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That's the word from Action Greensboro: a ceremony from 11:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. at which there'll be free hotdogs, among other things.

I'd've posted a story on our Web site, but the hamster negotiations mentioned below remain ongoing. I'll get something up when things are fixed, and there'll probably be something in Wednesday's print edition.

I'll be writing for tomorrow's paper about some of today's observances of the anniversary of the terrorist attacks. But right now, through 7 p.m. today, Veterans of Foreign Wars Post 2087 is collecting blood for the benefit of wounded U.S. military personnel. You can donate at Post HQ, 2605 S. Elm-Eugene St. in Greensboro. Their goal is 70 units. As of noon, they'd had five donations. Go help 'em out.

Convicted swindler Ken Lay has died. In addition to feeling sorry for his nonswindling family and friends -- even he had some, I'm sure -- I also wish he could've spent another 30 years or so on this earth working to make whole the many thousands of investors who lost their money because of his criminality at Enron.

The executive summary identifies seven sets of "key issues" surrounding the incident and its aftermath.

Violent language and provocation, pp. 13-14: The commission doesn't quite come out and say this, but the two sides seemed determined to goad one another into a fight. That said, it generally comes down more harshly on the Klan/Nazis, calling some of their words "immoral and demand[ing] public rebuke." It cites less extreme language from the WVO and calls that group's merely "troubling" although it is, particularly in the quote from demonstrator Paul Bermanzohn, no less eliminationist.

The commissioners emphasize, however, that because of the historical roles played by the Klan and Communists in the U.S., the intent and effect of the two groups' rhetoric were "inherently unequal." As I previously noted, unlike the Klan, Communists in this country do not have an established history of violence, although the commissioners cite the 1960s radicals the Weathermen as an exception. They add:

Founded specifically as an insurrectionist terrorist organization, the Klan has counted among its members many elected and law enforcement officials, including at least one U.S. president.

Group history aside, the two sets of individuals also had very different histories with respect to violence, the commissioners emphasized: Basically, the Klan and Nazis had such a history; the Communists did not.

Injustice in the justice system: I think that in the minds of many people, what took this incident from tragedy to travesty was the judicial outcome, particularly the state and federal criminal trials, both of which resulted in acquittals on all charges by all-white juries. As the commissioners observe:

We find one of the most unsettling legacies of the shootings is the disconnect between what seems to be a common-sense assessment of wrongdoing and verdicts in the two criminal trials. When people see the shootings with their own eyes in the video footage, then know that the trials led to acquittals, it undermines their confidence in the legal system. ...

... when the justice system fails to find people responsible when wrongs were committed, it sends a damaging signal that some crimes will not be punished, and some people will not be protected by the government. In addition, the majority of us believe that the system is not just randomly imperfect; rather, it tends to be disproportionately imperfect against people of color and poor people.

Commissioners call the jury selection process then in use "problematic" because it led to unrepresentative juries. In particular, poor people and minorities were underrepresented in jury pools, and at the time (and until 1986), it was legal to strike a potential juror just because of his race. In our stories last night and this morning, Mike Schlosser, then the Guilford County district attorney, acknowledged that the outcome might well have been different in the state capital-murder trial with a more representative jury.

The commissioners acknowledge that WVO/CWP members didn't cooperate with prosecutors during the state trial. But they point out that they cooperated with federal prosecutors, only to come up empty again.

Commissioners also emphasize that state prosecutors could have called other witnesses both to testify as to the facts of the shootings and to describe the victims as real people, human beings, rather than as faceless, stereotypical Communist protesters.

Moreover, commissioners point out, at the time of the first trial, some CWP members were reluctant to testify because they themselves faced rioting charges and were concerned about self-incrimination.

In the civil trial, a jury with one black member Greensboro police detective Jerry Cooper and Lt. Paul Spoon, commander of the parade coverage, liable with the white supremacists for one wrongful death among the five who were killed. The city paid roughly $400,000 to settle all claims, including those against Klan/Nazis -- why? That decision, commissioners note, "gave the appearance to many, rightly or wrongly, of the City's support for or alliance with the Klan and Nazis."

Yeah, when you're paying their bills, it's hard for people not to presume they're with you.

This section concludes with an explanation of the differences between the role of the courts and the role of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission in addressing wrongs. The two institutions are set up differently because they're intended to do different things.

