The shootings and after: A CWP response

              C4
Greensboro Daily News/Record, Sun., March 30, 1980
Viewpoint
Columns
and
Opinion
The shootings and after; A CWP response
WALLER
By SIGNE WALLER
The following statement was submitted in
response to a Harper's Magazine article by
Robert Watson excerpted in this space on
Feb. 10. The writer, a Greensboro resident,
is press agent for the Communist Workers
Party.
My husband, Jim Waller, was murderea
on November 3, 1979, together with four of
my closest friends, in the streets of Morning-
■ side Homes by a caravan
I of KKK and Nazis.
Robert Watson's article was both a vicious
personal slander and a
conscious distortion of
the facts surrounding the
events of both November
1 and November 11.
j Watson would have us
I take our grief and hide it
I behind a widow's veil.
Jim was picked out and
assassinated, in a government planned setup, his body pierced in 15 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 11 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, however, and what actually merits this lengthy response is that such a
shabby example of what passes for political
commentary found its way into the pages of
a magazine as prestigious as Harpers, as
well as into such influential newspapers as
the Washington Post. His entire treatise is a
systematic regurgitation of every lie, distortion, inaccuracy and inuendo that had been
printed by the "gullible media" he impugns.
What is interesting is that when the Harper's article was edited for inclusion in the,
Sunday Daily News, significant portions
were cut. They were precisely those portions which contained such obvious falsehoods they would have exposed the entire
article, such as that the police were not told
the anti-Klan rally would begin at Morning-
side, thus explaining their absence during
the murders.
Watson ignores the bloody history of
lynchings, repression and terror that southern workers, especially blacks, associate
with the Klan. He completely ignores the recent upsurge in Klan recruitment drives,
cross burnings, rallies and shootings not only
in the south, but in the north and west too.
The gist of his argument is that anyone who
dares to print or speak the truth about the
Klan deserves to be murdered in the street.
For Watson takes a political challenge and
uses it to lay the fault for the murders at the
feet of those who dared to expose the Klan
for what it is.
To Watson, the Klan is "mostly poorly
educated, country-boy fanatics who don't '
like their bravery questioned." Was it "poor
country boys" who executed a precision,
military-type maneuver on November 3, encircling the crowd, forcing them to scatter
back into the project buildings by a single
shot, methodically assassinating with bullets
CWP marchers in November 11 funeral procession
to the head or heart those leaders who could
only have been known as leaders, by those
with access to the intelligence-gathering
agencies of our government, and then, as
with one will, cooly retreating, packing up
and speeding off? If those are Watson's
"poor country boys," they must be teaching
commando tactics along with hog-calling.
Watson goes to great lengths to describe
the gathering of the Klan early on the morning of Nov. 3. He neglects to say that the
Greensboro police also knew of the gathering, knew the Klan was armed and knew
they planned to interfere with the march
that day. He also forgets to mention that the
police had a "reliable informer" inside the
Klan group at all times. He describes the
Klan caravan driving off to take up the CWP
challenge. He neglects to say that the police
were watching, photographing and following
the Klan into town all the way from Randle-
man Road to Morningside. He neglects to
say that the last car in the caravan was a
police car, occupied by Officer Cooper, who
watched from a distance of two blocks as the
murders were committed and the murderers
drove away.
Watson does manage to mention that a
Klansman had gone to the Greensboro Governmental Plaza to "look at" the rally parade
permit, which gave the undisclosed gathering point of the march, instead of the publicly announced Windsor Center site. Then,
one paragraph later, he states, "But the police were not told of the new assembly point
... The police, unlike the Klan, still thought
the march was to assemble at Windsor ..."
What Watson neglects, and what all of
Greensboro knows, is that on Thursday,
November 1, the police themselves gave a
self-identified Klansman, named Dawson, a
copy of the permit. The permit told the Klan
the unannounced gathering site (which had
been consciously changed by the CWP leadership in order to avoid any confrontation)
and the fact that the CWP would be unarmed, due to a special ruling enforced by
the city for this occasion. The police themselves had set up a meeting with Nelson
Johnson at Morningside for 11:30 a.m.
Now, are all these "minor facts" which
Watson omitted available only after time-
consuming, painstaking research? No! They
are available to anyone able to read in the
official police report issued by the Greensboro Police Department after November 3!
Much of the information was also reprinted
in the Greensboro Daily News between November 3 and 11.
