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To Signe Waller, the morning of November 3, 1979, initially felt like any other. If anything, she felt excited.
She had a dinner date planned that night with her husband, Jim. First they’d attend a protest together, a “Death to the Klan” rally kicking off a march and conference in Greensboro, North Carolina, the city where they lived. The couple were active members of the Workers Viewpoint Organization, a multi-racial labor group that planned to rename itself as the “Communist Workers’ Party” at the conference that day.
Signe had agreed to sell copies of their organization’s communist newspaper at the rally and talk to any reporters who showed up. She had two kids, and her young son was with her as the rally began. There’s news footage of her smiling, and she remembers talking to Jim as people prepared a sound truck for the upcoming anti-KKK march.
“I didn’t suspect anything untoward would happen,” she tells Teen Vogue.
What happened next was partially caught on film by TV news crews. A caravan of cars filled with white supremacists drove directly by the rally, which was held in the then majority black community of Morningside Homes. With zero visible police presence, anti-racist activists beat on the passing cars, and before long, white supremacists got out and began shooting at protestors. A few people returned fire, and in the end, five anti-Klan protesters were killed and at least 10 more were injured, including one Klansman. Years later, the public would learn that police had intentionally been missing, despite knowing about the potential for violence that day.
Signe never expected the police not to show up, she says. As soon as the shooting began, Signe said she fled with her son toward shelter in a nearby home.
“I felt like I had been running forever,” she says. “I just hoped he could run faster.”
From her hiding place, Signe imagined that the caravan of Klan and American Nazi Party members had simply shot their guns into the air. But when she eventually emerged, Signe said it “looked like a battlefield.” Her husband, Jim Waller, was among the five killed that day.
Jim was unarmed. So were three other anti-Klan protesters — Michael Nathan, César Cauce, and Sandra Smith. William Sampson, who helped organize local textile mills like many others in the area, was shooting back at white supremacists when he was fatally shot.
The incident that became known as the Greensboro Massacre deeply affected the working-class city in central North Carolina where it happened. Had the Iran hostage crisis — where Iranian students took over the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and held 60 hostages for more than a year — not begun the next day, the Greensboro Massacre likely would’ve captured national headlines for longer and become more widely understood.
Decades later, in June 2004, an independent commission began to dig into what happened that morning. The Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission sought to give people a more complete understanding of what occurred on that day in 1979 and to aid in the healing process for everyone affected by the attack.
Muktha Jost estimates that she poured thousands of hours into the commission. Her family moved to Greensboro from Iowa in 1999, and she was working as an assistant professor at North Carolina A&T State University, a historically black public school in Greensboro. When someone asked her to be one of the commissioners on the Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission, she saw it as an opportunity to feel like part of the city.
“I’ve always been the immigrant who just wanted to be here, even though I have roots in India,” Jost tells Teen Vogue. “I wanted to be part of the community, with all its ups and downs and brights and darks.”
Starting in 2004, Jost and the other independent commissioners listened to testimony in public hearings and private meetings from about 200 people who had been involved in the attack. Former Klansmen and Nazis participated, as did neighborhood residents, survivors, and police. Some expressed remorse for their roles and others remained unmoved. After two years and countless hours combing through documents and evidence — much of it from two criminal trials that hadn’t resulted in any convictions for the white supremacists, despite TV footage of the shootings — Jost and the other commissioners presented their findings on May 25, 2006.
Their report, which is hundreds of pages long and publicly available, is the most complete account of the Greensboro Massacre and what led up to it. The report blames Klansmen and Nazis for arriving with intent to provoke violence and for meting out most of it. And while the anti-racists and communists bear some responsibility, especially for inflaming the Klan with violent rhetoric, the report places most of the blame for the deaths that day on the police.
“The majority of commissioners find the single most important element that contributed to the violent outcome of the confrontation was the absence of police,” the commissioners wrote.
Police knew of the planned violence thanks to Eddie Dawson, a Klansman and paid police informant. The report says that Greensboro police “repeatedly direct[ed] officers away from the designated parade starting point, even after it was known that the caravan was heading there,” and also failed to stop the fleeing Klansmen and Nazis despite knowing that shooting had taken place.
Though no white supremacists were found guilty in the criminal trials, a later civil trial did find members of the Greensboro Police Department “jointly liable with white supremacists for the wrongful death of one victim,” as the report explains.
Today, for locals who know about it, the Greensboro Massacre is a polarizing issue. Many residents still see it as a “shootout” between two groups of unwanted outsiders, attempting to distance themselves and their city from what happened. Despite the commission’s detailed findings, there’s still no shared understanding of what happened.
Signe moved out of state after the massacre, but she returned shortly before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission formed. She’s since remarried, taking the name Signe Waller-Foxworth, and wrote a memoir titled Love and Revolution, which focuses on the massacre and its aftermath. She’s still a leading figure in local social justice struggles. In May 2015, Signe was one of the activists who helped unveil an official state historical marker commemorating the Greensboro Massacre. Currently, she’s part of a group working to create a school curriculum about what happened, making sure that this ever-relevant chapter of history isn’t forgotten.
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