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Remembering Rev. Nelson Johnson and the Historical Record
His clarifying insistence on truth telling will be sorely missed during a time when people are being threatened, demonized, and fired for telling American history’s multiple truths.
Mar 02, 2025
On Saturday, February 22, one of America’s great civil rights and labor activists was laid to rest in Greensboro, North Carolina. It’s possible you haven’t heard of Reverend Nelson Johnson, though Reverend Dr. William Barber II, the dynamic founder of Repairers of the Breach, the “co-anchor” of the new Poor People’s Campaign, and professor of the practice of public theology and public policy, places him (and his wife Joyce Johnson) in the rank of “Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass, Mother Jones and Martin Luther King Jr.” It’s salient in this moment, too, that the social, racial, and economic rifts that sparked the 1979 Greensboro Massacre and claimed the lives of five of Reverend Johnson’s fellow activists—scarring him for life—continue to divide our country today.
His clarifying insistence on truth telling will be sorely missed during a time when people are being threatened, demonized, and fired for telling American history’s multiple truths. Given this, it’s imperative to correct the historical errors and omissions in a recent New York Times obituary for Reverend Johnson.
The obituary reports that when, just prior to the November 3, 1979 murders, a caravan of Ku Klux Klansmen and American Nazis arrived at the start of a march Nelson Johnson and his fellow communists were mounting against racism, the police were “standing nearby.” This isn’t true. The police were, by official order, absent and out of sight and therefore unable to stop the approaching violence. What makes this particularly alarming is that at least three law enforcement agencies—the Greensboro Police Department, the FBI, and the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms—had elicited enough information from informants and infiltrators to stop the white supremacist attack before it happened. Every serious investigation of the November 3, 1979 events over the last quarter century acknowledges this.
When the facts of the Greensboro Massacre are presented clearly, it’s easy to see how the white power politics, law enforcement bias, and political opportunism that led to that tragedy illuminate the time we are in.
Klansmen and Nazis inflicting violence on African Americans, Jews, Catholics, Latinos, Native Americans and left activists is a horrific though unsurprising fact of American history. However, we must not omit from this history the responsibility of the public officials charged with protecting and serving all our citizens. The very foundation of our democratic system rests on the implicit and explicit trust we place in state officials and institutions to protect us in situations like the one that led to the Greensboro Massacre.
The Greensboro Massacre reminds us, as we are being reminded again today, that the only way to preserve that trust is to hold officials accountable when they betray it and commit crimes. Sadly, our justice system did not find the vigilante white supremacists or complicit officers of the law criminally responsible for the November 3, 1979 murders. Only a federal civil suit brought a sliver of justice to the tragedy. The New York Times obituary notes the civil judgement that found eight defendants liable for death but does not tell readers who they were: Five were Klansmen and Nazis, one was a police informant (and former FBI informant), and two were Greensboro police officers. This judgement reminds us that we must continuously resist the influence of reactionary white supremacist politics in our law enforcement agencies and justice system.
The obituary concludes with the installation of the 2015 North Carolina state historical marker commemorating the massacre. Left unreported, however, is the tenacious and hopeful work, not only by Reverend Johnson, but by Greensboro’s civil society, to set their history right. Thanks to these groundbreaking efforts, which included a two-year Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the City of Greensboro offered two apologies for the massacre: one in 2017, following the deadly Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, and another in 2020, in the wake of George Floyd’s murder. This second apology explicitly acknowledged that the Greensboro Police Department could have prevented the violence on November 3, 1979. Movingly, the city established a scholarship fund in the names of the five slain activists.
When the facts of the Greensboro Massacre are presented clearly, it’s easy to see how the white power politics, law enforcement bias, and political opportunism that led to that tragedy illuminate the time we are in.
It’s also important to remember, however, that Reverend Johnson’s historical significance is far greater than the trauma of November 3, 1979. His 60 years of racial and economic justice activism may be seen as an essential bridge, spanning from the revolutionary visions of Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X to Dr. William Barber’s current mobilizations on behalf of our nation’s poor. Like both these leaders, Johnson saw race and economics as inextricably linked. And like them, he never stopped trying to fix the root causes of inequality in America for all people suffering predatory capitalism. He came to consider demonizing others, even one’s enemies, as a mistake. That revelation would lead him away from communism to liberation theology and the idea of revolutionary, Christian love. This philosophical shift, however, didn’t transform Johnson from radical to reformer; he never stopped believing that true equality and justice in the United States will only come with fundamental changes to our values, our institutions, and our economy.
