Greensboro 1979, Kansas City 2014-Fascist Murder Workers Vanguard No. 1045	2 May 2014

Greensboro 1979, Kansas City 2014-Fascist Murder

 

After Frazier Glenn Miller gunned down three people outside a pair of Jewish community facilities near Kansas City on the day before Passover, the arrested killer shouted from the back seat of a police car: “Heil Hitler!” For decades a prominent member of Ku Klux Klan and Nazi outfits, Miller, also known as Frazier Glenn Cross, stood out even among his fellow white supremacists for his virulently murderous hatred of Jews. (None of the victims were in fact Jewish.) Nearly 35 years prior, Miller was in a caravan of KKK and Nazi fascists who shot and killed five union organizers and civil rights activists—supporters of the Communist Workers Party (CWP)—on 3 November 1979 in Greensboro, North Carolina.

Following the April 13 killings in Overland Park, Kansas, the bourgeois media have recounted in some detail how Miller and the Feds struck a plea deal in the late 1980s. In return for his testimony against other white supremacists, Miller claims that he was shielded in a witness protection program and his family helped financially. But in recounting Miller’s participation in the Greensboro Massacre, the New York Times (14 April) in typical fashion steered clear of any mention of the government’s involvement in those killings.

Greensboro was a conspiracy of the fascists and their capitalist state minders. In broad daylight, 30 race-terrorists drove in a caravan to a black housing project, escorted by local police, pulled out their shotguns and rifles and, in full view of television cameras, began pumping lead into a peaceful protest march. From the outset, the fascists were aided and abetted by the government, from a Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms agent who helped train the killers and plot the assassinations to a “former” FBI informer who rode shotgun in the motorcade of death.

Greensboro survivors, one of whom was left partially paralyzed, were jailed, fired and blacklisted from work and stalked by the FBI and local police. Some of the fascist killers were charged but acquitted by all-white juries in farcical trials, affirming once again the meaning of “justice” in this racist capitalist country. Miller was not one of those charged. Signe Waller, the widow of James Waller, one of the CWP activists murdered in Greensboro, declared after Miller’s rampage in Overland Park that he “should not have been walking the streets all these years,” in which case his victims “would probably still be alive.”

Coming near the end of the Democratic Carter administration, the Greensboro Massacre was the opening shot of what would become the Reagan years’ war on labor and black people. When the Klan announced that it would “celebrate” Greensboro in Detroit a week later, the Spartacist League initiated a labor/black mobilization that drew over 500, many of them black auto workers (see accompanying articles). Those 500 militants made sure that the Klan did not ride in the Motor City.

Over the next two decades, the SL actively built such labor-centered mobilizations in several other urban centers, successfully stopping Klan/Nazi provocations. Against those liberals and reformists who sought to derail such protests with calls on the government to “ban the Klan,” we pointed out that the capitalist state would use any such bans to go after leftists as well as trade-union and black militants. We declared: No more Greensboros! In an exemplary way, the mobilizations initiated by the Spartacist League and Partisan Defense Committee showed the power of the working class, marching at the head of all the fascists’ intended victims, to sweep the race-terrorists off the street and crush the Klan/Nazi menace in the egg.