The Greensboro City Council voted Tuesday to issue a formal apology for the massacre that left five dead at the hands of neo-Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan 41 years ago.
The passage of the resolution, which was approved by a council vote of 7-2, means that the city will acknowledge that the police department failed to act on information it had about violent acts the Nazi Party and the Ku Klux Klan planned to commit in a low-income community during a “Death to Klan Rally” on Nov. 3, 1979, organized by Communist Workers Party activists.
The resolution also dictates that the city will dedicate a scholarship in memory of the victims of the Greensboro Massacre. In addition, it includes an apology to the families, victims and the Morningside Homes community for the violence and absence of police action.
The resolution includes an apology for: “The failure of any government action to effectively overcome the hate that precipitated the violence, to embrace the sorrow that resulted from the violence and to reconcile all the vestiges of those heinous events in the years subsequent to 1979.”
Before the planned protest could begin, at about 11:20 on that deadly morning, a caravan of cars carrying Klansmen and neo-Nazis arrived at the Greensboro housing project where the anti-racist protesters were setting up to begin their procession. The heavily armed Klan-Nazi interlopers came prepared to disrupt the demonstration and do more, and within less than two minutes after pulling up in their cars they would mortally wound five people and leave seven injured.
Edward Dawson, an informant for the Greensboro Police who helped plan the massacre, notified the department of the details of the white supremacists’ deadly intentions beforehand. Bernard Butkovich, an agent with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms who was undercover with the local Nazi party, also supplied some of the weapons used at the massacre. Ultimately, the tactical squad that was supposed to monitor the march was absent when the Klansmen and neo-Nazis arrived at the apartment complex to provoke a confrontation.
A jury ruled in 1985 that there was no coordination between the Klan, local police and federal government to hurt protesters or disrupt the demonstration.
Six KKK and neo-Nazi members were charged with murder in the deaths of victims Sandra Neely Smith, César Vincente Cauce, William Evan Sampson, Dr. Michael Ronald Nathan, and Dr. James Michael Waller. The white supremacist defendants were acquitted by an all-white jury in 1980. Some four years later in 1984 nine defendants would be acquitted by another all-white jury on federal charges in the case.
Mayor Nancy Vaughan said Friday that the resolution began to take form in December when faith and civil rights leaders began contacting city council members to request an apology for after the 40th anniversary of the massacre.
The “Morningside Homes Memorial Scholarship” will be awarded to five graduates of Dudley High School each year, in honor of the five victims of the massacre.
Although the city has informally apologized for the massacre in the past, this is the most thoroughly vetted and first formal apology ever issued.
