This is an addendum to my letter to Impact Greensboro participants, which is posted above.
In his book Civilities and Civil Rights, William Chafe provides an analysis of the events of May 1969 that provides a context for the events of November 1979. Here are excerpts from Chafe's book.
"The issue that transformed Greensboro into an armed camp was both stark in its simplicity and devastating in its ability to crystallize racial tensions. Claude Barnes was a junior at Dudley High School. He had been President of his class, vice president of the school service club, an honor student, and a member of the student council. Barnes had also participated in a student group organized by GAPP (Greensboro Association of Poor People) around the theme of black unity. In April, a joint faculty-student election committee ruled that Barnes lacked the qualifications to be a candidate for student council president. The committee gave no reasons. When the election was held on May 2, Barnes received six hundred write-in votes - four hundred more than the runner-up. But since the write-in ballots were "illegal," the runner-up was declared the victor. That day Barnes and four other students walked out of the school in protest. The episode set in motion a series of events that three weeks later led to more than six hundred National Guard troops occupying black Greensboro...
In a larger sense... the issue was Barnes's association with Nelson Johnson and GAPP. Culture and politics were thus connected. When Barnes and his allies received no recognition from the Dudley administration, they sought advice from their friends at A&T. Johnson, in turn, offered full support, never denying that the school constituted a crucial component of his plans for a community / campus alliance. 'As soul brothers,' he later said, 'we were very active with Dudley students.' GAPP circulated literature at Dudley and invited high school students to meetings held at A&T. As a result, both black and white educators saw Barnes as a Johnson puppet, refusing to acknowledge that he might have a legitimate grievance in his own right. Because of this attitude, they also viewed actions by Johnson as part of a plot to foment rebellion.
Events came to a head on May 21st... Police riot squads fired tear gas to disperse the crowd (at Dudley High School)... protesters moved toward A&T, college students and community people became involved, and further rock- and bottle-throwing occurred... At approximately ten o'clock, Mayor Elam requested National Guard support from the governor... at 1:30 a.m., Willie Grimes, a student at A&T was shot in the head and killed... Who fired the fatal bullet has never been discovered... The autopsy showed the bullet to be less than .32 caliber. Although police repeatedly denied using ammunition of that type, news reporters subsequently revealed that officers had used both .30 caliber rifle ammunition and buckshot measuring about .30 caliber. The fatal wound could have come from either weapon...
That evening the crisis built to another climax... at one a.m. a police car was attacked and four officers were wounded, one seriously. Immediately, police concluded that the plans for ambush so long rumored in intelligence reports were now being put into action. In retrospect, that judgement seems problematic... city and state officials decided to clear the campus, using the National Guard to sweep through A&T's dormitories beginning at 6:30 a.m. (A&T President) Lewis Dowdy was not part of the meeting... nor was any black person present at any of the discussions leading up to the decision... Swiftly, the Guard moved through the buildings... Guardsmen, out of fear or anger, shot the locks off more than eighty doors before rushing the rooms. Confusion reigned because Dowdy had warned students to remain in their dormitories for purposes of safety... That afternoon hundreds of students moved silently toward the bus and train terminals seeking ways of leaving the city. They were orderly... many expressed concern about what would happen to their grades if they were unable to take final examinations.
Endorsing the official point of view, the Greensboro Daily News editorialized:
'high school students of unripened years and judgement could not embark on such a quasi-revolutionary behavior without sophisticated inducement... What has confronted Greensboro police and school officials... is not a mere protest over a student election that miscarried, but a form of - let us say it - guerilla warfare, characterized by manipulation of the silent or terrorized majority.'
Official commitment to the conspiracy theory only deepened... culminating when (Greensboro) Chief of Police Paul Calhoun told a Senate Investigating Committee in July that the entire episode had been a plot of the Black Panther Party... Calhoun charged (that) the Panthers had held training sessions at the home of Nelson Johnson... Calhoun denounced Johnson as 'one of the most militant Negroes in Greensboro for the past two or three years,' describing him as the chief architect of the... disturbances.
Johnson demanded an inquiry by the US Civil Rights Commission, and, specifically, an investigation of his own involvement and that of other non-Dudley students... the NC Advisory Committee to the US Civil Rights Commission held hearings in the fall of 1969... Looking first at Dudley High School, the committee concluded that 'the prevailing system was unjust,' that dissent had been suppressed, and that the exclusion of Claude Barnes from the student election was in fact the basic reason for the protests. When school officials adamantly refused to discuss these issues with parents or community leaders, the committee declared, 'the students were left to create situations that would force the officials to take notice... It is a sad commentary that the only group in the community who would take the Dudley students seriously were the students at A&T University.'