Courts, for good reason, look at narrow issues, narrowly and technically, to answer narrow and specific questions of fact and law. Although each witness swears to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, such a full truth is far beyond the scope of a court proceeding.

Commissions such as this one, however, attempt to look at a broader range of facts and context, causes and consequences. The opportunity for retribution is one price a society might have to pay to get at the larger truth, although commissioners emphasize that the two need not be mutually exclusive.

At this point, I've got a bit of other work to do so I'm going to call it a day. I do not know when or if I'll get to continue this effort; all I can say is to keep checking back.

I hope this has been helpful.

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.

As we reported last night, the commission brings its hammer down hardest on the Greensboro Police Department, and in hindsight it's not hard to see why.

p. 7: ... the single most important element that contributed to the violent outcome of the confrontation was the absence of police. Well, see my note in the previous post regarding individual responsibility. That said, it seems obvious in hindsight that having even a couple of uniformed cops between the two groups might have led the Klan/Nazis who were walking back to their cars to make a different choice, to leave the trunk lid closed. The commission certainly thinks that that visibility had created a different outcome at the two groups' previous confrontation, in July 1979 in the mill town of China Grove. (A detective and a department photographer were present but did not make their presence as police officers known, the report notes. I don't recall whether those two, Detective Jerry Cooper and J.T. Matthews, are still here, and I don't know whether they gave statements to the commission. But I'd love to know how they feel about their roles in the incident. Helplessness? Remorse? Both and more?)

UPDATE: We now have all installments of the report posted on our site; a link to each installment can be found in the gray box on this page. As I said earlier, feel free to follow along at home and comment here on this blog.

Still p. 7: The commissioners cite a number of factors they think should have led Greensboro police to expect violence, including "discussions among the Klan and Nazis about bringing guns." The exec summary hasn't mentioned this fact yet (it does on the next page), but the department also had an informant, the late Eddie Dawson, in the Klan.

p. 8: The police were fully aware of all this information, and in fact their own paid informant, the late Klansman Eddie Dawson, acted in a leadership role in bringing the two sides into contact. Dawson's police handlers had full knowledge of this role.

That's got to be hard for cops to swallow. I've dealt with whistle-blowing sources whose anonymity I've had to protect, but I'm certain that doesn't even come close to the moral complexities and ambiguities involved in running an undercover informant. (Just ask the FBI, at least one of whose informants in New England years ago also was working as a hit man at the time.) I would imagine that there may come a point at which the informant has to be pulled or great damage will be done ... and that that point often is visible only in hindsight.

Still, that fact doesn't excuse the litany of police failures listed on p. 8. Even after shots were fired, the commissioners say, police didn't intervene or stop most of the cars fleeing the scene. Why not?

And here's where the commission gets into some of the issues we reported last night: the department's "stunning lack of curiosity in planning for the safety of the event." pp. 8-9 assembles a number of items suggesting that police let their actions be guided by informant Dawson, rather than presuming the possibility of violence and planning accordingly.

Indeed, the litany on p. 9 of Dawson's behavior, all known to the police, makes for a formidable indictment: Informants are by definition party to criminal activity, but we find that the decision to pay an informant and fail to intervene when he takes a leadership role to provoke and orchestrate a criminal act, with the full knowledge of police handlers, is negligent and unconscionably bad policing.

The handlers aren't named in this section, but, as they say on TV, that's gonna leave a mark.

pp. 9-10 of the summary address the question raised earlier of why uniformed officers weren't present, and almost immediately it rewrites a bit of local lore: It attributes to Deputy Chief Walter A. "Sticky" Burch, later Guilford County sheriff, rather than to then-Capt. Trevor Hampton, the decision for Greensboro police to keep a "low profile" -- -- keeping uniformed police at a distance from demonstrators, with whom the department did not have a good relationship -- on the morning of Nov. 3. The summary doesn't elaborate on the significance of this fact, but the decision's being made at a higher level in the department than captain suggests that it was more than a mere tactical error.

Not that the tactic was well executed. In a vacuum, the commissioners agree, some sort of "low profile" was indeed a good idea, but ...

... the police discussion of this low-profile approach ... assumes that there were only two choices available: full presence in riot gear or removing officers to locations too far away to intervene when guns were fired.

Put simply, that was a false choice.

