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Nelson Johnson, Labor Leader Wounded in Greensboro Massacre, Dies at 81 [1]
['Clay Risen']
Date: 2025-02-15
The Rev. Nelson Johnson, a labor activist in North Carolina who was injured in the 1979 shooting in which white supremacists in Greensboro killed five protesters and wounded 11, and who later formed a commission to help his community process the tragedy, died on Sunday at his home in Greensboro. He was 81.
His wife, Joyce Johnson, said the cause was complications of kidney failure.
What came to be known as the Greensboro Massacre unfolded on Nov. 3, 1979. Mr. Johnson and his wife were local leaders of the Communist Workers Party, a Maoist group that had split from the Communist Party several years earlier, and they had increasingly focused their efforts on fighting an upsurge in white supremacist activity in their state.
That summer, they had led a confrontation with members of the Ku Klux Klan in China Grove, a town near Charlotte, where the Klan was sponsoring a screening of “Birth of a Nation,” the 1915 film that casts the hate group in a positive light.
As a follow-up, the Johnsons organized a “Death to the Klan” march through Greensboro, the city where the anti-Jim Crow sit-in movement had begun in 1960. Camera crews from local television stations were on hand, and several marchers were armed.
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[1] Url:
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/15/us/nelson-johnson-dead.html
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