Reverend Johnson’s community-based work has inspired labor and racial justice leaders all around the country. Though his name might not, until now, have been known widely, his work with unions and churches and social justice organizations has been buttressing grassroots democracy for decades.
The life of this big-hearted farm kid from the Airlie, North Carolina expands the geography, timeline, and scope of the conventional civil rights story. Getting his story right broadens our understanding of American history’s lessons, affirms a powerful faith in equal justice and democracy, embraces the power of community, and rejects the repression of our country’s truths.
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Trump’s Visit to Howell, MI Turned a Dog Whistle Into a Bullhorn
The former president spoke of sending outside police to Detroit to Intimidate voters in a place with a troubling history of white supremacist and far-right activity.
Sep 04, 2024
When former U.S. President Donald Trump announced he would speak in Howell, Michigan on Tuesday, August 20, the dog whistles could be heard loud and clear. It was a signal to the president’s white nationalist supporters that he was still on their side. Howell accrued a reputation for open racism and white supremacism when Ku Klux Klan Grand Dragon Robert E. Miles set up shop just north of the city. Although Miles died in 1992, cross burnings continued, and the house of a farmer who had spoken up for a proposed Drag Bingo event was vandalized with pro-Klan graffiti as recently as 2021.
During Trump’s speech, which was recorded although not open to the public, he fantasized about sending Livingston County police to Detroit to intimidate voters. “I’d love to have them working there [in Detroit] during the election.” Trump defended his appearance in Howell with a rhetorical question: “Who was here in 2021?” The answer was President Joe Biden. Be that as it may, Biden did not decide to campaign in the city a month after neo-Nazis had demonstrated their love for him in the same city.
One month to the day before Trump’s speech, on July 20, neo-Nazis and Klansmen marched through the city of Howell. Neo-Nazis sieg heiled and shouted “We love Hitler! We love Trump!” in a rally that coincided with the former president’s visit to Grand Rapids. On August 17, the day Trump announced his stop in Howell, a similar rally occurred in Brighton. Many Michiganders who saw pictures or videos of the rallies probably naively shook their heads at what they imagine is a purely Howell or Livingston County phenomenon.
The history of white supremacism and neo-Nazism in Michigan is not just Howell’s history, but all of our history.
Yet, those who say that neo-Nazis and Klansmen aren’t who “we” (here meaning Michiganders outside of Howell) are, could not be more incorrect, in fact, dangerously so. The Ku Klux Klan flexed its political muscles across the state throughout the 1920s. In 1925, the Klan-backed candidate Charles Bowles almost won the mayoralty of Detroit. The Michigan KKK pushed a statewide ballot issue that would have banned parochial schools in a fit of bigotry against Catholics. Prominent Michiganders such as Dan F. Gerber, founder of Gerber Baby Foods, were Klan members.
Although the 1920s Klan declined amidst sexual and financial scandal, its torch was picked up in Michigan by the Black Legion. The Legion, immortalized in a 1937 Humphrey Bogart film, launched violent attacks against Catholics, immigrants, Blacks, and labor unions. In his autobiography, Malcolm X states that his father was murdered by the Legion. The group was blamed for a total of around 50 murders. Prominent political figures were counted as members, including the mayor and chief of police of Highland Park. It was only a federal investigation brought about by the Legion’s murder of federal employee Charles Poole that ended the group’s reign of terror.
The German American Bund, founded in 1936, was dedicated to spreading the ideas of Nazism in the United States. Like the Legion, the Bund was memorialized in film: 1939’s Confessions of a Nazi Spy. In 2017, the Oscar-nominated documentary A Night at the Gardenrecounted the 20,000 strong rally the Bund held in Madison Square Garden on February 20, 1939. The Bund has multiple Michigan connections. Bund fuhrer Fritz Kuhn worked in a Detroit Ford plant before founding the group. The group also built summer camps for young American Nazis across the United States, including Camp Will and Might in New Jersey, Camp Siegfried in New York, Camp Hindenburg in Wisconsin—and Camp Eichenfeld, about 12 miles north of Pontiac, near US-10.
