[The Truth About the Greensboro Massacre: A Reply to Mr. Watson's Harper's Article]

              THE TRUTH ABOUT THE GREENSBORO MASSACRE:   A Reply to Mr.   Watson's
Harper's Article
by Signe Waller
I've   always liked Sunday mornings.   They seem a quiet time apart from the
ordinary bustle of my household.  Since Jim's death,   I've taken to rising earlier than
my usual seven o'clock.   This is especially true on Sundays,  which used to be one of
our few  precious     times together in our otherwise hectic lives.  On the morning of
Rbruary 10th,   I had just sleepily turned up the flame under the tea kettle when I began to thumb idly through the Sunday paper.  A    headline caught my eye,   and I saw
my picture on the front page of the Commentary section.   "The World is Watching. "
"The Greensboro Shootout Proves Easy Picking for Media Martyrdom. " Copyrighted
by Harpers Magazine,  March 1980.
My husband,   Jim Waller,   was murdered on November 3,   1979f   together with
four other of my closest friends,   in the streets of Morningside Homes by a caravan
of KKK and Nazis.  In the struggle to have the truth known about my husband's and
friends' deaths,   and the controversy surrounding November 3rd,   I've   read and heard
some of the most vicious and insupportable lies and  rumors paraded as facts across
newspaper page and television,   including the allegation that Jim and I planned his
martyrdom.  I haven't yet developed a tough enough hide to prevent the wave of anger
that wells in my throat when I read or encounter one of these attacks.
Robert Watson's article was both a vicious personal slander and a conscious
distortion of the facts surrounding both November 3rd and November 11th.   Watson
would have us take our grief and hide it behind a widow's veil. But my husband wasn't killed in an auto smash-up,   he didn't drink himself to death,   and he wasn't mugged
and murdered by some crazed drug addict.   Jim was picked out and assassinated   in
a government planned set-up ,   his body pierced in fifteen different     places.   The fatal
shot was in his back,   probably as he already lay on the ground.  He was completely
unarmed.
Watson and those like him will never understand that it is the very depth of
my grief --and the grief of all the other widows       and friends-- that won't allow us to
retreat and grieve in silence.   What seems to his smug,   complacent eye "macabre
elan" is very simply the determination to see the real murderers of my beloved husband and friends exposed.   November 11th was very difficult for me,   as I know it was
for the other widows.  We marched in a fog of pain,   exhaustion and grief.  I was near
to fainting.  But anger at our enemies and the determination to see the life's purpose
of our beloved comrades fulfilled helped us turn our grief into strength.   This  is what
Watson's feeble sneering can never touch.
What continues to appall me most about Watson's article is not its petty
viciousness or the transparencies of   his distortions or the conclusions he generates
solely from his own sick brain juice.  His article is easy to expose by a simple documented pr-esentation of the facts surrounding November 3rd.   What I have written
below does exactly that.   What disturbs     me most,  however,   and what actually merits
this lengthy response is that such a shabb y example of what passes for political
commentary found its way into the pages of a magazine as prestigious as Harpers,   as