I met a young man this week. He is a student at UNCG (University of North Carolina at Greensboro) a middling sort of university. He also grew up in Greensboro and his parents and one set of grandparents lived there all their lives as well.
This guy claims he has never heard of the Greensboro massacre of 1979.
I was a middle school aged kid on the other side of the world in 1979 and this was big news to me when it happened. I’ve always thought of it as a big event in racial (in)justice history. It’s come up again a few times in the almost 50 years since. OMD had a hit song about it. There was a Truth & Reconciliation process around it.
Is it actually possible that someone (a white kid if that matters) growing to the age of 21 in Greensboro could somehow manage to not even be aware that something like this happened there? Or is this guy likely yanking my chain?
I’d be interested in the level of consciousness about this for Dopers in the US and those overseas. @MrDibble@scudsucker is this something you were aware of when it happened?
I should point out that my parents (in Pakistan) had a disproportionate interest in racial justice everywhere. So maybe I’m in the 99th percentile of people in awareness of incidents like this. Sadly they are now full-on MAGA bigots.
But to me this is like someone in Johannesburg saying they’d never heard of the Soweto Uprising because if happened 25 years before they were born.
Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence (or awareness or interest or intellectual curiosity or general knowledge) of the American public.
I was a teenager in the Antelope Valley, and I remember it. Saw the footage on the news. (When Jerry Dunphy said, ‘From the desert to the sea…’, he was talking to me. )
Edit: I wish there was an underline option. Brackets and GT/LT symbols didn’t work.
On November 3, 1979, I was 14, living in Spokane, WA, and I clearly remember this happening because it was all over the news. However, on the following day–November 4–the American embassy in Tehran, Iran, was seized by students loyal to the Iranian leader, the Ayatollah Khomeini, beginning a hostage crisis that lasted until January 20, 1981. Because the Iranian hostage crisis consumed so much oxygen in the media for the next year, “smaller” stories like the Greensboro massacre got set aside and forgotten. Plus, there was the fact that the incident involved political extremists from both sides of the spectrum, for whom there was little sympathy among many Americans. Put together, you have an event that doesn’t seem to have much of an impact or register historically.
I think part of the point of the OP is that the person in question is from Greensboro, though, isn’t it?
Do the area high schools not teach local history? (Maybe they don’t.) Do they teach carefully edited local history and that bit was edited out? (All too possible.) Did the person in question pay no attention in school? (Also possible.)
I was out of the country, age 30, on a year-long sabbatical in Japan. It didn’t make the news there, not even the English language newspaper Japan Times (as far as I ever noticed), and I don’t remember ever hearing of it.
I can also imagine how the locality itself would have an unspoken conspiracy not to mention the event, and that it would not be taught in schools there. So yes, I think it is quite possible that growing up in Greensboro could make one less likely to know about this event than average Americans.
My friend and I were both students at the University of Iowa when this happened. I had taken physics the previous semester; thankfully, my professor (who still teaches there) and lab assistant were unharmed, but when I saw pictures of the professors who died, I recognized all of them.
Her 30-year-old daughter graduated from there, and never knew about it until I mentioned it on Facebook a few years ago. I guess it had never come up in conversation, at home or at school.
I am reasonably familiar with this tragedy, but we did not study American history at school, so I probably learned about it here on the Dope, and went on to read further.
(one of the great things about this site is the urge to read further…)
On the other hand I am well aware of the Soweto uprising, even though, again our South African history lessons basically ended at the 2nd Boer War (that is, in the Zimbabwean schools I attended).
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