You Say You Want a Revolution
DeParle, Jason
You Say You Want a Revolution by Jason DeParle On a sweater-weather morning in November 1979, a group calling themselves the Communist Workers Party gathered in a Greensboro, North Carolina...
...That's why one test of any new political vision lies in its treatment of the unconverted—its ability to be both radical and relevant...
...But the spirits of the revolutionaries soared...
...the communists were courting trouble, he said...
...They saw the [noncommunist] leftists' refusal to work with them as proof . . . [that they] were morally bankrupt ." This immersion in the workers' struggle happened to coincide with a series of right-wing antics that fueled the communists' faith and fervor...
...When the Carolina Brown Lung Association, an occupational health group, convinced wary workers to take lung tests, one of the Vanguard physicians began haranguing them about the coming workers' state...
...Did the communists want to lose the trial...
...Pleased with their media success, the ragtag band of racists scheduled a Klan exhibit at a county library and held a showing of Birth of a Nation...
...After a social suicide, the relevance of these activists had died long before the Klan showed up...
...Still, the double injustice of murder and acquittal isn't the only tragedy of this tale...
...They enlisted the help of a state health department official...
...In most murder trials, that works to the prosecutors' advantage...
...Organized into the new Communist Workers Party, they scheduled the Death to the Klan rally in Greensboro and dared the humiliated Klansmen to fight...
...I will never remain silent while the bourgeoisie brings fascism and world war on the heads of the American people," shouted widow Marty Nathan before bailiffs taped her mouth and dragged her from the courtroom...
...Codename GREENKIL The 1979 Greensboro Killings...
...But not in this case, when the victims were communists...
...The path of politics and medicine as they first chose it didn't promise a world transformed, but it did promise one improved...
...In their happily alienated world, every setback offered further proof of the world's injustice and the Vanguard's patent on political correctness...
...There's a temptation for anyone with a compelling vision of the world's injustice to dismiss those who have yet to embrace it...
...The second tragedy In North Carolina, where I was a Duke stu dent at the time, many shrugged off the injustice of both the killings and the acquittals...
...The murders took place in midday, before dozens of witnesses, and on film...
...When I proposed an article about it to a liberal magazine a few years later, an editor told me not to bother...
...Still, conviction seemed assured...
...The jury bought it...
...Make revolution, they decided...
...In Illinois, Frank Collins's Nazis were preparing their march on Skokie...
...Bill Sampson had Harvard Divinity School and the Sorbonne behind him...
...The failure to explain why these activists did is the one significant omission of Wheaton's account...
...A crowning irony, as Wheaton points out, lies in the revolutionaries' inability to see the Klansmen as part of the same downtrodden working class whose struggle they claimed to be leading...
...Rather than take that path, they chose to stand in the street and call Klansmen names...
...Outnumbered, the humiliated Klansmen retreated into the community center as the crowd chanted, "The only solution is socialist revolution ." In the weeks that followed, the Klansmen seethed and the communists grew bolder...
...And so they were...
...happily, a trend that seeks to address the concerns of crime victims is gaining sway...
...Nathan spent much of his undergraduate career living in a rundown Durham neighborhood where he helped residents demand improved housing...
...Wanted by the law, Covington later fled to South Africa and disappeared...
...We had it all worked out with the cops . . ." he wrote...
...As local newsmen watched, they unloaded their placards and readied their sound truck...
...The second, more interesting and perhaps more instructive, is the tale of political dissolution among the Vanguard...
...Since the law forbids death penalty opponents from sitting on such juries, prosecutors had to face a more conservative panel...
...They began singing "We Shall Not Be Moved," we're told, combining the spiritual with a good pummeling of the Klan straw man: " 'Just like a tree' —whap— 'standing by the wa-ter' —blam— 'we shall...
...Though their class backgrounds and worldly experiences differed, they and a few others shared a zeal for social action that put them in sharp contrast to most of their classmates...
...He and a number of other student activists lent their support to a 1968 drive to unionize the university's service workers, most of whom were black...
...The events of that morning left five dead, none convicted, and many confused...
...Wheaton finds just the right image for the outrage: five dead and their killers free without so much as a fine for littering...
...Long live the working class...
...Others in this prerevolutionary band did similar work...
...It turned out that law enforcement officials had infiltrated both the Klan and the Nazis and had plenty of warning of the impending violence...
...Yet they did little to stop it...
...Bermanzohn devoted himself to the cause of neighborhood health clinics...
...When the world, like a difficult mistress, refused their advances, they scorned it in return...
...But lots of activists become disillusioned, and few seek the destruction of the state...
...Beating the rap The murder of five people in the streets on a sunny Greensboro morning was shocking enough, but the acquittals that followed were unfathomable...
...They gazed on quizzically, a few kids in football uniforms standing by their moms, a drunk man in a fake leather jacket...
...It was the bicentennial .") Sally Bermanzohn, Paul's wife, explains that "I kept fighting for those values of what's right for the people and coming up against brick walls . . .." It's a statement that casts little light...
