Greensboro's lesson — that the state would not stop the Klan — drove the anti-Klan organizing of the 1980s. The John Brown Anti-Klan Committee, born from prisoner correspondence exposing Klan organizing among New York prison guards, confronted Klan rallies from Meriden to Austin; its militants absorbed arrests by the score, and its cadre overlapped the May 19th Communist Organization, whose imprisoned members — Linda Evans, Laura Whitehorn, Marilyn Buck — counted anti-Klan work central to the politics they were jailed for.

In the same years, Klan and Nazi paramilitaries assembled openly at Camp Puller and Hayden Lake while prosecutors reached instead for the movement's opponents; when the federal government finally tried the white-supremacist leadership for sedition at Fort Smith in 1988, an all-white jury acquitted everyone — the mirror image, activists noted, of the sedition convictions handed to Puerto Rican and Black revolutionaries in the same decade.