Police and protesters argue during a Malcolm X birthday march to protest human rights violations against African Americans in 1992.

Deadly Betrayal
... and a return to childhood faith
by Nelson Johnson

The fog hung heavy over Greensboro, N.C., early on the morning of November 3, 1979. As one of the organizers of an anti-Klan march to be followed by a labor conference, I was a little worried about the weather. Around 7am I stopped by the home of Jim and Signe Waller, a Jewish couple, where we had breakfast together. Jim had left the medical faculty at Duke University to become an organizer in a textile mill. Little did I know that this was the last time that we would ever have a meal together. In less than four hours Jim would be shot in the back.

By 10am the fog had melted away and the sunshine had burst through, transforming the day into a bright crisp fall morning. I was excited about the plans for the day. Impressive work had been done in the textile mills along a 75-mile stretch of the I-85 corridor and in communities in those mill towns. Greensboro was the center of our textile mill and community work. I felt that a lot of people would be joining the march and attending the labor conference. As a student leader at North Carolina A&T State University and a community organizer, I had organized a number of marches and rallies over the past 15 years. As usual, I was a little anxious before the big march and conference, but anticipating mill folk and folk from the black community getting together -- a meeting long overdue, I felt like a wonderful day was taking shape.

This initial assessment would prove tragically wrong. By the morning of the next day, I wore clothes splattered with day-old dried blood -- blood from five of my dear friends killed the day before by Klan and Nazi gunmen in the streets of Greensboro. I had spent a painful night locked up charged with inciting to riot after a paid police agent led a caravan of nine Klan and Nazi members into a legally planned march, where they killed five people, wounded 10 others and terrorized Morningside Homes, an African-American public housing community.

I had discussed the march with the police, painstakingly obtained a parade permit, and was assured of police presence and protection. I had had a difficult relationship with the Greensboro police since my student days 10 years earlier. The discussion with police immediately came to my mind as I peered through unbelieving eyes on that Saturday morning at the wounded and dying bodies of friends. As the blood of my loved ones was soaking into the ground, I stood over Jim's body and shouted with all the assurance that the Spirit could give me, "This could not have happened without direct police involvement and we declare war on you!"

Of course, I did not know of the police agent's organizing role or any of the other information that eventually came out in court after six long years that resulted in two leading police officers and six Klan and Nazi party members being found liable for wrongful death. At the time, I just knew the police were deeply involved in this tragic event, and I spoke the truth as it was flowing through me. I was immediately charged with inciting to riot, wrestled to the ground and taken to jail. I remained in jail that night because the magistrate refused to set a bond as I was declared to be too great a danger to the peace and order of the city to be set free that day.

Released by mid-morning on November 4, I was met by a small crowd of reporters and friends and informed of the names of those killed. They included not only Dr. Jim Waller and Sandy Smith, the beautiful black former Student Government President at Greensboro's all women's Bennett College, but also Michael Nathan, a Jewish doctor who was leading the first aid team for the planned four-mile march, Ce'sar Cauce, a wonderful brother of Hispanic origin, who organized among non-academic workers at Duke University, and William (Bill) Sampson, a Virginian by birth and the only Anglo-white. Bill had left divinity school at Harvard University a few years earlier to become a textile mill organizer in Greensboro.

Once out of jail I also gratefully learned that my eight- and nine-year-old daughters had been picked up by my youngest brother and taken to his home in Winston-Salem for safety. My wife, Joyce, and I drove to a friend's house, as it was too dangerous to move back into our home. The next six days, leading up to the funeral of those killed, were the most intense, the most packed with counterintelligence maneuvering and growing tension, ever in my life and, I suspect, ever in the life of this community of 200,000 citizens -- North Carolina's third largest city. These six days would portend the next six years, which involved an intense journey of survival for me and other members and friends of the Communist Workers Party (CWP). This journey involved a strange blending of vicious anti-communism and deep-seated racism, threading through three trials (averaging over five months each) related to the Klan/Nazi killings, the bringing of seven criminal charges against me, slander and vilification of those killed and those of us who survived on a scale that I had never seen before. Yet, all of this did not stop a powerfully inspired fight back and for me a rediscovery of my faith on a deeper level.

My faith was nurtured in the late 1940s and early 1950s on a farm near Littleton, in eastern North Carolina. We black folk formed a fairly tight rural community, but we were completely separated from whites except for the requirements of work. Religion was central to our village. My grandfather, for whom I was named and who died in 1932, was the founder and first pastor of Lee's Chapel Baptist Church. My father, now 92 years old, was a deacon in the church and my mother, who died at 87 in 1992, played the piano for the church choir. I grew up surrounded by religion and faith. It was so real and so profound for many people in our little village. As a child and teenager, I liked the singing and the preaching (preaching has a very lively form in the southern black rural tradition). However, the deeper substance and interiority of the faith never fully gripped me, although I am convinced that it gripped many other people in the community. I wanted to feel and believe as deeply as they seemed to feel and believe, I just didn't. But even with my shallow awareness, I was a believer, I went along with what I understood the faith to be.

