The Greensboro massacre: Political biographies of four surviving demonstrators

Abstract

On November 3, 1979, a group of radical activists, black and white, prepared to march against the Ku Klux Klan through the streets of Greensboro, NC. Suddenly, a caravan of armed Klansmen and Nazis drove into their midst and opened fire. Eighty‐eight seconds later 13 demonstrators lay wounded, and five of them died. The demonstrators were radicals; some of them had been activists since the early 1960s. Veterans of the Civil Rights Movement, they became union organizers in the 1970s in North Carolina. As America became more conservative in the 1970s, these activists became more radical, becoming Marxists and joining an organization that became the Communist Workers Party. This article focuses on four surviving demonstrators who come from very different family backgrounds and followed diverse paths to political activism. Willena Cannon's parents were black sharecroppers who never discussed politics. Jean Sharpe was the daughter of a member of the Ku Klux Klan. Paul Bermanzohn's mother and father were Holocaust survivors, who talked about current events but feared any involvement. Nelson Johnson grew up in an African American family with a tradition of fighting for equal rights. Each individual's evolution is discussed in light of two contrasting theories of political socialization, those of Flacks, which stresses the influence of the family, and Jennings and Niemi, which focuses on the importance of historical events. Both Jennings and Flacks explain different aspects of these four activists’ development, which can be understood as a dynamic interaction between individuals’ coming of age, family influence, and the contemporaneous social movements of the 1960s. The article includes the impact of the massacre on the four survivor's political beliefs and activism since 1979.