One would have been hard-pressed to encounter a more unusual mix of people in Greensboro or most anywhere in the United States. They were Black and white and brown, men and women, young and middle-aged. Some held degrees from the country’s most prestigious universities. Others had never completed high school. And yet they all agreed that “filling the hole” meant inverting the social order, turning power over to the country’s working people. If capitalism didn’t soon collapse like the rickety house of cards they believed it to be, they’d agitate to dismantle it, textile mill by bank by distant investor.
The future society they imagined would prevent byssinosis, the debilitating brown lung disease that cut short the lives of the Piedmont’s textile workers; pay living wages; support working mothers; and deliver healthy food to all its citizens regardless of race, culture, or circumstance. These goals might not have sounded terribly radical but seeing how far short society fell of these objectives had broken their faith in the political and business establishment’s commitment to the country’s poor and working people, to the idea of America’s inevitable progress.
The people bustling around Signe and Jim’s home were not Kumbaya-singing hippies or dropouts. They rarely drank and didn’t take drugs. The ideals of the Declaration of Independence—“all men are created equal”—had led them to the melody of a siren song: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.” It was a hazardous amalgam sprung from American soil. While they weren’t controlled or in communication with any foreign power, they did find inspiration in the peasant revolution in China and its charismatic and ruthless philosopher-soldier, Chairman Mao Tse-tung. Mao, possessing a gift for pithy quotes, had said, “If you want to know the taste of a pear, you must change the pear by eating it yourself… If you want to know the theory and methods of revolution, you must take part in revolution. All genuine knowledge originates in direct experience.”
When the moment grew ripe for revolt, the men and women in the house on Cypress Street were prepared to taste the pear: what else, they asked, but a well-organized insurrection could overthrow a government that extracted its immense wealth and power from Native American land, the toil of Black slaves, and the exploitation of the working poor? These men and women intended to be agents of history, wading into relentless currents to rudder the United States toward a far and brighter shore.