Moving on to A&T, the committee severely criticized both city and National Guard officials. Given the paucity of weapons found and the absence of any disturbance at the time of the sweep, the committee concluded that there was no justification for dropping tear gas from the air or forcibly destroying locks and doors. Indeed, such actions emphasized the 'lawlessness and the disorder with which this operation was executed.' In light of the abundance of racial discrimination that it found in Greensboro, the committee questioned the accuracy of blaming Nelson Johnson and other 'outside agitators' for the disruption. Instead, the committee was impressed with how consistently state, local and school officials had acted to corroborate the charge that 'the system' paid no attention to black problems in Greensboro.
This insistence on finding a violent conspiracy... caused white leaders to ignore legitimate grievances and to overlook important distinctions within the black movement... Nelson Johnson and his co-workers rejected Panther rhetoric and methods of organization. They sought to build a coalition around issues such as housing and to develop a sense of political efficacy both on campus and in the ghetto... the evidence suggests that Nelson Johnson and his associates were more committed to building the community than destroying it for the sake of armed revolution.
More than a decade later, an air of mystery and uncertainty still surrounds the tragedy at Dudley and A&T in the spring of 1969. No one is sure who killed Willie Grimes; nor is anyone certain who wounded the police... it is... important to venture some generalizations about the Dudley and A&T tragedy. First, there is no way to escape the contradictions that run through the public police record - more contradictions than a reasonable person can accept as natural or incidental... Second, a significant double standard - based upon race - appears to have characterized police and newspaper treatment of the disruptions... Third, in all of this, police, National Guard, and local officials overreacted... Fourth, the overreaction of authorities was rooted in a state of near-paranoia that swept state and local officials. In part, that hysteria reflected national events...
But the near-paranoia was also a response to local circumstances. Never before had white political and economic leaders faced such a profound threat. The challenge consisted not of weapons, but of an approach to power that questioned the very ground rules by which city leaders functioned and remained in control. By organizing poor people, public housing tenants, cafeteria workers, and high school students to reject the definition of their proper 'place' handed down by white authorities, Nelson Johnson and his associates were undercutting the very foundation of white power. No longer would blacks defer; no longer would they allow someone else to set the agenda or determine the scope of possible compromise. In effect, Johnson was asking blacks to create their own base of power and solidarity, to shape their own political program, and to do so independently of whites thought. If blacks created their own ground rules, they would cease to be vulnerable to white attempts to divide and conquer them through traditional white rules. In this sense, the new black insurgents were rejecting the heart of North Carolina's progressive mystique... they were striking at the very base of white control - the power to define what is real and unreal, permissible and impermissible.
Neither Greensboro's white leaders, nor those in the nation at large, proved able to deal with this political and cultural challenge on its own terms. The issues of self-definition, self-determination, and autonomy were too large, or perhaps too threatening. Instead, white leaders perceived a conspiracy - violent in nature - to commit illegal acts, to overthrow the government, to kill and maim white people. By defining the challenge in such a manner, it became easier to avoid confronting the underlying questions and yet to feel comfortable with a response to black insurgents of total rejection and hostility...
The result was irrational use of force in 1969. Despite evidence to the contrary, city officials disregarded the existence of divisions among the student protestors. It was as if they needed to see a conspiracy in order to justify their own instinct to strike out and destroy the enemy. Once Nelson Johnson and his allies had shown their contempt for the progressive mystique, they had moved beyond the pale. Thereafter, white leaders seized any evidence of radicalism to create a picture of black insurgency that would warrant all-out retaliation...
When the Greensboro Daily News denounced black protesters for engaging in 'guerilla warfare,' it was in a very real sense explaining why the use of any degree of force, however awesome, could be justified in response. In this context, the violence of 1969 can be seen as a ritual acting out of the need to destroy an enemy who challenged one's most dearly held values, even if the exact nature of the challenge or the reasons for the reaction were never fully articulated in a conscious manner... Moreover, since the enemy refused to play according to the rules of the progressive mystique, there was no need to worry about the harshness of one's response... Now the rules had changed, both among the protestors and among the city's leaders. Repression had become a legitimate way of saying 'never.'"