Camp Eichenfeld bustled during the summer months. The leader of the Detroit Bund John H.B. Schreiber said that the camp, which flew a flag with a Nazi swastika alongside the Stars and Stripes, hosted between 500 and 700 people every weekend. Bundists also packed into the German-American Restaurant on the northeast corner of E. Jefferson and E. Grand Boulevard in Detroit for monthly outings. Today, the story of Detroit’s Nazis is nearly entirely forgotten, buried in old issues of The Detroit News and Detroit Free Press. It was only with assistance from employees at the Burton Historical Collection at the Detroit Public Library that I learned about it. The national Bund reeled under investigations from federal officials before finally closing up shop for good after the U.S. entered World War II.
This was not the end of fascist activities in Michigan, though. Demagogues like Father Charles Coughlin and Christian nationalist Gerald L.K. Smith preached the fascist doctrine in print and over the airwaves. Smith made an unsuccessful run for Senate that garnered over 100,000 votes. A new group, the National Workers League, continued where the Bund had left off. The League was one of the groups that incited a riot against the Sojourner Truth Housing Project, because most of the families living in the project were Black. Parker Sage, the head of the League, and Garland Alderman, the secretary, were arraigned after the riots. Those charges were dropped so that Sage, Alderman, and William Robert Lyman, also of the League, could be indicted in Washington D.C. for sedition. After a 1944 mistrial caused by the death of the presiding judge, the charges against the League members and their co-defendants on the far-right were dropped.
Even members of Congress from Michigan echoed pro-fascist sentiments. Congressman Roy O. Woodruff inserted a letter into the Congressional Record that included the alarming phrase: “We do not need to fear Hitler.” Another Congressman, Clare E. Hoffman, saw a beneficial side to Nazism. The U.S. “might now profit…” he advised, “from what Hitler has done by adopting at least some of his decent methods of production…” Hoffman’s speech was given as France was falling to the Nazis. Two months before Pearl Harbor, Congressman George A. Dondero said in Congress “The greatest danger menacing the United States today is not invasion or attack by the Axis Powers but the trend of socialism and communism.”
Running the license plates of the far-right demonstrators, Livingston police determined that several were not residents of Howell or Livingston County. That should give pause to those living outside of Howell who think they and their neighbors are paragons of tolerance. The history of white supremacism and neo-Nazism in Michigan is not just Howell’s history, but all of our history. We must now decide if it will be our future as well.
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The Rise of White Nationalism Alongside the Second Coming of Trump
The KKK does not choose to support Donald Trump because he is a Republican but because they agree with the ideas that he (and other far-right Republicans) spout.
Sep 18, 2023
In 2020, The Daily Show ran a segment in which statements by Republican leaders, including Donald Trump, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX), and various Fox News personalities were juxtaposed with those made by Ku Klux Klan leaders like former Grand Wizard David Duke and former Imperial Wizard Bill Wilkerson. Fired Fox News commentator Tucker Carson, for instance, screeches manically that, because of immigration, “eventually there will be no more native-born Americans.” Immediately following that comment comes former Grand Wizard Duke saying, “We’ve got to start protecting our race.”
Donald Trump is then shown at a rally (with several Black people behind him wearing “Blacks for Trump” T-shirts) saying about Covid treatments, “If you’re white, you have to go to the back of the line. Discriminating against white people!” Again, there’s a cut to Duke stating, “There is racial discrimination going on right now in this country against massive numbers of white Americans.”
All too sadly, it didn’t take much effort then, nor would it now, to demonstrate that the racist “great replacement theory” that contends white Americans are being radically displaced by immigrants underlies an ever-fiercer defense of so-called Christian nationalist identity. And in our time, that defense has been essential to the rise of what has become the Trumpublican Party and the fierce growth of white racism that’s gone with it.
That Daily Show segment ended with the ultimate irony of Ted Cruz claiming that “the Democrats are the party of the Ku Klux Klan.”
No surprise there. Despite the all-too-obvious convergence of the perspectives of the Republican far right and the white supremacists of the Klan, as well as other avowed racists, Republican party leaders continue to vehemently deny any identification with the KKK or its views. In the process, they regularly issue obligatory statements rejecting bigotry, racism, and anti-semitism, while passionately disavowing Duke and others like him — all disingenuous and empty gestures of the first order.
Recent Republican behavior paints a very different picture. Earlier this year, for instance, Senator Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) got thoroughly twisted in knots trying to defend his statement that “my opinion of a white nationalist, if somebody wants to call them a white nationalist, to me, is an American.” Eventually, he had little choice but to (largely) retreat from that stance — at least officially.
