Klan Collusion Issue Tested in Trial : Police Complicity Charged in Slayings of Five at ’79 Rally

Dale Sampson shuddered with a familiar fear as she stood recently beside the common grave site where her husband and three other anti-Ku Klux Klan demonstrators lie, victims of a hail of gunfire from a band of klansmen and Nazis in 1979.

The fear has haunted her ever since the November day 5 1/2 years ago when, as she cradled her dying husband’s head in her arms, she saw the klansmen and Nazis piling back into their cars and pickup trucks and speeding away from that bloody scene virtually unscathed, and without a single policeman in sight.

“I was aware that something was terribly wrong besides the fact that my husband was dying in my arms,” said Sampson, a 36-year-old social worker.

“The klan and the Nazis couldn’t have come in there and driven away without somebody allowing them to do it. We had been set up by the police and federal agents like ducks in a shooting gallery.”

That theory is now being tested in a federal courtroom in the neighboring city of Winston-Salem, about 30 miles west of Greensboro.

Sampson and 15 other plaintiffs--including persons injured during the Nov. 3 attack as well as next of kin of those who died--are seeking $48 million in damages in a civil suit charging Greensboro city and police officials and federal agents with complicity in the slayings, either willfully or through their own negligence.

Five persons were slain in the attack: the four white men buried in the common grave and a black woman whose body was buried elsewhere at her family’s request. The case is a complicated one with a bewildering array of defendants--60 in all, including klansmen, Nazis, informers, former and current Greensboro police officers and federal agents.

It has taken more than four years to come to trial. Legal procedures forced it to await the outcome of two other actions: a state trial in 1980 that tried six klan members and Nazis on charges of first-degree murder and rioting, and a federal trial last year that put nine klansmen and Nazis on the stand for alleged violations of the demonstrators’ civil rights.

Acquitted in Both Cases

In both cases, each heard by an all-white jury, the klansmen and Nazis were acquitted.

One difficulty for the prosecution in those trials also casts a pall over the plaintiffs’ chances for winning this time around: The victims of the bloody episode were all members of the Communist Workers Party and heavily involved in labor organizing in the state’s textile mills.

Getting a North Carolina jury to see them as anything but rabble-rousing subversives who deserved their fate will be difficult.

Sampson’s husband, William, for example, was Phi Beta Kappa and student body president at Augustana College in Illinois, had earned a master’s degree from Harvard Divinity School and had completed three years of medical school in Virginia before coming to North Carolina to work in the textile mills and help organize workers.

But his public image, like those of the other slain demonstrators, suffers in this state because of his ideological ties and labor activities.

North Carolinians pride themselves on their old-fashioned patriotism and their unshakable belief in the free-enterprise system and the right to work--and they take a dim view of those advocating otherwise.

“I’m really bored to death by this whole thing,” said Susan Phipps, 35, of Winston-Salem, echoing a widespread sentiment. “Neither one of them--the communists or the klan--are worth being on the face of the earth.”

Even in the liberal community, the party’s communist label, its strident ideological stance and its rhetoric of violence toward the klan alienates many who would otherwise be attracted to its cause.

To make their case, the plaintiffs are presenting a considerable body of evidence, much of it new. For example, a former paid informer for the Greensboro Police Department has testified in court that he warned the police at least two hours before the killings that armed klansmen and Nazis were going to the anti-klan rally site at a predominantly black Greensboro housing project. Yet police tactical squads assigned to protect the demonstrators were permitted to knock off early for lunch.

And a policewoman who was investigating an unrelated domestic disturbance a block away from the housing project about 15 minutes before the scheduled rally time of 11 a.m. was inexplicably ordered by headquarters to break off her questioning and leave the area, according to her deposition, which was entered into the court record last week.

As a result, there were no uniformed police officers on the scene until after the gunfire was over and the klansmen and Nazis had begun their getaway.

‘You Asked for the Klan’

In a strange twist, the same paid informant who testified that he had attempted to warn the police of the potential danger also showed up at the rally site in the pickup truck at the head of the nine-vehicle klan-Nazi caravan.

“You communist son of a bitch,” he cried to one of the demonstrators as the caravan pulled alongside the rally, “you asked for the klan. Here they are.”

Attorneys for the defendants in the two previous trials argued heatedly that the communists seemed to invite a bloody clash with the klan. The defense is again raising that argument, pointing to an open letter to klan members and sympathizers written by the party before the rally.

It reads: “The KKK is one of the most treacherous scum elements produced by the dying system of capitalism. . . . You are nothing but a bunch of racist cowards. . . . We challenged you to attend our November 3rd rally in Greensboro. We publicly renew that challenge.”

It ends: “We will show you no mercy. DEATH TO THE KLAN!!!”

Some of the communists at the demonstrations were armed and they fired at klansmen and Nazis during the melee.

“Our evidence will show that the klansmen and the Nazis came down and expected to behave peacefully,” Larry Moore, an attorney for four of the defendants, said in an interview. “They didn’t threaten anybody. They didn’t cause anybody to apprehend violence. They were attacked by the demonstrators first and fought back in self-defense after a stick fight ensued and guns were pulled.”

Moore and attorneys for the police and federal defendants also adamantly deny any collusion between law enforcement officials and the klan and Nazis.

The plaintiffs, despite the stiff odds against their success, say they are more optimistic about their chances this time. They point out that this is the first time local and federal law enforcement officials have had to stand in the dock along with the klansmen and Nazis. Much of the evidence against them has never been presented in court.

“In the two previous trials, prosecutors were . . . prosecuting the very people their colleagues had acted in league with,” Jack Novik, assistant director of the American Civil Liberties Union, charged in an interview. “They had little interest in bringing out the whole truth surrounding the 1979 attack.”

Unlike the other trials, this one involves civil charges rather than criminal actions. Thus, the burden of proof on the part of the plaintiffs is less. In criminal cases, guilt must be proven beyond a reasonable doubt, while in civil cases only a preponderance of evidence is required.

And, for the first time, a black is sitting on the six-member jury.

The trial, presided over by U.S. District Judge Robert R. Merhige Jr.--a flamboyant figure whose most famous decision was his order to desegregate the Richmond, Va., public schools--is now going into its sixth week and is expected to continue for several more weeks.

“I’ve always felt if someone can kill my husband for his work and for what he believed in, then they could kill anybody and get away with it,” Sampson said. “It’s not popular in this country to stand up for human rights and morality. It’s popular to be anti-communist and racist right now.”