I suppose that part of the basis for my faith is because religion and church were the stabilizing force in the community. In fact, church was the only significant institution in the community other than the school. It served the role of being a community center, recreation center, old folks home, counseling service, arts and drama club, civic center and faith center, all wrapped into one. It was really the unifying epicenter of our village.

As for Jesus, I really didn't think much about who he was in my early years. I certainly didn't have a frame of reference on how or whether the human and divine dimensions came together in Jesus. Such theological reckoning was not even a thought. He was just the Savior, who did miracles, helped people and assured us that everything would be all right. In the midst of this racially oppressed and segregated community, Jesus helped us put up with "white folk" in the hope of going to heaven in another life. My faith did not grow out of well-considered reflection on the meaning of anything in particular. Rather, it was the acceptance -- and I did accept it -- of the general feeling, mood and beliefs in my small rural community. We believed that there was a God and that God would reward the good people and punish the bad people; Bible stories were told in such a way as to reinforce that. If you asked God, God would have mercy on you, even if you were mean, because he was a forgiving God. Such was my early faith training.

I matured slowly. People my age always seemed more grown-up than I was. Through my four years in the U.S. Air Force and later my growing involvement in the black liberation movement, particularly my study of Marxism, I gently laid aside many of my previous faith beliefs. There was so much about religion that didn't make sense to me in my late 20s and 30s. I gradually moved away from organized religion and dedicated my life to working among the poor. I was committed to doing what I could to help folk, including working with religious people and the church when I thought that would help. Although I did not make a public spectacle of it, I no longer considered myself to be a confessing believer in the former sense.

During the six-year period after November 3, 1979, of being denounced, labeled, branded, stigmatized and ostracized, I was alternately drawn to reflecting more on faith and things of the Spirit and then pushed farther away from religion because I thought the church should have been doing more. In 1983 I believe I was serving a 20-day sentence for contempt of court. I had refused to stand when the judge entered the court because the court, in my opinion, was so corrupt. I had seen two all-white juries acquit all the Klan and Nazi gunmen of all criminal charges in spite of the fact that they were filmed by four television stations, calmly shooting people. I had lost all respect for the court.

While serving the 20 days, I went on a 20-day hunger strike to express further contempt for the court. An Episcopalian minister attached to the University of North Carolina in Greensboro, Henry Atkins, visited me in my jail cell one day and inquired as to my well-being. I didn't know him. He seemed like a very kind man. I sensed in him something very authentic. I asked him what he really believed. "Do you really believe there is a God and, if so, how do you explain the sort of thing that happened here in Greensboro and especially the role of church folks?" Honestly, I cannot remember exactly what Atkins said, but I remember what he didn't say, and I remember how I felt. He didn't give me the expected heavy-handed speech about how God was going to deliver me or punish someone else or the bit about my need to have more faith. As best I can recall, he shared a little about his life and about what God meant to him personally. It didn't sound all that strong at the time, but I felt it was genuine. It was enough for me to begin to wrestle anew with my own faith.

When I got out of jail, Atkins invited me to St. Mary's House, a little church adjacent to the college campus. About 25 Christian ministers were there, mostly white. They were courteous but obviously did not understand the depth of the systemic evil and the need for change.

From 1979 through 1984, I felt like I went through hell. I reached the end of my rope. I spent many nights agonizing over what I needed to do in the future. Driven by circumstances and inspired by discussion with Atkins and others, I started to read the Scriptures a little. I went to a number of churches in the black community, trying to draw meaning from what was being preached. A black pastor who was particularly helpful to me was Otis L. Hairston of Shiloh Baptist Church. He was a quiet, unassuming man who preached a gentle gospel that not only invited individual transformation, but also challenged institutional powers and systemic evil. My family and I became members of Shiloh, and it was under Hairston's leadership that I was both protected and initially nurtured in the gospel ministry.

There was a warmth and reception of me in the black church that I had not received anyplace else. What I heard, however, often didn't seem to address the problems of the structured and the systemic evil. What these services did do was to reinvigorate my interest in Jesus. I started to focus on Jesus. As I did, I gradually discovered a person that I hadn't known existed. I was beginning to see how thoroughly Jesus opposed all the sources of evil rooted deeply in culture and manifested through systems. I also sensed a compelling compassion in him for everyone, especially for the poor. I could begin to see how deeply some people loved him and how much others hated him.

Out of the anguish and hardship born from the Klan and Nazi killings on November 3, 1979, I reluctantly returned to the faith of my childhood. Still seeing through a glass darkly, I began to discover in Jesus the kind of deep reliance on God that sustained Him in challenging the powers and principalities and enduring the cross. As I rediscover Jesus on deeper and deeper levels, a new world -- the necessity for authentic community lived on the basis of very different assumptions -- is opening up to me. It's a challenging but beautiful journey.

Nelson Johnson is pastor of Faith Community Church and Executive Director of the Beloved Community Center in Greensboro, N.C.