The following comes from This Day in Civil Rights History, written by Ben Beard and NewSouth editor Randall Williams:

On this day in civil rights history, Ku Klux Klansmen and Nazis killed five people in North Carolina, in what would become known as ���the Greensboro Massacre.���

Weeks earlier, the Workers��� Viewpoint Organization had planned an anti-Klan rally to be held in Morningside Homes, a black housing project in Greensboro. In the late 1970s, the WVO, a biracial organization, helped textile unions in North Carolina negotiate better working conditions. The WVO grew out of the civil rights and antiwar movements of the late 1960s as activists sought to continue their work in the post-civil rights era.

Under WVO auspices, poor black and white textile workers built a coalition to improve their situation. On occasion, the KKK threatened the union leaders and, as an act of defiance, the WVO planned a rally against the Klan. The activists were also planning to announce the new name of their organization: the Communist Workers��� Party.

The so-called ���Death to the Klan��� rally was to be a combination social protest, political gathering, and economic declaration. Learning of the event, members of the KKK and the American Nazi Party, both then active in middle North Carolina, planned a competing anticommunism event.

The anti-Klan rally began around 11 a.m. Soon afterwards, carloads of Klansmen and Nazis disrupted the rally. Television news cameras were present, and their film of the incident showed the armed Klansmen and Nazis getting out of their cars and, with guns drawn, approaching the anti-Klan parade, targeting members of the Communist Workers Party and firing point-blank at them. The entire incident lasted only a few minutes. At the end, five leaders of the rally lay dead���Caesar Cauce, Mike Nathan, Sandi Smith, Bill Sampson, and James Waller���with ten injured.
Survivors of the attack alleged a conspiracy, and with good reason. The local police, who were warned of the potential for trouble, were suspiciously absent at the time of the attack. Informants in the Klan had relayed information about the potential attack, but no one had done anything about it. In the subsequent state and then federal trials, however, the murderers were found not guilty on all charges. In a civil trial, the City of Greensboro paid some of the survivors a settlement without admitting any wrongdoing.

The Greensboro Massacre caused a national outrage and led to the formation of the National Anti-Klan Network (later the Center for Democratic Renewal). Some 100 civil rights, church, labor, and community organizations joined in the network. In the summer of 2004, Greensboro launched the Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission to investigate the incident.

This Day in Civil Rights History is available from your favorite local or online book retailer, directly from NewSouth Books, or from Amazon.com.

It’s too late for this year, but if you’re interested in civil rights history and will be in Birmingham next summer, save this: Birmingham educator Barry McNealy conducts “Milestones Walking Tours” of the sites made famous in 1963′s civil rights protests in downtown Birmingham. Included are the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church where the four girls died in the bombing; the Kelly Ingram Park where Bull Connor unleashed dogs and turned firehoses on demonstrators, the nearby federal courthouse, the jail where Martin Luther King Jr. wrote his famous letter, and other sites, including the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute. This year McNealy gave his tour at 10 a.m. every Saturday in June and July. For more information about future tours, call 205-328-9696.

John Hulett, the first black office holder in one of the historic Black Belt counties of Alabama, and the co-founder of the Lowndes County Freedom Organization, died August 21 at his home in Mosses, Alabama. He was 78 and had been in poor health for several years.

Lowndes County was and is one of the poorest counties in the U.S., despite being adjacent to the state capital. The county lies between Dallas and Montgomery counties and in 1965 the famous Selma to Montgomery march passed through Lowndes. Civil rights martyrs Viola Liuzzo and Jonathan Daniels were both murdered in Lowndes, and prior to the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, there was not a single registered black voter in the county, though the population was 80 percent African American.

Hulett and his fellow activists in the Lowndes County Freedom Organization took their lives in their hands every day to challenge both state power and the unofficial terror of the Ku Klux Klan. But they prevailed, and the black panther they chose as their ballot symbol in Alabama elections was an inspiration to Stokeley Carmichael and other young activists who poured into the Black Belt to help Hulett and others register voters in the mid-1960s. The symbol was later adopted by the founders of the Black Panther Party.

Visitors to Hulett’s small office in the Lowndes Courthouse after he had become sheriff were startled to see hanging on his wall a vicious-looking wood-handled whip that he had inherited with the office. He kept it there, he said, as reminder that it had been used by his predecessors to beat Lowndes’ blacks for years. As sheriff for two decades, Hulett himself often did not wear a gun, and the county was so small and so poor that he often cooked the jail inmates’ meals himself.

Later he also won election as the first African American probate judge in the county, and he mentored a generation of Alabama black office holders who followed in his footsteps. Today, thanks to the gains of the Voting Rights Act, Alabama has more elected black officials than any state in the union.

He is to be buried Saturday, August 26, 2006.

The Fine Arts Theatre in Los Angeles will screen Voices of Civil Rights, a documentary by Jeffrey Tuchman, on July 15 at 7:00 PM; tickets are $7.00. The film follows a group of journalists on a 70-day bus ride through country, interviewing people about the civil rights movement. The stories that the journalists collected are now archived at the Library of Congress. The documentary will also air Saturday, February 12 at 8:00 PM on the History Channel.

The House voted yesterday to renew the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which prevented votes from having to pay or take tests in order to qualify to vote. You can learn more about the Voting Rights Act from the U.S. Department of Justice Civil Right Division website.

On July 17, the NAACP will honor civil rights attorney Fred Gray, NewSouth author of Bus Ride for Justice, with the William Robert Ming Advocacy Award for his long-standing civil rights contributions.

Gray, born in Montgomery, Alabama, grew up to become one of only two black lawyers in Montgomery in the 1950s. When his friend Rosa Parks was arrested in 1955 for violating the segregated seating ordinance on a Montgomery bus, twenty-six-year-old Martin Luther King, Jr., was chosen to lead the Montgomery Bus Boycott, and twenty-four-year-old Fred Gray became his–and the movement���s–lawyer. Gray���s legal victory in the federal courts ended the boycott 381 days later. Over the four decades since, Gray has won scores of civil rights cases in education, voting rights, transportation, health, and other areas. He represented the Freedom Riders, the Selma-to-Montgomery marchers, the victims of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, and many more.

Gray spoke about the NAACP’s award, to be presented in Washington, DC, in a Montgomery Advertiser article earlier last week: “I became a lawyer to do the kind of work the NAACP did, and it’s a great honor to receive this award,” he said. “They have been with me throughout my entire career and given me the opportunity to defend them so they could be able to do business in this state.”

Fred Gray chronicled his civil rights career in his gripping memoir Bus Ride for Justice; he has also chronicled his work with victims of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study. Both of these books are available directly from NewSouth, from Amazon.com or from your favorite local or online book retailer. Limited signed copies of Bus Ride for Justice are also available from the NewSouth Bookstore, toll-free (866) 639-7688.