Typically though, whatever they may claim, Representatives Greene and Paul Gosar (R-AZ) had no problem hanging out with racists and neo-Nazis — until, at least, they got caught doing so. In February 2022, they both spoke at the America First Political Action Conference that brought together Islamophobes, hardline nativists, and others on the far right. The gathering was organized by prominent white nationalist and Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes.
Yeah, the very same Fuentes who would have dinner with Donald Trump and Kanye “Ye” West at Mar-a-Lago that November.
Like Trump after that feast, when busted, Greene stated, “I do not know Nick Fuentes. I have never heard him speak. I have never seen a video. I do not know what his views are, so I am not aligned with anything that is controversial.” Despite Trump’s dubious assertation that he didn’t know Fuentes either, he certainly knew his old pal Ye and the controversies generated by a number of his antisemitic statements.
Endorsed by Duke
In 2021, it was Gosar and Greene along with Representatives Matt Gaetz (R-FL) and Louie Gohmert (R-TX) who attempted to launch an America First Caucus that would champion “uniquely Anglo-Saxon political traditions.” A secret paper, uncovered by Punchbowl News, discussed the forming of that caucus and the rationale behind it (addressing the supposed threat of “mass immigration” to “the long-term existential future of America as a unique country with a unique culture and a unique identity”). No need even to say “white,” of course. After the document was revealed and some Republican leaders criticized the initiative, all parties involved backed down (at least in public).
Time after time, key Republican figures have leaned into the ethos and ideological aims of white nationalism. It’s no wonder that America’s racists, including the KKK, have fallen in love with the modern Trumpublican version of the Republican Party. Once upon a time, of course, and for decades thereafter, the Klan was deeply linked to the southern wing of the Democratic Party — the Dixiecrats, as they were then known — but began to switch to the GOP as presidential candidate Barry Goldwater and then presidents Richard Nixon (with his infamous “southern strategy”) and Ronald Reagan exploited white feelings of resentment towards the Civil Rights Movement and the national Democratic Party’s support for racial equality.
In a research paper published by the American Sociological Review, David Cunningham, Justin Farrell, and Rory McVeigh argue that the Klan played a small but meaningful role in the transition of the Democratic South from blue to red. In a number of areas, there was a correlation between the rise of Klan activity and the southern shift to the Republican Party.
It should be noted that, from 1989 to 1992, David Duke even served as a Republican in the Louisiana state legislature. Like most white southerners then, he had been a registered Democrat until, in the late 1980s, he joined a regional shift to the GOP. National party leaders did denounce Duke, but local Republicans were far more ambiguous in their dealings with him. He also ran for the U.S. Senate as a Republican and for president in the 1988 campaign, first on the Democratic and then the Populist Party line. That year, he formally switched to the Republican Party, clearly showing which party at any moment best reflected his white nationalist ideology.
The day after Donald Trump accepted the Republican nomination for president in 2016, Duke announced a run for the Senate in Louisiana, saying, “I believe my time has come. The people of this country, the patriotic, decent, God-fearing people of this country are now right with me.” He promptly also backed Trump, claiming that voting for anyone but him for president would be “treason to your heritage.” And Trump would prove to be in no rush to disavow him (though, in the end, he finally did).
Duke’s time, of course, hadn’t come and he got few votes. Still, more recently, the Klan and the GOP got new life when Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy thought it a good idea to liken African American Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley (D-MA) and Black scholar Ibram Kendi to what he called “the modern grand wizards of the modern KKK.” Klan leaders, he added, would be “proud” of her. He claimed that all he wanted to do was “provoke an open and honest discussion in this country,” presumably about race, a subject in which he had previously never shown the slightest interest.
Ramaswamy is Hindu and of Indian background. His color and his faith put him at odds with the hardcore evangelicals and white nationalists of the GOP base who have supported Trump. He has tried to argue, aware of that constituency’s prejudices, that he also adheres to Christian values and believes in Jesus.
He now claims that he’s personally never met a white supremacist and that racism in the United States mainly comes from the political left. Like other conservatives, he contends that racism is an individual flaw, rather than systemic, structural, and institutional. Despite a plethora of public rallies by avowed racists, a horrifying series of racist-driven mass murders, and a Homeland Security Department report that white supremacist extremists “will remain the most persistent and lethal threat to the Homeland,” Ramaswamy dismisses the danger of white supremacy as a kind of myth. As he put it, “I’m sure the boogeyman white supremacist exists somewhere in America. I’ve just never met him. Never seen one, never met one in my life, right? Maybe I’ll meet a unicorn sooner. And maybe those exist, too.”
