. They said their efforts to unionize local textile mills -- an increasingly successful effort, survivors said -- sent alarms through Greensboro's power structure.
Johnson told the commission in August: "The fact is that the Klan was used on Nov. 3 to kill labor organizers, to shut down the textile organization drive, to intimidate and confuse the black community, and to this very hour put a chill and a pall on the whole progressive movement."
But even the staunchest conspiracy theorists have admitted there is little hard evidence linking law enforcement or city leaders to the deaths.
Lewis Pitts, a civil rights attorney who represented the CWP in the civil trial, said he thinks law enforcement colluded to allow the violence, then covered up the evidence.
Yet when pressed by commissioners, he said there were only "inferred and implied agreements to carry out a common end, and overt acts in the furtherance of that agreement."
"(There) was never any written plan," Pitts said. "I don't certainly assume they all got together in the same room."
Likewise, no one has provided information of a rumor long whispered in Greensboro -- that Johnson conspired to keep law enforcement from the march.
It's true Johnson told police at a news conference Nov. 1, 1979, to "stay out of our way." Still, he said, organizers thought police would protect protesters from Klansmen.
He also rebuffed questions from commissioners about the clash between the CWP and Klansmen at China Grove, a small town in Rowan County.
In October 1979, the CWP disrupted a rally where the Klan was showing "The Birth of a Nation," a 1915 film often used as a KKK recruiting tool. CWP members stood nose to nose with the armed Klansmen in the streets of China Grove, each side ready for a confrontation.
"You could feel each other's breath," Gorrell Pierce, a Klansman and Nazi present at China Grove, told commissioners. "It was that close.
"I knew right then that the next time these people got that close together, something bad would happen."
Klan members eventually retreated inside the community center, at which time the CWP burned a Confederate flag. In fliers promoting the Nov. 3 rally, CWP members claimed victory in China Grove and claimed to have "chased these same scum Klansmen off the lawn."
Johnson was asked whether he believed the incident foreshadowed danger.
Commissioner Robert Peters: "After you became aware of how armed the Klan was at China Grove, did you expect violence at the Morningside rally?"
"Absolutely not," Johnson said. "I've tried to emphasize that I don't bring my children to shootouts. And I don't bring other people's children to shootouts.
"And I didn't plan things with the expectation of that."
Jim Waller was an odd bird during his working days at Cone Mills' Haw River plant. He was from Chicago, a skilled pediatrician, a black-bearded activist and union organizer.
His widow, Signe Waller, laughed as she told commissioners about his lunches: bean sprouts, pickled herring, a bagel and lox. Once, another worker drew a cartoon that showed Jim Waller opening his lunch satchel -- and everyone around him passing out from the smell.
Signe Waller and other survivors have long argued that the lack of a police presence at Morningside allowed the killings to happen. The only explanation for her husband's death, she told commissioners, is conspiracy.
"Everything I have learned has persuaded me that government officials had foreknowledge about the Klan and Nazi attack plan and acted in complicity with those plans," she said.
"Consequently, a cover-up was needed to distract people from the evidence of criminal collusion."
In Capt. Rick Ball's mind, there was no conspiracy.
Ball, a patrolman on Nov. 3 and the first Greensboro police officer to speak publicly about the incident, disputed the theory long espoused by Signe Waller and other survivors.
"I am here before you to say enough is enough," he said. "When you separate fact from rhetoric, you will find not one ounce of credible evidence to support such a (position) because it doesn't exist."
Instead, Ball cited confusion among police officials about where and when the march was to begin, a position long held by the department -- and long disputed by surviving members of the CWP.
He told commissioners 26 police officers were on duty, most stationed at the Windsor Community Center on East Lee Street, where police thought the march would originate; 30 to 40 demonstrators had gathered there.
Protesters wouldn't help police officers clear up the confusion, Ball said.
"To say that we were met with hostility would be an understatement," he said. "There was no valuable dialogue that took place."
Commissioners also heard testimony that surviving members of the CWP wouldn't cooperate with officials during the criminal trial.
Peters, one of the commissioners, asked Floris Weston, the widow of slain CWP member Cesar Cause, why she refused to testify.
Peters: "You had been married for six months and your new husband was just shot to death. You talked about how you really wanted justice. Did you not think you could at least try to get some justice by going through the legal system?"
Weston: "I thought it was a no-brainer. I thought that with the videotape, it would be easy. I certainly didn't think they needed me."
The judge who presided over the criminal case, James Long, told commissioners that disruptions in the courtroom by CWP members -- including the release of a stink bomb -- did little to win the jury's support.
He contrasted their behavior to that of the Klansmen, whom he described as "neatly dressed defendants" sitting quietly with their attorneys.
Long also said prosecutors didn't use evidence they initially had thought would help their case: a sound analysis of gunshots fired at the scene.
An FBI agent tried to use the sound from television footage to pinpoint the shots. He discovered that 18 of 39 shots came from positions occupied by demonstrators.
Prosecutors chose not to call the agent as a witness, fearing it would bolster the Klansmen's claims of self-defense.
Defense lawyers used that analysis to their advantage.
Ultimately, commissioners will spend the winter months weighing the speakers' testimony against their agendas, then reach a conclusion that must satisfy such disparate parties.
That's little consolation to Candy Clapp, who was a 15-year-old resident of Morningside Homes on Nov. 3, 1979.
She testified about hearing her neighbors scream, "Run for your life!", about teachers who offered little comfort at school the following Monday, about how her parents refused to discuss the shootings.
She's still afraid of crowds.
"It seems to me," she said, "nobody wants to take responsibility for what took place on Nov. 3."
Contact Margaret Moffett Banks at 373-7031 or [email]mbanks@news-record.com[/email]
[url]http://www.news-record.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050928/NEWSREC0101/509280328/1001/NEWSREC0201[/url]
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