Un nuevo musical aborda el trauma de la masacre perpetrada por el KKK en 1979

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Composer and playwright César Alvarez joins Democracy Now! to discuss their new musical, The Potluck. It tells the story of the 1979 Greensboro Massacre, when Klansmen and American Nazis opened fire on an antiracist demonstration in Greensboro, North Carolina, killing five members of the Communist Workers’ Party. In 2020, the Greensboro City Council passed a resolution apologizing for the attack and the police department’s complicity in the killings.

Alvarez tells Democracy Now! the musical is an attempt to grapple with “what it has meant to grow up in the aftermath of this state-sanctioned murder,” as well their personal connection to the massacre. Alvarez’s parents were part of the Communist Workers’ Party, and Alvarez is named in honor of two of their slain comrades.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow. org. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.

We turn now to The Potluck. It’s a musical about the 1979 Greensboro Massacre, in which five protesters in North Carolina at an anti-Klan rally there were gunned down by the Ku Klux Klan and the American Nazi Party. Those killed were members of the Communist Workers’ Party. Ten other activists were injured. No one was convicted, but a jury did find the Greensboro police liable for cooperating with the KKK in a wrongful death. In 2020, Greensboro’s City Council passed a resolution apologizing for the attack and the police department’s complicity in the killings.

Composer and playwright César James Alvarez was born in Greensboro a year after the murders. Their parents were among the survivors of the massacre. …