...Senate...
...At a textile mill, the factional rivalries led to a bloody melee between competing organizers, to the management's delight...
...Elizabeth Wheaton, who covered the trials for the North Carolina Independent, offers a detailed account of the Greensboro killings...
...The communists responded with cries of conspiracy, and the revelations that followed made their theory seem plausible...
...Then came word that Covington, the Nazi leader, had sent the communists a letter six weeks before the shooting, boasting that the police had approved their murder...
...It had to be done," explained one fellow revolutionary widow...
...They were talented physicians, with boundless energy and a rare gift for recognizing the world's uncounted people...
...As a group, they had at least two things in common: a deepening sense of life's unfairness and a growing frustration with their inability to change it...
...She left behind a vial of foul-smelling oil...
...Others stayed in medicine and agitated from outside the plant...
...Bermanzohn felt the betrayal deeply...
...What's stunning is the speed with which this group swapped its idealism for cynicism and hatred...
...They passed out leaflets and dragged out a Klansman in effigy...
...The union lost the drive...
...One of the jurors had fought against Castro at the Bay of Pigs...
...Never mind that their factional infighting caused them to lose a union election...
...Piecing it all together, the Vanguard concluded that the nation was lurching towards fascism A month later, the concerned revolutionaries found inspiration in Alabama, where anti-Klan forces had organized "armed self-defense patrols...
...This sent the proletariat fleeing...
...Though they spoke with disdain of their fasttrack classmates who sought six-digit salaries and a convenient tee-off time, they bore a paradoxical similarity: the revolutionaries wanted it all and right away...
...You Say You Want a Revolution by Jason DeParle On a sweater-weather morning in November 1979, a group calling themselves the Communist Workers Party gathered in a Greensboro, North Carolina housing project for a "Death to the Klan" rally...
...Nixon was president, Kissinger was dropping bombs on Cambodia, and a local media crank named Jesse Helms had just been elevated to the U.S...
...the prosecutor asked...
...That attitude wasn't confined to the Piedmont...
...Wheaton doesn't speculate, and the answer isn't clear...
...Nothing seemed to work...
...When officials proposed building a new Durham County General Hospital on the outskirts of town, he and other health activists charged it was being located there to benefit realtors, developers, and doctors but not the poor people who needed it most...
...Mike Nathan, the son of a struggling widow in Washington, D.C., had been at Duke since his undergraduate years, scraping by on work-study wages and scholarships...
...But it resulted instead in political undertakings of dismally minor significance...
...Death to the Klan," the demonstrators began to chant as they caught sight of an eight-car caravan of Klansmen and Nazis...
...The Leninist lesson was clear: strike again...
...During the confusing clash that followed, one Klansman stood at his car trunk, nonchalantly handing out weapons while a cigarette dangled from his lip...
...Their protest was dispersed...
...The Vanguard became pariahs to much of the noncommunist left but "refused to see their political isolation for what it was," Wheaton writes...
...The prosecutors' job didn't get any easier when the communist survivors refused to testify, denouncing the proceedings as a capitalist coverup...
...Elizabeth Wheaton...
...And beyond Durham, things didn't look much better...
...It was Duke University Medical School, of all places, that brought most of these future revolutionaries together...
...charges of civil rights violations...
...The children of the Revolutionary Youth League positioned themselves at the front of the gathering march, joined by the neighborhood kids in football jerseys...
...Impressed, Collins came to North Carolina and recruited Covington's help in the Skokie march, propelling them both into the national news...
...That journey is one that speaks to the ancient tensions between radicals and reformers and carries lessons for activists of many stripes...
...But almost all will find themselves thwarted by a world they know to be unjust and tempted to succumb to bitterness and suspicion...
...The metamorphosis from reformer to revolutionary promised a grander stage—the transformation of the whole world instead of one sad corner...
...The North Carolina communists planned their own show of force, staging an armed "Smash the Klan" rally outside a community hail where the clan was attempting another showing of Birth of a Nation...
...Knight turned them down, and police dispersed the crowd...
...The Klan hit the headlines too...
...Revelations of ties between the Klan and the Greensboro police caused even the skeptics of conspiracy theories to wonder if the communists were right in calling themseleves the victims of a government set up...
...Unharmed and unhurried, the Klansmen piled their shotguns, pistols, numchucks, knives, and brass knuckles back in their Jason DeParle is an editor of The Washington Monthly...
...Bending over the body of her slain comrade husband, Signe Waller raised a clenched fist...
...What was to be done...
...For most of them, union organizing was the answer...
...Everyone was talking revolution," Wheaton writes...
...Some, like Sampson, left medicine to work in North Carolina textile mills...
...Niggers and Communist party, you could hardly tell who was niggers and who was Communist," said David Matthews, a Klan member...
...We thought he was there to help us," Bermanzohn said, ". .. he screwed us, just didn't do any of the things he said he was going to...