The following question, which has been on
all our minds, did not occur to Watson: What
on earth did the Greensboro Police Department have to lose by warning Johnson that
the Klan had the permit and asking him to
cancel the rally? It appears to me that Chief
Watson writes, "Someone (No one is now
sure whether it was a Worker or a Klansman) began firing shots in the air." Now this
is very slick. Four different TV stations
taped the murders, and although the quality
of the tape varies — (I have seen them
twice) — it is both audible and visible that
the signal shot comes from a long-barreled
pistol fired from the front of the caravan. So
who is Watson's source? There is only one
group of people "unsure" who fired the first
shot and that is the Klan defense lawyers.
Watson goes on to say "most of the killers
were captured within minutes" by the police.
He conveniently omits that eight of nine cars
in the caravan escaped without even being
pursued and that the one van that was apprehended was "caught" only because it
paused long enough to pick up a straggling
Klansman and ran smack into the police coming from the other direction.
Now that we have established who Watson's sources are, let us proceed to his central thesis: that the CWP is "a curious little
band of about 25 revolutionaries ... estranged from almost all life in Greensboro,
or anyplace in America, full of hatred because of their failures ..." Watson asserts,
"No one I knew in Greensboro was aware
that communists of any variety were at work
in the state until the shootout." (sic) But he
seems curiously isolated from many events
of the past few years here.
He apparently never heard about the
widely-supported union drive at Revolution
Mill led by Sandy Smith, which the Amalgamated Clothing »nd Textile Workers Union
(ACTWU) refused to accept because there
were communists organizing it. Or the militant two-week strike at Cone's Granite Finishing plant in Haw River in the summer of
1978, led by Jim Waller. Or the labor board
cases filed, fought and won last fall over
union sympathizers fired by ,Cone in the
Revolution drive. Or the arrest of Bill Sampson for standing by his responsibilities as union shop steward at White Oak and being
thrown in jail for |is efforts. Or the other
strikes led or aided by party members and
friends. Watson must have been out the day
the article appeared about the administratorship slapped on jail Cone locals by ACTWU to prevent tie elections of rank and
file slates of officers^ headed by Bill Sampson
at Cone's White Oak plant and Jim Waller at
Granite Finishing] But Jim was such a
"failure" that the Granite workers stood by
him every step of the way as he fought Cone
and the union to get his job back and, in
spite of the ACTWU'3 administratorship and
also in spite of the fact that he had been fired
by Cone and out of the plant six months earlier, they elected him president of their union local, Local 1113 T, in Haw River.
Where was Watson when the North Carolina competency test issue was raging and
Nelson Johnson debated the head of the Min
imum Competency Test Commission, James
J. Gallagher of Chapel Hill? Or when the
Daily News ran a big story with a photo of
about 2,500 marchers in Raleigh demanding
Governor Hunt release the Wilmington 10?
Where was he when two Guilford County
sheriffs deputies were thrown off the force,
brought to trial and convicted because
Workers Viewpoint organized protest to the
beating of a black youth, Gernie Cummings?
Watson missed the fact that Cesar Cauce
led a delegation of Duke Hospital workers to
Washington, D.C, to confront the bureaucrats of the American Federation of State,
County and Municipal Employees, forcing
them to really take up the Duke union drive
instead of "organizing" in name only. If he
missed so much in North Carolina, we can't
expect him to have been aware of the $50,-
000 worth of medical supplies organized and
shipped by Dr. Michael Nathan of Durham
to the liberation forces in Zimbabwe in 1979.
Watson seems to have a lot invested in
convincing himself, without, of course, any
supporting evidence, that the CWP is
"mostly white." Then, how, according to
Watson, were the funeral marchers three-
quarters black? (Along the same lines, how
can the CWP be both "recent inhabitants"
and "frustrated after years of unsuccessful
organizing at" local mills?)
In a similar effort, he suggests that Sandy
Smith, the only black killed on November 3,
was "killed in the crossfire." This is ridiculous. After being hit across the back of the
head by a Klansman's stick, Sandy picked
herself up and helped the children to safety.
She then sought shelter in the alcove-like
side entrance to the Morningside Community Center. When she put her head around
the corner to see what she could do to help
others, she was shot squarely between the
eyes by a man who had sought her out, waited for her to emerge and deliberately murdered her. This is all from the eyewitness
account of the friend in whose arms she died,
well out of the range of any "crossfire" or
stray bullet.
