Charlottesville Events Parallel Violent Conflict In Greensboro's Past

In 1979, five members of the Communist Workers Party were shot to death by a group of Klansmen and neo-Nazis during the “Death to the Klan” rally in Greensboro. In response, the Ku Klux Klan was banned from marching or recruiting there again.

When former journalist Jeff Whisnant returned to North Carolina in the late 1980s to attend graduate school at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, the city council had recently lifted that restriction.

“Their justification was that their civil right to free speech was being violated,” says Whisnant. “But other members of the community felt like they had given up their right for free speech by killing people in the city streets [in 1979]. And, not unlike today, there was an outcry.”

That year, the Klan was given a permit to hold a rally in Greensboro. Whisnant and other students wanted to counter protest the event, but were denied the right to do so for fear of violence.

“From that point on, the community really got behind us,” says Whisnant. “[They said] ‘Wait a minute. This is a clear example of something not going right.'”

That rejection he says prompted greater pressure from groups across the city.

“You had members of the Jewish community who, remembering the Holocaust, wanted to stand witness. You had members of the Hispanic community who, [with] their own background saying, ‘We want to join in.' The African-American community came together, the A&T students, [and] older adults that we met like Skip Alston, [former] head of the [North Carolina] NAACP.”

The city relented, and an opposition event called the Peace and Unity rally eventually took place in 1987.

Correction: The broadcast version of this story stated the wrong year for the Peace and Unity rally.