...The parade permit said noon...
...Signe Waller, who reiterated her devotion to the working class even as her husband was dying in her arms, carried on the struggle a year later by sneaking into the Democratic Convention and setting off firecrackers during Jimmy Carter's acceptance speech...
...Eighty-eight seconds and 39 shots later, the neighborhood lawns were littered with dead and wounded protestors...
...A few of the demonstrators pulled pistols from their pockets and returned the fire...
...Most intriguing is the bizarre personal and political odysseys of the victims, from liberal idealists to raging Leninists convinced they were on the verge of tearing down the capitalist state...
...What was to be done...
...They portrayed their clients, Wheaton says, as "goodoleboys, who had been provoked beyond endurance and then attacked by gun-wielding communists" afraid to testify...
...In the crusade I know best and support whole-heartedly, that to abolish the death penalty, I've seen this fever take hold of frustrated leaders who begin viewing every cop, prosecutor, and prison guard as an intractable and dishonorable foe...
...But there are lessons here for most social activists...
...Fuck you," the federal agent replied...
...Scratch the surface of any Republican and you'll find a Nazi underneath," he later explained...
...When the shooting began at 11:23, most of the cops assigned to cover the protest were miles away still eating lunch...
...The leap from Gray's Anatomy to Mao's Red Book plunged the converts into a world of fervent polemics and the quest for the correct line of revolutionary action...
...But Wheaton's reporting ultimately reveals the police not as complicit schemers but as pitiful bunglers who couldn't even keep track of the rally's starting time...
...During a 1976 union drive at Duke, Wheaton reports, "Warring Communist groups began to leaflet Duke workers with single-spaced legal-sized diatribes criticizing each other's political line...
...But two juries acquitted the killers, first on state murder charges and later on federal...
...In early 1979, a dozen or so North Carolina Klansmen donned their mildewed robes and lit a few crosses, drawing more reporters than white hegemonists but getting the publicity they sought...
...This was not an assemblage of great interest to the housing project residents...
...All grew increasingly difficult for the noncommunist left to deal with...
...That's a test the CWP failed...
...The prosecutors even had virtual confessions from some of the captured Klansmen...
...Few are likely to wind up shouting Leninist slogans at Klansmen...
...The hospital was built...
...Never mind that their revolutionary diatribes sent sick workers fleeing the clinics...
...Television cameras captured the casual slaughter, and millions watched it replayed on national news...
...But we shouldn't need reminders that the espousal of communist doctrine, however unappealing, doesn't merit deathbyposse in the Greensboro streets...
...That zeal took different forms...
...Another wrested a two-by-two from a protestor and split open her skull...
...The drive had its militant moment when several hundred students surrounded the administration building and sent a delegation to the home of Douglas Knight, the Duke president, confronting him with their demands...
...But the most interesting element of this story concerns neither cops nor killers nor the terrible injustice rendered...
...But defense attorneys could hardly have asked for more...
...Then the real thing arrived...
...The police provided the specifics of the permit, including the march's route, to a Klansman named Eddie Dawson, who was doubling as a Greensboro police informant...
...Like most of their classmates, they arrived with fistfuls of academic honors...
...But the intellectual and emotional mechanics of this conversion from reformers to Vanguard are never adequately explained, either by the revolutionaries or by Wheaton...
...We'd waste a couple of you and none of them would see anything ." There were other suspicious details...
...June 1976...
...cars and drove off...
...Thus stood the movement for the workers' state on the morning of November 3 when the caravan of Klansmen and Nazis arrived...
...Then there was this edifying exchange in an interrogation room, between prosecutors investigating the case and an agent of the Federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms who had infiltrated the Nazis: "Who the fuck are you...
...It's tempting to write off this political declension as the uninstructive acts of a few crazies...
...This political pathology led them to abandon the fights that mattered...
...These activists who initially took aim at Durham County General began setting their sights higher, training them on the entire capitalist state...
...She was disillusioned...
...Ironically, they got another when prosecutors pursued the death penalty...
...Closer to home, a loudmouthed 23-year-old Nazi named Harold Covington popped into the papers in 1977 with runs for the Raleigh city council and the state senate...
...Though she finds no evidence of conspiracy, she finds plenty of other disturbing things, like old-fashioned incompetence among the police...
...He made the latter bid during a Republican Party primary...
...Shoot the niggers," yelled back a baby-faced gunman as he and the others opened fire on the interracial crowd...
...Paul Bermanzohn, the son of Holocaust survivors, had been student body president at City College of New York...
...The union was defeated...
...Long live the Communist Worker Party," she screamed...
...I got three of them ." Wheaton does an impressive job of tracking the complicated legal details of the case and explaining the mechanics of the acquittal...
...Notices posted in the housing project said 11:00...
...The Klansmen got one break when the court assigned them top-notch (and liberal) attorneys who fashioned an argument around self-defense...
...University of Georgia Press, $24.95...
Vol. 20 • February 1988 • No. 1
