I was reminded of this by Why Am I Not Surprised?
On this date in 1979, a group made up of both African-Americans and European-Americans gathered in Greensboro, North Carolina, to protest against the Ku Klux Klan. As soon as they began, however, forty KKK members and American Nazis drove into the crowd, got out of their vehicles, got out their automatic weapons and opened fire, killing five and wounding ten others. The massacre was filmed by four television stations. Nevertheless, after two trials, two all-White juries acquited all defendents and no one has ever served a day in jail for these cold-blooded killings in broad daylight while law enforcement officers looked on.
Maoists who make implicit death threats against the locals probably don’t have much survivability in the modern south, to say nothing of 30 years ago.
(Not that that is a justification for murder, of course. And it’s appalling that the cops may have been involved.)
I am surprised that the feds did not investigate this when Clinton was president.
I’m not. Not that much surprises me in this case.
The thing about videos is that they indict,they charge but they seldom if ever convict especially if the behavior being videotaped is a police officer and that’s been found in many if not most cases. Rodney King and Elio Carrion come to mind. And getting White jurors to face the fact that police officers do lie and do corrupt and awful things would upset our universe. That’s why prosecutors in many places don’t want Black or Latino jurors because they question police testimony and evidence in ways White jurors as a class just don’t.
As you know, with King, the jury in Simi Valley(and the trial was essentially decided when that became its venue) was almost entirely comprised of White jurors. The Carrion cases was mostly White but also included Black and Latino members I believe. But it came down even in their comments to them not wanting to send a message out to prospective deputies that would cause no one to want to be one. They didn’t want that responsibility. No one does.
Carrion’s YouTube video is here. The justice department was involved in the King case clearly. With Carrion, it announced that it’s waiting until May to make a decision.
The more pressure a community puts on a situation, the more likely the feds will launch an inquiry(which isn’t that difficult to get started) and more importantly, continue one to its conclusion. A low-level U.S. Attorney told me as much during a situation here.
One of my sociology professors was the only Black woman on a jury of otherwise White people and she voted to acquit a Latino man who was accused of resisting arrest who was beaten up by police. She felt the officer was less than honest in his testimony but the White jurors believed the officer(mostly, because they of course never lie) and the man was intoxicated at the time. Oh, the pressure she got to not hang the jury from all sides!
The interesting thing is that I was reading online a speech given by my state’s AG and he was telling people in this audience about how Black and Latino individuals were getting routinely beaten by my city’s department.
The second criminal trial (in 1984 under Reagan) was a Federal civil rights trial following a Federal investigation. The Federal route had already been fully pursued long before Clinton came to office.
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