Posted on 07/16/2005 5:45:50 PM PDT by Graybeard58
GREENSBORO, N.C. - A Ku Klux Klan leader who was at a workers' rally more than 25 years ago where five people died and 10 others were injured gave defiant testimony to a commission Saturday, saying "maybe God guided the bullets."
Virgil L. Griffin of Mount Holly, imperial wizard of the Cleveland Knights of the KKK, said someone in the crowd of Communist Workers Party marchers fired first and hit a van driven by a Klansman.
"We had every right to drive down that street with nobody touching the cars," he said. "I didn't come to shoot or kill anybody."
Griffin spoke before the Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission, an effort modeled on similar commissions in South Africa and Peru.
The commission is investigating the deaths at the Nov. 3, 1979, march organized by the Communist Workers Party that ended when members of the Klan and the American Nazi Party opened fire.
The commission is meeting without the support of city leaders in Greensboro, and it has no authority to pursue criminal or civil claims or grant immunity from them.
Leaders in Greensboro, a city of 223,000 in central North Carolina, fear the hearings will rekindle old animosities, but organizers hope to uncover what they feel is the untold story behind the shootings and promote healing.
Afterward, police hustled Griffin out of the meeting hall. Before they could drive him away, Griffin handed out business cards to reporters and described the commission as "a total waste of time."
"It would have been forgotten 20 years ago if you didn't keep it in the news," he said.
In 1984, federal prosecutors failed to win a conviction against Griffin, who was acquitted of conspiracy to interfere with a federal investigation.
Several Klansmen were acquitted of murder charges at a state trial. A civil trial did find the Klan, the American Nazi Party and the Greensboro Police Department jointly liable for the wrongful deaths of the five people killed. The city paid $350,000.
Signe Waller, the widow of a communist labor organizer shot and killed at the march, told the commission Friday that city and federal law enforcement knew the Klan planned to attack the marchers, but did not take any action to stop the "government-sanctioned killings."
"It appears to me that a death squad of terrorists was normalized in this city long before Sept. 11, 2001," Waller told commissioners.
Earlier in the day on Saturday, a former KKK grand dragon said authorities were simply indifferent and did not consider the potential for violence.
Gorrell Pierce said fighting between marchers and Klan members ended in shooting because Communists tried to pull a 79-year-old Klansman out of his car. He said he had ordered members of his Klan faction not to attend the march and that he was told what happened by others in the Klan.
"To tell the truth, if you look at the evidence and see what happened, it was all self-defense," said Pierce, who said he was Christmas shopping in Winston-Salem on the day of the shootings. "Everybody was participating in a riot."
In the weeks that followed, the Klan all but died out in central North Carolina, Pierce said.
"When the smoke cleared down here after the shooting, there was as good as no Klan," he said. "Everybody headed for the hills."
Greensboro's mayor from 1993-1999, Carolyn Allen, said Pierce "should be awarded an Academy Award for his performance."
"He was very smooth," she said.
The klan, the nazis and the communists. Who do you root for in a fight like that?
It's about time that Sen. Byrd fessed up!!!
Robert Byrd alert!!
You hope nobody misses and there's enough ammo to go around.
The police officers unlucky enough to have to quell the riot.
I'd root for all three of them to shoot each other full of holes, but then I'm kind of a violent person to begin with.
I'm trying to figure out why this commission was ever convened and why any of the KKK men went and testified. The commission doesn't seem to have any force of law behind it.
... the Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission, an effort modeled on similar commissions in South Africa and Peru.
The commission is meeting without the support of city leaders in Greensboro, and it has no authority to pursue criminal or civil claims or grant immunity from them. ... but organizers hope to uncover what they feel is the untold story behind the shootings and promote healing.
Never saw a blackmailer quit after one payment.
This "Commission" is pure BS. It is just another angle by local blacks to keep the kettle simmering. Every night on the news Channel 2, which has always been very heavy black oriented, can't wait to fan the fire. The big catch phrase is something like, "We need this in order to let things heal." This happened in 1979. If the black "leaders" would drop it it would have gone away 20 years ago. I don't know one person who stays up nights worrying about the Klan/Nazi shootings in 1979.
How the heck do you respond to logic like that?
This is what my father used to describe as a win-win situation.
YOU BEAT THEM SENSELESS AT THE POLLS. AND WE HAVE BEEN.
Thanks to both of you for your posts.
Or as Colonel Jeff Cooper used to say,"This sounds like a problem that is solving itself."
Anyone who helps put them behind bars.
Easy. The Klan. They will die out from old age. It would have been nice if they could have taken out all the communists before they croak. The Nazis need killing too, but the commies by far have the worst record.
That's easy. Sheets Byrd would not have been arrested as a subversive for refusing to join the Klan in 1940s WV. Ratzinger didn't have much of a choice in the matter - Byrd did.
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