Aran Shetterly
Unaffiliated independent scholar
FEL-262599-19
Fellowships
Research Programs
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[Grant products]
Totals:
$60,000 (approved)
$60,000 (awarded)
Grant period:
2/1/2019 – 1/31/2020
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Morningside in America: The “Greensboro Massacre” and the Contested History of Race, Class, and Power in the New South
A re-examination of the 1979 murders of five
labor and racial justice organizers in Greensboro, North Carolina, and the
trials of the Klansmen and Neo-Nazi who shot them.
Morningside in America examines the 1979
murders of five labor and racial justice organizers in Greensboro, NC and the
trials of the Klansmen and Neo-Nazis who shot them. In the absence of a shared
narrative, the city’s historically rooted race and class conflicts are
reinforced. My research assembles the facts—many new—to tell a character-driven
story that explores the relationship between the police and the mill owners in
Greensboro and the North Carolina Piedmont; the history of black liberation and
the post-King-assassination radicalization of Civil Rights and New Left
activists during the 70s; the rise of a white power movement in the wake of the
Vietnam war; and the FBI’s complicated, Cold War history with radicals on the
left and the right. As these threads of history intersect and collide, two
narratives of the massacre emerge, one that struggles to account for America’s
long, complicated past, and another, ahistorical narrative, that treats the
murders as an accident.
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