The next question, of course, is whether the police decision to remain at a distance, although more than just a tactical error, was supervisory negligence or something more sinister. And reading between the lines, one might fairly surmise that the commission has wrestled hard with this question:

Since intelligence from multiple sources indicated that violence was likely, police clearly were negligent because they took no action to prevent it. However, nearly all commissioners further believe that the totality of evidence reasonably suggests to the layperson that mere negligence alone is not an adequate explanation. No evidence has
been found that indicates there was any conspiracy between the police or between the police and the Klan/Nazis to kill the demonstrators. However, the knowledge and subsequent deliberate actions (and failures to act) on the part of key police officers directly contributed to the violence that the police knew was reasonably foreseeable. Even though no legal basis for law enforcement involvement in a conspiracy was
found in the trials, the majority of commissioners believe there was intentionality among some in the department to fail to provide adequate information or to take steps to adequately protect the marchers. Not every officer was party to either the intelligence or key decisions, but certainly [Detective Jerry] Cooper, [Detective R.L.] Talbott, Capt. Byron Thomas (all from the Criminal Intelligence Division), [Capt. Larry] Gibson, [Lt. and future Chief Sylvester] Daughtry (from the Field Services Bureau), Lt. Paul Spoon, and [Capt. Trevor] Hampton (from the Field Operations Bureau) all were present in intelligence meetings and participated in key decision-making.

A majority of commissioners, then, believe some of these officers deliberately did less than their best to protect the marchers. That claim opens up a Rashomon-like set of possible ways of interpreting what happened, depending on exactly what the officers did and didn't do, contrasted with what people with different perspectives and life experiences might have reasonably expected them to do or not do. That, in turn, means disagreement not only about the facts and their significance, but about the level of good or evil to be attached to each.

That reality, or set of multiple realities, lies, I think, at the heart of why the events of Nov. 3, 1979, continue to divide this city. (It might even have contributed substantially to the outcome of the trials, despite the jurors' oaths to consider only the evidence in front of them, although I'm just speculating about that.) To its credit, the commission grasps that significance:

While nearly all Commissinoers find sufficient evidence that some officers were deliberately absent, we also unanimously concur that the conclusions one draws from this evidence is [sic] likely to differ with one's life experience. Those in our community whose lived experience is of government institutions that fail to protect their interests are understandably more likely to see "conspiracy." Those accustomed to reliable government protection are more likely to see "negligence," or no wrongdoing on the part of law enforcement officers. We believe this is one reason the community is polarized in interpreting this event."

And with that, I'll take a quick lunch break.

pp. 10-11: Commissioners here quickly dispose of a longstanding misimpression: that police weren't on the scene because of a misunderstanding about the time and place of the planned parade. And they do so using the Police Department's own records and testimony: Indeed, internal police records show that the discrepancy [about the parade's starting point] was repeatedly discussed in several police planning meetings and it was repeatedly emphasized that the starting point was to be at Everitt and Carver.

'Morning all.

I understand the TRC site was down earlier, possibly swamped by visitor traffic. I believe I may bear some responsibility for that problem (he said, blushing): Before I went to bed last night, I posted a short item about the report to the online community Metafilter. When its denizens, sometimes referred to as MeFites, decide to look at something en masse, they can create some serious Web traffic, and that might be what happened. Since I posted, the item already has drawn 20 comments, the tone of which will sound familiar to anyone who has followed the local discussion of the events of Nov. 3.

I'm going to start with the exec summary and keep going 'til I'm done with the report. I'll do a minimum of one post per section (I may update a post with multiple points/observations). Feel free to comment at any point, particularly if you have a question about something I've written or think I might be missing or misinterpreting something.

For those who might care, here's my background on this subject:

I was a sophomore in college when the shootings happened. I did not arrive in Greensboro until the spring of '87. One of my first assignments here was to cover the Klan march here that spring, the first since the shootings. At that time, I was immersed in the history of the event. Since then, I've done little reporting on it.

In the mid-1990s, an online acquaintance tipped me that the Justice Department had finally declassified its files on the case. I filed a Freedom of Information Act request seeking copies, and I had to nurse that request for better than two years before we finally got them -- if memory serves, in mid-1999, just in time for my colleague Lorraine Ahearn to write about them for the 20th anniversary of the shootings. I didn't do any reporting off the files then, and I've not written anything about the shootings since that I can recall.

Executive summary:

p. 2: "We ... acknoledg[e] that healing, hope and reconciliation are long-term goals that must take place across what currently are deep divides of distrust and skepticism in our community." They're not kidding themselves, then.

p. 3: " ... serious limitations in the resources available to us, as well as fear of and hostility toward our process, have restricted our ability to review all the evidence available." I'd be interested in knowing precisely what evidence commissioners believe exists that they haven't had access to.

