88 Seconds in Greensboro

Politics & Elections
1

Not sure this is the right place for this.

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.

2

Yes.

Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence (or awareness or interest or intellectual curiosity or general knowledge) of the American public.

3

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. :wink: )

Edit: I wish there was an underline option. Brackets and GT/LT symbols didn’t work.

4

To underline something enclose it in BBCode like this: [u]something[/u]

5

That’s what I did, and it didn’t work. But when I try it now, it does work.

6

IME, it’s extremely helpful to get @LSLGuy 's blessing.

7

I was less than a week old when this happened and don’t remember ever learning about it until just now (grew up in the Midwest).

8

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.

9

I live in Austin, and there are some people here who don’t know about the UT-Austin Tower sniper shooting decades ago.

10

I suspect its place in history was taken up by the Bowling Green Massacre instead.

I don’t remember this incident, but I was two years old when it happened.

11

Thank you for the responses so far. I guess I was raised in a somewhat idiosyncratic family.

12

I was 2 months into grad school in Los Angeles. I doubt I ever heard of it.

As a California native, the 45 states to our east were rather vague theoretical concepts of little interest.