Greensboro’s Child

Lewis Pitts explains how the prosecuting attorney selected jurors for the State Trial for the November 3rd, 1979 shootings:

From the News & Record article, Blame for shooting shared, report says:

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The all-white jury in the state criminal trial was caused by a “problematic jury selection process.” Before 1986, defense attorneys and prosecutors could strike a potential juror from the pool based on race.

On Thursday night, former District Attorney Mike Schlosser, who tried the state criminal cases, said he agreed with those findings. Defense attorneys dismissed black jurors, which he said hampered his efforts to convict the Klansmen.

“It would have been much more fair to have a jury that represented the community,” he said.

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Much was made over the years about the jury have zero African-American representation, but no one seemed to care about the prosecuting attorney’s public attitude towards communism and his proclivity to allow obvious anti-Communist citizens to sit on the jury.

These actions are more damning than not having a jury representing a mix of races, as they were prosecuting Klan and Nazi members for killing Communist Worker Party members.

On the flip side of the coin, the Klan members had court appointed attorneys representing them, who just so happened to be the top defense attorneys in Greensboro at that time.

Willena Cannon has experienced life to the extreme. She has helped poor people and the homeless throughout her life. When she said this short statement it went way over my head and I thought it was a little ridiculous.

I was 23 years-old at the time I shot this clip. As I’ve experienced life over the past nine years, I can now begin to understand why she would say something along those lines.

What do you think?

After the defendants in the shootings were twice acquitted in state and federal trials, a civil trial found that Klansmen, Nazis and members of the Greensboro Police Department were jointly liable for the wrongful death of one of the five CWP members killed.

Instead of appealing the decision, the city of Greensboro decided to to pick up the civil trial award tab — $395,000 — for all of the defendants.

Jim Melvin, Mayor of Greensboro from 1971 to 1981, provides context behind the decision:

We killed ‘em off overseas, and we did it again over here…

Duke University News And Communications
Duke Law Professor Looks Back on Greensboro Massacre

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“I still strongly feel that the Greensboro Police Department was just willing to let these two groups that they perceived as being on the radical fringes, at each end, fight it out and let the chips fall where they may,” says Carolyn McAllaster. “That just offends me as a civil libertarian that that happened then and that can still happen today — that someone can be penalized for their views or not be given the protections they are entitled to under our constitution.”

The Klan and Nazi members charged in the killings were acquitted of murder charges, but in 1985 a jury in a federal civil trial found them, as well as members of the Greensboro Police Department, jointly liable in one of the deaths. McAllaster, who acted as local counsel for the families of the victims in the civil suit, recalls that anti-Communist sentiments far outweighed anti-Klan feelings among prospective jurors.

“I remember juror after juror saying their attitudes against Communists were ’We fought against Communists in World War II’ and ’We fought to keep this country free from Communists’ — or words to that effect. There was a real link in their minds to the battle in World War II and anti-Communism.”

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