Sorry, Vivek. For the Black people who were gunned down in Charleston, South Carolina, Buffalo, New York, and Jacksonville, Florida; the Jews murdered in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; and Latinos slaughtered in El Paso, Texas, white supremacy is no joke.
While being roundly criticized by Democrats and civil rights leaders, Ramaswamy mostly received crickets from fellow Republicans. In interviews, no one ever seems to have asked him about how his pledge to support Donald Trump, should the latter become the Republican presidential nominee, puts him in the position of offering his stamp of approval to a candidate who was actually endorsed by Duke (twice!).
In 2016, Duke infamously announced his fierce support for just one presidential candidate — Donald Trump, of course. In a CNN interview with Jake Tapper on February 28, 2016, Trump initially pretended, all too unconvincingly, that he had never heard of him. (“I don’t know anything about David Duke.”) The next day, after coming under fire, he claimed that he had been wearing “a very bad earpiece” and had misheard the exchange. He then stated, “I disavowed David Duke.”
Trump knew just who Duke was, having discussed him in other interviews in previous years. As early as 1991, he told CNN’s Larry King that support for Duke’s run for governor of Louisiana was “an angry vote,” even if he then failed to address the racism at the heart of Duke’s campaign. In 2000, he did call Duke “a bigot, a racist” on NBC. At the time, Trump was flirting with running for president on the ticket of the Reform Party but blanched when he decided it was too extremist for him to be successful. He clearly grasped that it was in his political interest to distance himself from Duke’s toxicity, but he’s never been aggressively challenged to explain why Duke would have endorsed him in the first place.
“Some Very Fine People on Both Sides”
In 2017, Duke was one of the star attendees of that infamous “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, that brought together hundreds of neo-Nazis, white supremacists, antisemites, and far-right extremists from around the nation. The gathering, which turned violent, leading to the murder of protester Heather Heyer and injuries to many others, was initially called to protest the removal of a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee.
Trump also opposed that statue’s removal. After Heyer’s murder by a white nationalist in a car, he was forced to make a statement in which he voiced distinctly contradictory views, both condemning and praising the extremists. The president famously denounced the “egregious display of hatred, bigotry, and violence on many sides” and added that “you also had some very fine people on both sides.” By creating such a false equivalency, he clearly meant to assuage those in his base who also didn’t want monuments and memorials to Confederates removed.
Duke was thrilled by Trump’s initial statements. He said that the president “was the only person in the entirety of the U.S. government who pointed out that all the fault was not with the people who came there to defend the Robert E. Lee statue, and those who came to defend the right and heritage of white people.”
Duke also endorsed Trump in 2020 (and will likely do so in 2024). Perhaps predicting Trump’s future fallout with Vice President Mike Pence, and seeing Tucker Carlson for who he truly is, he tweeted, “Trump & Tucker is the only way to stop the commie Bolsheviks! It is the only path to beat them! #TrumpTucker2020.”
Duke did not make a mistake. He took in Trump’s attacks on immigrants (of color) and his view that whites are victimized by racism. He undoubtedly felt all too comfortable with the president’s suggestions that Black-led cities are dirty and dangerous places. While Republicans might dance around or denounce the very idea that they were in any way linked to white supremacists, no less the Klan itself, those groups are all too clear on where they stand in relation to the two parties.
Unfortunately for Trump, the party’s Klan troubles go further than just a rhetorical convergence. In August 2023, special counsel Jack Smith charged Trump with four counts related to the January 6th insurrection under a series of laws written during the post-Civil War Reconstruction era — specifically, Section 241 of Title 18 of the U.S. Code, which was originally adopted as part of the 1870 Enforcement Act to combat the Klan and other white terrorist organizations. Those laws were put in place to protect the voting rights and civil rights of newly free African Americans including, as Reuters reporter Hassan Kanu noted, “the right to have one’s vote counted,” the very right that Trump and his criminal enterprise sought to deny.
In the end, the KKK did not choose to support Donald Trump because he was a Republican but because they agreed with the ideas that he (and other far-right Republicans) spout. It is finally time to face the rise in the twenty-first century of a new form of white nationalism and its alignment with many leaders of the Republican Party, including Trump.
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