Watson sprinkles references to the
"falseness of the race issue" throughout the
article. This is patently absurd. According to
Watson, CWP, by holding the march in a
black community, was trying to dupe blacks
into seeing the Klan as anti-black. Supposedly, by whipping up this "false issue," CWP
was trying to build support among blacks. In
fact, in every article, leaflet, statement and
slogan the CWP has put out in its anti-Klan
campaign, the call is for unity among blacks
and whites against the Klan. My husband
worked patiently and persistently with
white workers, a few of whom threatened to
kill him when he handed out leaflets in support of the Wilmington 10. It was that per-
. sistent work and Jim's strong sttand against •
all oppression that gave those 'workers the
unity necessary for that strike against Cone
in the summer of 1978! So, basically, Watson
is telling whites that CWP only organizes
blacks. And he is telling blacks not to worry
about the Klan —just keep out those (white)
organizers and the police will protect you.
But Watson's heaviest task may be to convince District Attorney Michael Schlosser to
stop playing into the hands of the CWP by
letting the Klan go free on ridiculously low
bail, by publicizing ignorant statements, and
by prosecuting Nelson Johnson, Rand Man-
zella and Willena Cannon on trumped-up
charges made on November 3 while the city
police were so busy arresting anti-Klan demonstrators, they had no time to pursue the
Klan.
Oh yes, he better also get busy convincing
those 7,000 people who marched on February 2 that they are also victims of CWP's
seeming genius at manipulation. And after
that we have a long list for you of organizations, individuals and petitioners who have
rallied, prayed, marched, picketed, contributed money, circulated petitions and continued to support efforts to have all charges
dropped against Nelson, Willena and Rand
and to force the full disclosures of Justice
It is people like Watson who help usher in
fascism. He formulates a neat, stereotyped
explanation for a tragedy of major national
significance. But the main thing he specializes in is the Hitler big lie technique. What is
the big lie here? That November 3 didn't
really happen! This is precisely why his article is being promoted. By massively using
the imagery of a "media event" and "scriptwriters," Watson is telling people not to believe what they saw — five people murdered
in cold blood in broad daylight. He is telling
them, those weren't real people who were
murdered, but faceless ideologues "who reduced their lives to cliches." This fascist lie
serves only the cover-up of government complicity in the murders and paves the way for
fascist measures such as the new FBI Charter, which allows agents to commit any
crime, including murder, with impunity in
the course of protecting their "undercover
positions."
Every day since November 3 has brought
new proof that the murders were planned
and executed by forces much higher than
small-time riffraff. There is the open sympathy of the District Attorney for the Klan and
Nazis and Governor Hunt's call for infiltration of the CWP, even as the Klan, which
welcomes government infiltrators as long as
they're whites, endorses him for re-election.
The District Attorney's refusal to file conspiracy charges against any Klan or Nazis is
a conscious omission which restricts the investigation in its scope, so that possible police or government complicity will not even
be considered. The refusal of the authorities
to make any additional arrests, even as
known Klan organizer Virgil Griffin runs
around the state bragging he organized November 3 and was in the caravan himself,
the dropping of charges against Raeford
Caudle, who owns the vehicle and some of
the guns involved in the actual shooting and
was in the caravan himself, and the Superior
Court judge's refusal to even hear my request for a private prosecutor in the Klan
cases, are part of an extensive cover-up.
Who were the CWP 5? From roots in the
anti-war and civil rights movements of the
60s, the development of each of these fine
fighters into communist revolutionaries was
a logical, painstaking, principled search foi
what was a better system and solution to th(
misery they saw around them. But to peopli
like Watson, the real life beauty of our be
loved Jiirr, Sandy, Cesar, Bill and Mike L
incomprehensible.
As I look around my empty kitchen, I cai
hear the echoes of countless evenings of hu
man traffic, talking, laughing, excitement
comradeship. When Jim was alive, my kitcr,
en resembled nothing so much as a clime
with a constant stream of friends, new an
old, with their children. Jim lovingly care
for every earache and temperature. H
patched and stiched every cut, patientl
counselled every new mother, treasured ei
ery newborn as his own, wrote every pre:
cription with meticulous care. I never kne
a more loving father and husband, a moi
devoted physician, a more dedicated revolt
tionary. I could never have wanted a fin<
husband. My grief is like a knife in my hear
and I know that knife lies in the hearts of i
the widows and all the countless comradi
and friends who knew, loved and respectf
our Jim, Bill, Cesar, Mike and Sandy.
To say that we don't grieve for these lov<
ones is testimony only to Watson's own shj
low, shameless pimping off their deaths. It
testimony to the fact that he, and those li!
him, will drown in their own cynicism ai
blindness, will forever live in the darkness
their own contempt for the human race ai
will always be used by those seeking
maintain their boothold on the necks of
awakening giant!