Bombshell memo on horrific race massacre exposes complicit FBI: 'They lied like crazy’

Rev. Nelson Johnson, Joyce Johnson and Lewis Brandon (l-r), survivors of the Greensboro Massacre, pose next to a historic marker unveiled in 2015. (Courtesy Beloved Community Center, used with permission.)

The Greensboro Massacre Was Not an Intelligence Failure

The Violence Was Foreseeable

The newly released FBI records add detail to an already damning institutional record surrounding the Greensboro Massacre. Before Ku Klux Klan and Nazi members killed five anti-Klan organizers on November 3, 1979, federal agents had received multiple indications of possible violence. Yet the FBI’s immediate written assessment after the shooting declared that there were “no civil rights violation or racial overtones present.”

Calling this a failure of awareness understates what the documents show. The relevant institutions collected warnings, communicated with informants, monitored political groups and possessed the authority to decide which information mattered. The failure was in what they did with that power.

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Surveillance Followed the Left

According to the 2006 Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission report, the FBI began investigating the Workers Viewpoint Organization after its members and local Black residents confronted armed Klansmen in China Grove. That preliminary investigation ended on November 2, one day before the massacre.

The asymmetry is stark. Anti-Klan organizers became objects of federal surveillance. Meanwhile, information about armed white supremacists potentially attacking their rally did not produce protection sufficient to prevent the killings.

The records do not establish that every FBI official knew every warning or that the Bureau conspired to cause the attack. They do establish something less speculative and still severe: federal law enforcement possessed intelligence about possible Klan and Nazi violence while directing its investigative machinery toward the left-wing organization that would soon be attacked.

The State Had Names, Warnings and Informants

This was not a situation in which authorities lacked access to the violent faction. Eddie Dawson, a Klansman who led the caravan into the Black public housing community, had previously served as an FBI informant and was then providing information to Greensboro police. Three days before the massacre, he contacted his former FBI handler about a forthcoming rally the Klan might attend. The handler subsequently confirmed that Greensboro police had received information about a possible disruption.

Other evidence described in the reporting was more explicit. An undercover Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms employee testified that, two days before the massacre, he heard a Klansman advocate throwing pipe bombs into a Black crowd. An FBI agent also acknowledged receiving a November 2 tip that North Carolina Nazis planned to attack and possibly kill people at an anti-Klan gathering.

The precise circulation and handling of every warning remain disputed. Former FBI official Cecil Moses told Raw Story that he had not been briefed and had “absolutely no information” before the shooting. But institutional power cannot be reduced to the personal recollection of one official. Agencies create chains of command, intelligence systems and reporting rules precisely because public safety cannot depend on whether the right man happens to hear the right warning.

Bureaucratic Ignorance Became a Defense

The FBI later produced retroactive memoranda reconstructing contacts it had not documented contemporaneously. One November 26 memo said the account of a July meeting with Klan leader Joe Grady was submitted to help Moses answer press questions. Agents reportedly had not recorded the meeting at the time because Grady’s warning was nonspecific and fell outside investigative guidelines.

That explanation may describe bureaucratic procedure. It does not excuse the result. Grady had discussed possible future violence, and agents had asked whether the Klan possessed automatic weapons. By late October and early November, additional information connected the Klan and Nazis to the Greensboro rally. Treating each warning as an isolated fragment made institutional inaction easier to defend after the bodies were counted.

Moses also cited restrictions imposed after congressional investigations exposed FBI abuses under COINTELPRO. But limits on political spying do not explain why the Bureau reportedly surveilled the Workers Viewpoint Organization while failing to act effectively on warnings concerning armed white supremacists. Invoking civil-liberties reforms to explain that disparity turns safeguards against state abuse into an alibi for selective attention.

The Official Story Erased Race

The initial FBI memo’s assertion that the shooting carried no racial overtones was not merely obtuse. It stripped the attack of the political context that federal action would have required officials to confront.

The shooters were Klan and Nazi members. The attack occurred in a Black public housing community. Black organizer Nelson Johnson had long been subjected to FBI surveillance, and Sandra Smith, one of those killed, was a Black former student-body president at Bennett College. The victims were participating in an anti-Klan march. Describing that scene as racially neutral did not clarify the facts; it obscured their most obvious institutional meaning.

Moses emphasized that Communist Workers Party members would not cooperate with the FBI. The records support that claim, including the refusal of one victim’s widow to speak with agents because she believed the FBI had killed her husband. But distrust after the massacre cannot retroactively excuse failures before it. Nor did victims owe immediate confidence to an agency that had monitored their movement and initially denied the racial character of the attack.

Neglect Is Also an Exercise of Power

State and federal prosecutions ended in acquittals. A later federal civil jury found Klan and Nazi members jointly liable with the Greensboro Police Department for one demonstrator’s death, and Greensboro formally apologized in 2020 for police failure to warn marchers despite extensive knowledge of the planned attack. The FBI’s legal responsibility was not established in that verdict; Moses had been dismissed as a defendant.

Political responsibility is broader than a judgment against a particular official. Institutions reveal their priorities through whom they monitor, whose warnings they downgrade, whose violence they depoliticize and whose deaths they recast as unforeseeable.

The Greensboro record exposes a durable pattern: the state can treat organized white-supremacist violence as a potential disturbance while treating its opponents as a security problem. When officials call that outcome confusion, they misdirect attention from the decisions embedded in procedure. Intelligence was gathered. Power was available. Protection was absent.

Thanks to Raw Story

Source: Bombshell memo on horrific race massacre exposes complicit FBI: ‘They lied like crazy’

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