39 Shots

Criminal

Vox Media Podcast Network

True Crime, Society & Culture, Documentary

4.7 • 38.4K Ratings

🗓️ 20 May 2016

⏱️ 33 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

In 1979, a group of labor organizers protested outside a Ku Klux Klan screening of the 1915 white supremacist film, The Birth of a Nation. Nelson Johnson and Signe Waller-Foxworth remember shouting at armed Klansmen and burning a confederate flag, until eventually police forced the KKK inside and the standoff ended without violence. The labor organizers felt they'd won a small victory, and planned a much bigger anti-Klan demonstration in Greensboro, North Carolina. They advertised with the slogan: “Death to the Klan" and set the date for November 3rd, 1979. As protestors assembled, a caravan of nine cars appeared, and a man in a pick-up truck yelled: "You asked for the Klan! Now you've got 'em!" Thirty-nine shots were fired in eighty-eight seconds, and five protestors were killed. The city of Greensboro is still grappling with the complicated legacy of that day. The Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s full report is available online. Today, Reverend Nelson Johnson is a pastor with Faith Community Church and serves as the Executive Director for the Beloved Community Center of Greensboro, which advocates for social and economic justice. Signe Waller-Foxworth is the author of Love and Revolution: A Political Memoir. Eric Ginsburg is the associate editor at the Triad City Beat. For this story, we also interviewed Elizabeth Wheaton, author of Codename Greenkill. Say hello on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Sign up for our occasional newsletter, The Accomplice. Follow the show and review us on Apple Podcasts: iTunes.com/CriminalShow. We also make This is Love and Phoebe Reads a Mystery. Artwork by Julienne Alexander. Check out our online shop. Episode transcripts are posted on our website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Support for this show comes from Krakan.
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0:48.1	here for the grassroots and all the muddy booths. From schools to stadiums, we're here for it all.
0:55.0	Barclays, here for the land of football.
1:00.0	The first time that I encountered the clan we were at a restaurant in
1:06.0	Greensburg called the Appar cellar and the clan actually formed a line outside on both sides of the street in their uniform.
1:18.0	And in that place, we were not only in a ratio, we were men and women.
1:25.0	There were white women there, black women, black men, white women.
1:29.0	We were sitting at a table and people came and took the soda I was drinking and poured it in my lap.
1:38.7	This was in the mid-1960s.
1:40.9	Nelson Johnson had just returned from four years in the Air Force and was enrolled at
1:45.5	North Carolina A&T State University.
1:48.5	So that was my first encounter with the clan within the context of seeking to have a mill but conscious that we were
	...

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