Cool USA Facts!

In 1979, a communist-led march to oust the Ku Klux Klan and the American Nazi Party lead to the Greensboro Massacre, where local police helped the KKK stop the march and kill 5 protesters. Edward Dawson, a Klansman-turned FBI informant as part of the agency's COINTELPRO program and was among the founders of the North Carolina Knights of the Ku Klux Klan when the North Carolina chapter of the United Klans of America split. By 1979 he was working as an informant for the Greensboro Police Department. He was given a copy of the march route from the police and informed them of the potential for violence. Absent the police, the attackers escaped with relative ease. All of the killers were acquitted in state and national trials. The city lost a civil lawsuit in 1980, being one of the few times in US history when "a jury held local police liable for cooperating with the KKK in a wrongful death." The Greensboro city council finally apologized for the incident in 2017. 1