39 Shots

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
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