cover image LOVE AND REVOLUTION: A Political Memoir: People's History of the Greensboro Massacre, Its Setting and Aftermath

LOVE AND REVOLUTION: A Political Memoir: People's History of the Greensboro Massacre, Its Setting and Aftermath

Signe Waller, . . Rowman & Littlefield, (542p) ISBN (432pp) ISBN 978-0-7425-1365-5

This politically laden memoir is as much an exploration of the American leftist mentality of the late 1970s as it is an examination of a violent incident in recent American history. Waller's husband was one of the five people—all but one Communists—killed by the Ku Klux Klan during an anti-Klan rally in Greensboro, N.C., in November 1979. After several acquittals on criminal charges, some Klan members and a few police officers were eventually convicted in a civil lawsuit. But the rally is only part of Waller's hodgepodge story, as she mixes her own memories and newspaper accounts of the era with oral interviews to depict how she and her fellow Communists—many of them well-educated professionals—came to the Greensboro area to organize. Throughout, Waller makes no pretense at objectivity. Her "insider" status allows her to depict the motivations of Communist activists in the waning days of a politically active era. It does appear that local police at the very least failed to prevent the murders at the rally. But Waller's bias gets in the way of her description of the massacre and its context—for instance, she writes that in 1978 "strikes indicated a rising consciousness of the working class" in the United States, an unsubstantiated claim. And when she sympathetically analyzes the ideological discussions within her small Communist circle, she is likely to lose all but the most ardent fellow travelers. (Oct.)