The Greensboro Massacre: A Song Cycle
I turn left and park the car where the pavement meets temporary pasture. One lone oak tree provides shade on this bright April afternoon. The green grass, rich in color from the springtime warmth, is interrupted here and there by mounds of dirt, the only sign suggesting the recent presence of bulldozers. Otherwise, the large field is sparse and open, with the exception of a few scattered trees. The open space is bounded on three sides by east Greensboro neighborhoods and, on the fourth, by Morningside Cemetery.
The emptiness of the space belies the teeming presence there, the ghostly shapes of buildings recently razed to make way for a new housing project. The old one—Morningside Homes—had fallen into disrepair. Undoubtedly, new well-built houses will be welcome—a much-needed upgrade. But stories have been circulating about how people were evicted from their homes, disheveled as they may have been, without any guarantee that they would be able to call the soon-to-be-built Hope VI houses their own. For a piece of land so recently full of buildings and streets and people who made it their home, the large field before me is eerily quiet.
I am here to prepare myself emotionally and spiritually for a performance. Tonight I will present my undergraduate senior thesis to the Guilford College community, a thesis that I have worked on for nearly half my undergraduate tenure, for which I have written a collection of songs to tell the story of the Greensboro Massacre and its aftermath. Tonight I will sing these songs in public for the first time. I am trying to make sense of the artistic, intellectual, political, emotional, and communal journey that I have been on for the past year and a half, a journey that has made November 3, 1979 arguably more important to me than any other date. I am here to gather strength and inspiration, to commune with the ghosts that linger in this place.
I have watched countless hours of film footage and poured over hundreds of pictures of the very place where I now stand. This is the ground where members of the Ku Klux Klan and Neo-Nazi party gunned down labor organizers Cesar Cauce, Michael Nathan, Bill Sampson, Sandy Smith, and Jim Waller on November 3, 1979. But in spite of this meticulous research, I hardly recognize the space. The landscape constructed in my head from fragmentary documentary images is almost entirely different from the one before me. Without the physical structures of Morningside Homes—the public housing complex featured so prominently in the background of the film footage from November 3—I am disoriented, unclear where to face or direct my attention.
Fortunately, the enormous oak tree remains, like a Rosetta stone, making the strange, flattened landscape legible: Michael fell somewhere around here, in the middle of the street; Jim was shot in the back over there under the tree; Cesar went down in the grass by the street corner; Bill was on the grass on the other side of the street; and Sandy, well, I never could place Sandy because she was never shown in the footage. I think she would have been somewhere over there where the new community center now stands. However, these are all approximations. The only things that provide a sense of continuity between the physical present and my imagination of the past are the oak tree and the corner of Everitt and Bingham Streets. But “Bingham” is a new name for what used to be Carver Street. The corner of Everitt and Carver Streets was where it happened. The new name feels like a deliberate if partial effacement of one of the only remaining markers of the place.
At the performance I do my best to make that plot of earth sound. Borrowing the tune of Woody Guthrie’s song “1913 Massacre,” I try to sing as much detail as possible, narrating the events as they unfolded on that day: “On this Saturday morning, folks gather around / In Morningside Homes, on the east side of town / For a conference and a march to oppose the Klan / That the Communist Worker’s Party has planned.” Singing the cycle of songs to a crowd of people feels as close to giving birth as I will ever come. Survivors of November 3 are in the room. I sing the stories that they told me. I also sing the stories that jumped out at me from newspaper clippings, like the one of the Klansmen saying that the shootings and the subsequent trials had brought him closer together with his wife. And I sing about my own place in the story, about the choice before me and others like me of whether to engage with the history of this tragedy: “I am a child who wasn’t even born / This had nothing to do with me / I’m forgetting, I am free / And I’m riding east away into the morning.”