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On pp. 11-12 of the executive summary, the commissioners delve into one of the issues surrounding the shooting that many in Greensboro, in my experience, have been reluctant to discuss: the fact that the victims were communists, the American equivalent of the boogeyman for most of the 20th century, and that that fact has tended to color for many Greensboro residents the questions of guilt and responsibility.

The Commission finds strong evidence that members of the police department allowed their negative feelings toward Communists in general, and outspoken black activist Nelson Johnson in particular, to color the perception of the threat posed by these groups.

I'm reading between the lines here, but I wonder whether the commissioners mean that because the police bore such antipathy toward communism in general, they overestimated the threat posed by the demonstrators. The rest of that paragraph goes on to say, as previously documented, that police definitely underestimated the threat posed by the Klan/Nazis, thus exposing marchers and nearby residents to greater danger.

For the past century or so, at least, most Americans have tended to believe that the greater and more present dangers to our freedoms have come from the left. Certainly there have been exceptions, such as writer Sinclair Lewis, who once famously predicted, "When fascism comes to America it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross." But by and large, communism has trumped fascism. Even during World War II, when we were allied with the Soviet Union in the fight against Nazi Germany, American leaders such as Gen. George S. Patton were advocating that instead of stopping at the Elbe River, American forces should keep heading east, through Germany and Poland to Moscow.

But while Communism posed an existential threat on a global scale -- I can't even begin to imagine, for example, how frightened we must have felt when we learned that Klaus Fuchs had given our nuclear secrets to the Soviets -- how much trouble did it cause here in the U.S.? How many murders did Communists commit? How much property damage did they cause? And almost as important, how much influence did communists ever gain over the levers of political and economic power in this country?

Now ask yourself the same questions about the Klan.

In practical terms, which group has truly posed the clearer and more present danger? The Klan and related right-wing groups. No question.

And yet leftists, historically, have drawn more ire. Adding to that in Greensboro's case was the fact that these were rude, ungrateful leftists: They loudly disdained the police, they pledged to defend themselves, they chanted "Death to the Pigs!" when officers tried to contact parade organizer Nelson Johnson to discuss police arrangements for the parade.

All true, the commission says on p. 11 ... yet that changes nothing:

... the Commission strongly emphasizes that hostility and verbal abuse did not preclude the marchers' right to police protection. The police knew this enmity [between marchers and police] existed. Nevertheless, Capt. Gibson delivered the explicit promise of protection for the safety of their marchers and their First Amendment rights when Johnson was issued a parade permit. This promise of protection was even more significant given the requirement of the parade permit that the protesters be unarmed. Unfortunately for the whole community, the police failed to carry out the promised protection.

The commission goes on (p. 12) to, in effect, lecture the police department on its duty. I don't think anyone grounded in the Constitution would object to its sentiments, although I question the factual accuracy of this assertion: "Further, officers are surely trained to deal with this eventuality [the need to keep safe even the unpopular or those with threatening views] as it is a routine occurrence in police work." I'm sure that's true today, but the summary contains no evidence that it was necessarily true in 1979.

Federal law enforcement, p. 12: Briefly, the commission criticizes the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms for not sharing intelligence with Greensboro police. It identifies a BATF informant among the Nazis but says that so far as it could determine -- which, it makes clear, is not very far given the feds' reluctance to share information about their operations and agents -- that informant did little or nothing along the lines of what Dawson did to bring the hostile groups together and foment violence.

I can vouch for the feds' reluctance to give up information. The boxes of paper we got from Justice in 1999 in response to our Freedom of Information Act request contained thousands of documents but, if memory serves, little or no new information about the roles of federal agents in the incident.

The WVO and Morningside Homes public-housing community, p. 12: The commission states that espousing principles means trying to abide by them, even to the extent of foreseeing the consquences of one's actions:

The parade permit meant that the WVO had permission from the city to march. The WVO did not legally need permission from Morningside residents to march. However, as a self-described anti-racist organization explicitly advocating for the empowerment of working-class black people, it should have understood that it had an ethical obligation to ask permission of the residents before staging the parade in their neighborhood, rather than simply informing them.

How much emphasis to place on this issue, I suspect, depends on how strongly you believe that the demonstrators knew or should have known that they were a likely target of violence. Earlier, the commission indicated that it believes that pretty strongly.

It also faults the Neighborhood Residents Council, some of whose members had met with the WVO to review plans for the march, for not getting word out to more residents. But commissioners agree: ... the march organizers exposed Morningside residents to a risk they had not accepted as a community.

I'm not sure how a community "accepts" the risk of being put in the line of fire in a shootout between two groups of outsiders. Can it, in fact, do so? And if not, practically speaking, what other options did WVO have? Cancel the march? In those pre-World Wide Web days, what options did poor and working-class people have besides marching to make their concerns known? And what moral and ethical responsibility, in a land in which we ostensibly don't kill people for their beliefs or statements, did the WVO have to protect bystanders against the prospect that they would be shot at merely for exercising their First Amendment rights?

I'm not sure there's a good answer to all of that.

Commissioners conclude their discussion of the Morningside Homes community by observing that in light of the Klan's violent history and in light of Nov. 3 and its aftermath, "many in black working-class communities, and especially former residents of Morningside, are still afraid to talk about this issue. For this reason, there may well be other viewpoints in support of the WVO held by people who have not felt at liberty to speak."

If true, that's a shame, and a reproach to us as a city. If people are afraid to say what they think because they fear violent reprisal, we have a serious problem.