Aran Shetterly is the author of the new book Morningside: The 1979 Greensboro Massacre and the Struggle for an American City's Soul. He also has written the book The Americano. He lives in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Q: What inspired you to focus on the 1979 Greensboro Massacre in your new book?
A: In 2015, my wife and I joined my father, Robert Shetterly, in Greensboro for an exhibit of his portraits at the International Civil Rights Center and Museum.
The series of paintings of Americans who, throughout our history, have spoken truth to power is called Americans Who Tell the Truth and are used to start conversations about citizenship and history in schools, universities, and communities all around the country.
The organizer of his event said there was a couple we needed to meet while we were in town. And at a little Salvadoran cafe at the edge of Greensboro’s downtown, we spent two hours with Reverend Nelson Johnson and his wife Joyce.
I left that conversation with “the Nelsons” (as people affectionately refer to the couple) with the hair standing up on the back of my neck.
I couldn’t believe that I’d never heard about how when they and their activist comrades were struggling to build interracial unions in Greensboro’s vast textile mills and called for a march against the Klan’s racism, a caravan of Ku Klux Klansmen and neo-Nazis drove to the start of that march and began shooting, killing five labor organizers and injuring another 10.
How when Nelson and Joyce and other survivors of the shooting said they suspected law enforcement to have been involved somehow in the shooting, they were ostracized in Greensboro, fired from their jobs, and blamed for the deaths of their friends. How our justice system held no one criminally responsible for the shooting.
But how then a federal civil trial, over which the famously fair, Richmond-based Judge Robert Merhige presided, did find Klansmen, Nazis, and Greensboro police officers jointly liable for wrongful death. As far as I can tell, no such combination of co-defendants had ever been found jointly responsible for death in our country’s history.
But what really gave me goosebumps as I walked away from that conversation was that despite all the trauma they’ve experienced, the Johnsons could continue to fight for the rights of the poorest and most marginalized among us, radiating a positive, hopeful, and loving spirit out into the world.
This was before the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, before Trump said there were “fine people on both sides.” I had a feeling that immersing myself in this subject would reveal something much bigger than Greensboro, that it would teach me about who we are as Americans. And it has.
Q: How did you research the book, and what did you learn that especially surprised you?
A: This was not an easy project to research. The FBI investigation into the November 3, 1979, shooting was, at the time, the third biggest in Bureau history. Then there were three trials, a state murder trial, a federal civil rights trial, and a federal civil trial.
And then from 2004-2006 a truth and reconciliation commission (TRC) looked at the shooting and created yet another set of archives.
So the first challenge was the sheer volume of primary source material, from the archives at the Wilson Library at UNC-Chapel Hill, to the TRC archive at Bennett College, to the vast Digital Archive at the University of North Carolina-Greensboro, and several private archives.
Then a sudden Freedom of Information Act response from the FBI, late in the project, provided me with 20,000 pages of Bureau documents. I had to be smart about what characters I would focus on in the story so that I could figure out how to approach the hundreds of thousands of pages of records pertaining to this history. And that doesn’t even include all the newspaper coverage!
In addition to the documents, so many people connected to this history are still alive and continue to be passionate about their point of view on what happened that tragic day and what it means.
I didn’t want to dismiss anyone’s energy, but to listen, try to understand, and try to figure out what it meant when, for example, someone is shouting at me on the phone about why my book was a gigantic waste of time. It took me time to orient myself before that energy and be able to process it into the book.
Yet another challenge was the resilience of the Blue Wall of Silence. There were a few cracks in the facade, but it was impressive how, after all these years, so many police still echo a misleading narrative that covers up their failure to protect the marchers that day. And they aren’t the only ones who repeat myths and lies about the facts of the case.
What I learned, and what was most surprising to me, is that after nearly half a century, the narratives about November 3, 1979 still have social and political power in Greensboro. People still feel that they have to echo certain myths and falsehoods to be accepted in certain powerful city circles.
Q: Attorney and author Michelle Coles said of the book, “Aran Shetterly’s incredible book offers a harrowing reminder of how our justice system too often turns a blind eye to the perpetrators of racial violence while denying their victims blind justice.” What do you think of that assessment?
A: I think it’s true. But I would go even further. It’s very interesting how so often we not only deny victims justice, but ask them to apologize and forgive first. The victims of the Greensboro shooting have been much more reflective and have admitted their mistakes much more than any of the city officials connected to the shooting that day.
When the truth and reconciliation process started in Greensboro, many people wanted to skip the “truth” part and get right to “reconciliation.” But what are you reconciling if you can’t sit with the truth, or even multiple truths first?
We are still learning how to recover from traumas like this, from political violence like this, and we haven’t figured it out yet, in part because there’s so much resistance to even discussing this complex history.
Q: What do you see as the legacy today of the Greensboro Massacre?
A: Things changed in Greensboro because of the massacre. After the shooting, the city adopted a district system for voting in city councilors. This meant that in a 70 percent white city, the council became quickly more diverse and representative of its residents.
But I think part of the legacy is also a warning. We like to think that our society is becoming progressively more equal and enlightened. That our institutions inevitably bend toward justice. But this event happened in 1979, well after Jim Crow and the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts. It tells us that bad ideas and resistance to good ideas continue.
We have to be vigilant because we can move both backwards and forwards. Our present moment is fraught with this possibility.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I’m at the very early stages of a project that, I hope, will reframe the conversation about relations between the United States and Mexico. It’s a dramatic, untold story and I’m excited to dig in when I have the chance.
It’s a return to Latin America for me. My first book, The Americano: Fighting with Castro for Cuba’s Future, was about the Cuban Revolution.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: I hope that people will read Morningside as, in part, the story of a courageous quest. Nelson and Joyce Johnson are the seekers in this story, looking for the key to unlock deeper democracy and equality in our society.
And I hope that people will begin to see Greensboro as an essential and too often overlooked laboratory for Black Power and social justice.
But mostly, I hope that they become immersed in a book that I spent a long time crafting to read like a novel.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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