The Rev. Nelson Johnson, a labor activist in North Carolina who was injured in the 1979 shooting in which white supremacists in Greensboro killed five protesters and wounded 11, and who later formed a commission to help his community process the tragedy, died on Sunday at his home in Greensboro. He was 81.
His wife, Joyce Johnson, said the cause was complications of kidney failure.
What came to be known as the Greensboro Massacre unfolded on Nov. 3, 1979. Mr. Johnson and his wife were local leaders of the Communist Workers Party, a Maoist group that had split from the Communist Party several years earlier, and they had increasingly focused their efforts on fighting an upsurge in white supremacist activity in their state.
That summer, they had led a confrontation with members of the Ku Klux Klan in China Grove, a town near Charlotte, where the Klan was sponsoring a screening of “Birth of a Nation,” the 1915 film that casts the hate group in a positive light.
As a follow-up, the Johnsons organized a “Death to the Klan” march through Greensboro, the city where the anti-Jim Crow sit-in movement had begun in 1960. Camera crews from local television stations were on hand, and several marchers were armed.
As the marchers gathered outside a public housing complex, about 40 members of the Klan, as well as members of the American Nazi Party, arrived in a caravan of cars and began harassing them.
Fights broke out, and someone began shooting. Within just 88 seconds, four marchers lay dead and another 12 were injured, one of them fatally. Mr. Johnson suffered a knife wound to his arm. The police had been standing nearby, but they did not intervene until the shooting stopped.
(The event captured national news, but only briefly; the next day revolutionaries took 53 Americans hostage in Tehran, the beginning of a 444-day crisis.)
Two criminal trials of the Klan and Nazi Party members followed, one at the state level and one federal. In both cases, juries found for the defendants. A civil trial in 1985 found eight defendants liable in the death of a single marcher, Michael Nathan.
By then, Mr. Johnson had begun to move away from his radical beliefs and toward a religious calling. After earning an undergraduate degree in political science from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical University in 1986, he received a master’s in divinity from the Virginia Union School of Theology in 1991.
He returned to Greensboro to preach, and in 1991 he helped found the Beloved Community Center, a nonprofit dedicated to community empowerment and social justice.
Inspired by the efforts of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in post-apartheid South Africa, Mr. Johnson and his wife spent years calling for a similar program to look into the Greensboro Massacre. But government and many private groups resisted, worried that it would reopen old wounds.
Mr. Johnson and his wife pushed ahead and finally formed the seven-member fact-finding commission in 2005. The real risk, he said, was leaving those wounds unexamined.
“These deep wounds live just beneath the surface,” he told The Washington Post in 2005. He added that “it’s really not recognizing why this city hasn’t come to terms with racial oppression and the treatment of people. Here’s an opportunity to be truthful.”
After taking testimony from a wide range of witnesses, including former members of the Klan, the commission released its final report in 2006. It placed most of the blame for the violence on the Greensboro Police Department.
“The majority of commissioners,” the report said, “find the single most important element that contributed to the violent outcome of the confrontation was the absence of police.”
Nelson Napoleon Johnson was born on April 25, 1943, in Littleton, a town northeast of Raleigh near the Virginia border. His parents, James and Zelma (Thorne) Johnson, were farmers.
After graduating from high school in 1961, he served in the Air Force for four years and then enrolled at North Carolina A&T, a historically Black institution in Greensboro.
He quickly became involved in local civil rights and labor activism. He led organizing efforts for campus cafeteria workers and founded the Greensboro Association for Poor People, a group in sync with efforts by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to expand the Black rights struggle to economic inequality.
In 1969, one of the members of the group was elected senior class president at a city high school. The school denounced the student as a radical and refused to seat him. Mr. Johnson and his association turned out to protest, and the situation escalated, to the point where the mayor called in the state’s National Guard.
Violence ensued, and one protester, Willie Grimes, was killed, though it was unclear where the shot came from. Several high school and college students, including Mr. Johnson, were arrested in what came to be known as the A&T Uprising.
Mr. Johnson married Joyce Hobson a few days afterward. Along with her, he is survived by their daughters, Akua Johnson-Matherson and Ayo Samori Johnson, and two grandchildren.
The city of Greensboro did not participate in or support the truth and reconciliation commission, and it long resisted Mr. Johnson’s call for an official recognition of the event. Finally, in 2015, it relented, placing a historical marker near the site.
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