Findings & conclusions, p. 6: Well, let's not mess around: "[We find] that on the morning of Nov. 3, 1979, members of the Klan/Nazi caravan headed for Greensboro with malicious intent. At a minimum, they planned to disrupt the parade and assault the demonstrators (by throwing eggs), violating the marchers' constitutional rights to free speech and assembly."

Translation: We think there was a criminal conspiracy.

"Further, we believe ... in order to be victorious in any violence that occurred." (I'm not going to retype long passages verbatim; I hope you can read along.) So the Klan/Nazis intended to start a fight and win it, although the last sentence of that passage also can be interpreted to mean that they were prepared to act in self-defense if someone else started a fight.

Which would be legal. And, as it turned out, was their defense in court.

Still on p. 6: But not all caravan members bear equal responsibility. We find the heaviest burden of responsibility is on those (Roland Wood, Coleman Pridmore, Jack Fowler, David Matthrews, and Jerry Paul Smith) who, after they returned to their cars and their path of exit was cleared, went to the trunk of the last car to retrieve weapons. They then fired at demonstrators, fatally wounding [four who were unarmed] ... Sampson had a handgun, and was firing it when he was fatally shot.

And that's where the self-defense argument falls apart. The five named men had walked back to their cars, apparently safely. Their "path of exit was cleared" (although the summary doesn't say how or by whom, or how it previously had been obstructed). They chose to open the car trunk. They chose to pull out weapons. And they chose to start the shooting (between two and five shots before any CWP members returned fire, the commissioners say elsewhere on the page), apparently in the absence of any direct, immediate threat.

If you believe in individual responsibility, there's the nut of the whole thing right there ... because last I checked, we don't shoot people in this country for saying unpopular things, even when (as the commission suggests elsewhere) those things are naive to the point of stupidity.

Still on p. 6: WVO/CWP: We also find that some, albeit lesser, responsibility must lie with the demonstrators who beat on the caravan cars as they passed. No kidding. If you damage the car, it's a crime, and it almost certainly created a level of uneasiness among the occupants that made violence more likely. But, as noted above, the Klan-Nazi folks had a clear path to leave and chose not to take it.

11:04 a.m.: Eh. Got tied up on the phone. Will resume shortly.

p. 7: The Commission finds that the WVO leadership was very naive about the level of danger posed by their rhetoric and the Klan's propensity for violence, and they even dismissed concerns raised by their own members.

A friend of mine likened the Communists' rhetoric to "yelling fire in a crowded theater," the classic example in constitutional law of speech that isn't protected by the First Amendment. I don't think the comparison is apt. The situation it describes doesn't get protection because of the likely danger to innocent third parties, rather than because of the likelihood of violent retaliation from the party to whom the speech is directed.

As I said above, this is supposed to be a country where we don't shoot people for things they say. But when you say something that could be interpreted as a death threat, and you say it about, and to, a group -- the Klan -- with a documented history of extreme violence (much of it never subject to legal consequence), you have to be aware of the possibility.

However, we also find that this miscalculation was caused in part by the Greensboro Police Department, which did not inform either the WVO or Morningside residents about the Klan's plans and its coordination with other racist groups.

Fair enough. But that said, the communists' anti-Klan rhetoric didn't start on Nov. 3. It had been going on for a long time, and you didn't need the Greensboro Police Department to tell you that the Klan could get angry and violent. At least, I didn't think you did, but then I grew up near here (Charlotte). aMany of the demonstrators didn't. Maybe they thought of the Klan as more caricature than threat. I don't know.

My colleague Margaret Banks just called to say that distribution of the Greensboro Truth & Reconciliation Commission report, initially scheduled for early in the 6 p.m. ceremony this evening, has now been bumped back to 7:30. She says they have copies of the executive summary out on a table, but the table is being guarded so no one can get a copy.

I am not making this up.

For the record, as of right this minute (6:03 p.m.), there's nothing new up on the commission's Web site.

Stay tuned for updates.

UPDATE: Full report now up on GTRC's Web site. We've got a story up on our home page. Although the timestamp on it is stuck at 7:37 p.m., it is being updated regularly.

UPDATE: I'll be analyzing the full report starting in the morning -- and blogging on whatever I find as I read. Y'all come.