Thank you to Netgalley and Amistad for providing me with a digital ARC of this book. 

Morningside: The 1979 Greensboro Massacre and the Struggle for an American City’s Soul is a deeply salient account of the Greensboro Massacre, where a protest led by a local chapter of the Communist Workers’ Party (CWP) against the Klan culminated in an armed ambush by the KKK and Neonazis and ended with the deaths of five people on November 3, 1979. 

As a Greensboro native who rarely ever heard of the 1979 Massacre growing up, I found this book to be devastatingly eye-opening and extremely detailed in its account of the event. Shetterly paints a colorful picture of a critical and overlooked point of American history through the lens of the Greensboro Massacre, when tensions between ideologies were on the verge of boiling over—post-McCarthy communist organizing, the blossoming white power militia movement in the wake of the Vietnam War, and the storied fight of multiracial coalitions in the South to create a better future in America. He also delves into the deep, conflicted history of the city of Greensboro, a city precariously balancing on a knife’s edge. 

The violence committed on November 3, 1979 is unfortunately all too familiar to us now in an era where gun violence has become a startlingly regular occurrence. It has been almost a decade since a white supremacist killed nine people at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina. It has been seven years since the 2017 Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, where a neo-Nazi drove his car into a crowd of counter protestors and killed Heather Heyer. Within the last several years, we have seen an increasingly violent response from police and right-wing agitators towards peaceful protests all across the United States. This is a story about America’s past and present—and a plea for our future. 

While the individuals whose lives were abruptly cut short that morning never received justice, their deaths did not snuff out their work. Their families, friends and loved ones continued their fight for justice and push for equality, only deepened by that loss. Despite efforts to paper over the event with corporate amiability and deliberate obfuscation by the Greensboro Police Department, the FBI, and other prominent Greensboro institutions, their loss and their memories continue to persist. 

A searing look at an overlooked act of racial and political violence, Aran Shetterly’s Morningside unravels the tensions between the multiracial fight for justice and the nation’s dark underbelly of white supremacy which still continue today. It is a call to reckon with the devastation of America’s racial past in order to move forward with clear eyes towards a brighter future.