The following is a Counterpoint.

By Edward Whitfield

John Young is a friend of mine, but I feel compelled to respond publicly to his April 2 commentary in this paper.

I offer this with love and conviction.

It seems that Young has a deaf ear and a blind eye. He seems not to have heard the repeated self-criticisms of former Communist Workers Party members about some of the errors and misjudgments that they made in leading up to the Nov. 3, 1979, tragedy. He feels the need to point out to the community how bad they were. He makes these criticisms as though the self-criticisms were not a matter of public record from the hearings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
We don't need quotes from Jerry Tung in New York to see the errors then or the good work before, during and after this event, and none of his statements justify what happened.

Young also seems to have a blind eye to the Police Department's behavior that day. He accepts the ridiculous notion that the police were confused and tricked by deceitful demonstrators when it was those same police who were able to provide exact information to the Klan/Nazi caravan so it could get to the appointed place at the appointed time that was listed on the parade permit and perform its mayhem.

The CWP does not exist as an entity now in this community, although some of its former members do. Those people's record over the last 26 and in the period before speaks for itself. Their errors have been spoken to by them repeatedly, and there is nothing in their rhetoric that made them deserve or cause the deaths.

The Greensboro police, on the other hand, do continue to exist in this community, and in a democracy the police must be supervised by the community. While, hopefully, we will get more details soon, some of what is coming out in the current exposure of the police's unsupervised secret activity makes much more sense of the Nov. 3 incident than the idea that the police decided to take a low profile but didn't tell anyone and then got confused and misled.

But it may be a bit premature to go too deeply into the answers to these questions when we have the opportunity to see the work of a commission of seven unimpeachable members of the Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission who were never in the CWP and who are held in high esteem by all who know them.

The product of their last two years' work should not be undercut by speculation that is based on a deaf ear and a blind eye. Let's look forward to reading this report soon.

The writer lives in Greensboro and is a long-time activist and a former labor organizer. He testified during the July 2005 Truth and Reconciliation hearings.