Report concluded that both sides had engaged in inflammatory rhetoric, but that the Klan and ANP members had intended to inflict injury on protesters, and the police department had colluded with the Klan by allowing anticipated violence to take place. In 2009, the Greensboro City Council passed a resolution expressing regret for the deaths in the march. In 2015, the city unveiled a marker to memorialize the Greensboro Massacre. On August 15, 2017 and on October 6, 2020, the Greensboro City Council formally apologized for the massacre. Background The Communist Workers' Party (CWP) had its origin in 1973 in New York as a splinter group of the Communist Party USA. "The CWP was one of several groups which were established as part of a Maoist revival within the radical community. To the Maoists, the pro-Soviet Communist Party USA was soft on capitalism and it also lacked militancy." Its leaders intended to increase activism in what they called the Workers Viewpoint Organization (WVO), along the Maoist model. In 1979, members of the CWP came to North Carolina in an attempt to organize textile workers. In the South, the communists had achieved little success with white workers, so they shifted much of their attention to black textile workers, who had long been excluded from these jobs in previous decades. As a result of these efforts, the CWP came into conflict with a local Ku Klux Klan chapter and the American Nazi Party. Some CWP members also worked in the textile mills, including James Waller, who left his medical practice to do so. He became president of the local textile workers union. WVO members were active in Durham and Greensboro. The WVO resisted the continuation of racial discrimination in North Carolina by confronting a local KKK chapter. Hostility between the groups flared up in July 1979, when protesters in China Grove, North Carolina, disrupted a screening of The Birth of a Nation, a 1915 silent film by D. W. Griffith which portrayed the era of Reconstruction and the formation of the KKK in heroic terms, and portrayed blacks in a demeaning, racist way. Taunts and inflammatory rhetoric were exchanged between members of the groups during the ensuing months. In October 1979, the WVO renamed itself the Communist Workers Organization. It planned to stage a rally and a march against the Klan on November 3, 1979, in Greensboro. The county seat of Guilford County,