Words from Inside My Head

…since coming to realize, nearly fifty years after the event

that there had been an event;  the Greensboro Massacre, 

which happened in November of 1979, almost exactly three years

before the date I myself was sexually assaulted, something which

also happened in Greensboro, North Carolina, in 1982.

I’m embarrassed to admit that, at that time, I lived in my own
ignorance, and I was not at all tuned in to what Greensboro
had meant back in the 1960’s, let alone 1979, and that although
the event was a major news story at the time, I was mindlessly
unaware of it, back then and for years afterwards,

although, ironically, it was because of the Greensboro police’s treatment
of me that my initial waking up was initiated, although it took years
for me to surrender the fictions about life as I’d believed it. Stumbling recently onto
these coincidental timings, started me wondering if they might explain why
on earth the Greensboro police had treated me as if I were an offender

rather than the victim of a crime. In my conspiracy theory, an elderly
man, we’ll call Ernest, the sales rep who’d been calling on bookstores in 
Greensboro, North Carolina long before me, was an outspoken socialist and  
somewhat of an activist, living in North Carolina. The company which 
he’d founded, and which I worked for then, was based in my Ohio

hometown; and way back in the 1930’s, he had chaired the Socialist party
there, where he’d campaigned for Governor on its slate (and of course lost)
(In some minds, Socialism and Communism are the same) He would
have stood up for anti-racism and other things the (fairly naive)
victims of the Massacre* had been protesting for, though not

for the violence they had spouted, in trying to shepherd the KKK to leave
town, and though most likely he himself hadn’t been there, he seemed
likely to be one to have spoken out loudly about this kind of thing, using
the written word in local papers or maybe face to face to the police, if 
they’d ever happened to meet up with him on one of the many nights 

he’d spent, sleeping in his working van in the parking lot of an independent
bookstore he was calling on; and if so, they probably wouldn’t have liked 
what he might have said. It’s not unlikely he’d have been there in the 60’s and 
70’s, the times when the Greensboro police were not at their best, and now
here they were, after the Greensboro Massacre, accused of being friendly

with the the KKK and neo-Nazis’, who’d killed five people there  (it’s complicated
– read about it  here) Perhaps the detectives who were working on my case –
though who, as far as I can tell, had not actively participated in the Greensboro
Massacre – thought I was a fan or follower of Ernest’s. Which I might have been, had I not still believed that the police were everybody’s friend, there for the

protection of all the law-abiding white, brown and black citizens, or if I’d known
what protesting meant, or if I’d been aware of the Greensboro lunch-counter sit-ins
in 1960, or if I’d known if Ernest might have been protesting, or if I’d known more than I did, and if I wasn’t still encased in the up North white fantasies I’d been born and bred with. But back then, I was still clueless; in my case, I had called the police, thinking

they would help, not knowing what the atmosphere in Greensboro was back then, so maybe after all, this conspiracy theory doesn’t help explain their treatment of me, at all. It may have simply have been because it was 1982, in Greensboro, North Carolina, and that’s just how it was, because that’s how Greensboro police, like the police most everywhere, tended to treat people. And maybe this was just a chance to tell

about the Greensboro Massacre. 

*CWP – Communist Working Party

.