RALEIGH, N.C. _ Decades after five people died at the hands of Nazis and Klan members, a North Carolina city is considering a formal apology.
A proposed resolution posted to the city of Greensboro website calls on leaders to apologize to the victims, families and community members impacted by the violent 1979 clash known as the Greensboro Massacre.
In addition to addressing the attacks, the proposal would create scholarships in the victims' memories, according to an agenda for Tuesday's virtual City Council meeting.
If approved, it could be a step toward healing in the North Carolina city.
On Nov. 3, 1979, Communist Workers Party members met at the Morningside Homes public housing complex for a demonstration called "Death to the Klan," McClatchy News previously reported.
"Word spread to members of the Ku Klux Klan and American Nazis in other parts of the state and they arrived with guns in their trunks," the North Carolina Highway Historical Marker Program said on its website. "Events unfolded in rapid order, with shots fired by both sides."
Five protesters were shot and killed, and at least 10 others were hurt, McClatchy News reported.
In 1980 and 1984, the city of Greensboro says all-white juries acquitted several people accused of murdering the slain protesters and hurting others. Also in the 1980s, a jury in a civil case found "six members of the Ku Klux Klan and the American Nazi Party and two Greensboro police officers liable for wrongful death in connection with the Greensboro Massacre," officials say.
In recent years, the City Council says it passed a "statement of regret" about the massacre, voted in support of a historic marker at the site and supported an "impromptu" apology introduced by council member Sharon Hightower.
"I felt like we needed to make the effort," Hightower said, according to the News & Record. "This takes it a step further. It really is intentional and focused on the areas of hurt that really will speak to the concerns that the participants had from 1979."
The city in its latest proposal offers an apology for the "failure of any government action to effectively overcome the hate that precipitated the violence, to embrace the sorrow that resulted from the violence, and to reconcile all the vestiges of those heinous events in the years subsequent to 1979."
The resolution also would create five annual scholarships for graduating high school students. Each of the awards, worth $1,979, is in memory of a massacre victim, the city said on its meeting agenda.
The potential resolution "has resulted from years of advocacy by survivors and community members whose lives were shattered by the events of November 3, 1979, its aftermath, and the decades-long unwillingness of the city to acknowledge the complicity of the local police," community groups said Monday in a news release.
Two organizations, Beloved Community Center and the Pulpit Forum of Greensboro & Vicinity, are incorporating statements from survivors in a news conference Wednesday, the day after the council meeting.
