Morningside by Aran Shetterly
Left and right have clashed on America’s streets long before 2020. In an especially bloody 1979 incident, long forgotten beyond Greensboro, NC, Nazi and Klan gunmen opened fire on a Communist Workers Party demonstration, killing five protestors and injuring others. The media called it a “shoot-out,” but although the CWP brought guns, they never had a chance to return fire. No one was held criminally responsible for the “Greenboro Massacre.”
Aran Shetterly researched his account though wading through contemporary reporting, revisiting the scene, and speaking with survivors. He’s alert to ironies. North Carolina Gov. Jim Hunt was in China at the time of the incident, negotiating a tobacco deal with Communist officials just as the self-styled Maoists of Greensboro were being ambushed under the blind eyes of local police. The CWP’s leaders were well-educated Northerners characteristic of left idealists, seeking a utopia where greed and need were abolished, but the party’s ranks included local mill workers who never finished high school. The CWP was multi-racial and multi-generational. As Shetterly puts it, “If capitalism didn’t soon collapse like the rickety house of cards they believed it to be, they’d agitate to dismantle it.”
While sympathetic to CWP’s general aim of steering America “toward a brighter shore” for all people, he is not unaware of their naivete, their comfort with the language of violence, their flyers boldly stating “Death to the Klan.” The CWP openly challenged those “racist coward” to confront them at their November 3, 1979, rally in Greensboro. And they brought their children to the march.
Stay on top of the news of the day
Subscribe to our free, daily e-newsletter to get Milwaukee's latest local news, restaurants, music, arts and entertainment and events delivered right to your inbox every weekday, plus a bonus Week in Review email on Saturdays.
Some of the most interesting trains of thought in Morningside arrived decades later as survivors wrestle with “truth and reconciliation.” CWP organizers Nelson Johnson and his wife Joyce abandoned Marxist materialism without rejecting his critique of capitalism, finding home instead in Christian liberation theology. Morningside is a stimulating, thought-provoking examination of American problems and their problematic solutions.
Get Morningside at Amazon here.
Paid link
