Greensboro Justice Fund

The 1979 Greensboro Massacre occurred against a background of recession in the textile industry, renewed labor organizing, the emergence of the Ku Klux Klan, and efforts on the part of the progressive community to respond. As the Klan paraded across the South through the spring and summer of 1979, civil rights activists marched to protest the Klan's racist violence. In Greensboro, a march and educational conference was planned for Saturday, November 3, 1979. They never occurred. Minutes before the march was to begin, with police withdrawn from the area, a caravan of Klan and Nazis drove into Greensboro's Morningside Homes and opened fire on the crowd, killing five and wounding eleven others. The campaign for justice in Greensboro, spanning six years (1979-1985), was an important battle in the fight to safeguard our constitutional rights to freedom of speech, freedom of association, and equal protection under the law.
...The tragedy of the November 3, 1979 Greensboro Massacre has given rise to the first Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in the United States. On June 12, 2004, after twenty-five years of persistent grassroots organizing, diverse Greensboro communities came together to install a seven-member Commission modeled after the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission.