Episode 43: 39 Shots

Criminal

Vox Media Podcast Network

True Crime, Society & Culture, Documentary

4.7 • 38.4K Ratings

🗓️ 20 May 2016

⏱️ 31 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	The first time that I encountered the clan, we were at a restaurant in Greensboro called
0:06.8	the Apacela, and the clan actually formed a line outside on both sides of the street
0:15.5	in their uniform.
0:17.8	And in that place, we were not only in a ratio, we were men and women.
0:25.6	There were white women there, black women, black men, white women.
0:29.6	We were sitting at a table, and people came and took the soda I was drinking and poured
0:36.2	it in my lap.
0:38.5	This was in the mid-1960s.
0:40.7	Nelson Johnson had just returned from four years in the Air Force and was enrolled at North
0:45.6	Carolina A&T State University.
0:48.4	So that was my first encounter with the clan within the context of seeking to have a
0:57.3	meal, but conscious that we were integrating a place where that was not permissible.
1:04.9	As a student, he formed the Greensboro Association of Poor People and quickly became a respected
1:10.0	civil rights leader.
1:11.9	In the late 70s, he worked to build up unions in North Carolina's textile factories and
1:16.8	was joined by activists from all over the country.
1:20.1	Their strategy was to get hired by a factory and then organize its workers from the inside.
1:26.2	That was a trend in the protest culture, you know, to leave the nice lucrative career
1:33.8	that you had or were going to have and go to work in some kind of manual, blue collar
1:43.0	work, be organizing people, work in the community or in the factories or both.
1:49.0	Signi Waller Foxworth and her husband, Jim Waller, were two of the activists working
1:54.0	alongside Nelson Johnson.
	...

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