The Truth About Reconciliation
Last October, the city council in Greensboro, North Carolina, met for a special session. The meeting was held at 7 p.m. over Zoom, and with most of the nine commissioners connecting from their living rooms, it had all the ambiance of an online poker game.
Greensboro, a mill city located an hour west of the university-heavy Research Triangle, helped birth the civil rights movement. In 1960, Black protesters sat down at the lunch counter at the Woolworth’s on Elm Street and refused to leave. The building is now a historic landmark and the home of the International Civil Rights Center and Museum.
On this autumn night, Greensboro’s city council was going into special session to confront an incident that had clouded that civil rights legacy: the November 3, 1979, killing of five leftists by white supremacists during an anti-Klan protest in a local housing project. Gunned down in the street, four protesters died under a late-morning sun, in front of newspaper photographers and TV news cameras, and before emergency crews could arrive; one perished two days later at a local hospital.
It was the worst Southern violence in a decade. But the Greensboro Massacre, as it came to be known, quickly disappeared from the front pages of national newspapers. The next day, 52 US hostages were taken in Iran, and America had a larger crisis to worry about—one that birthed, among other things, 24-hour news. Greensboro, however, has been grappling with the massacre ever since. No one was ever convicted. And two criminal trials that ended in acquittals left disturbing questions about whether police steered the communist protesters into a fatal ambush.
So a sense of unfinished business hung over the city council meeting. The nationwide debate over policing had rekindled those old questions, and a coalition of clergymen was lobbying the council to formally apologize for a delayed police response that left the protesters without protection when the shooting began.
Dr. Goldie Wells, a retired educator, used her few minutes of Zoom time to show an image of a Sankofa bird plucking an egg from its back. Sankofa comes from the language of the Akan peoples of Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire. It means, as one translation has it, “go back to the past and bring forward that which is useful.” “In these times,” Wells said, “there’s so many things we need to apologize for [that] taking this step is long overdue and I think it will mean a lot to a lot of people.”
Support for an apology was not unanimous. One member noted that the council had already expressed “regret,” while another pointed to a broad apology that the city issued just three years earlier. But Greensboro’s mayor, Nancy Vaughan, joined the majority, saying her support was guided by five scholarships, worth $1,979 apiece, that the council was creating for high school graduates to “keep these discussions alive.”
There’s a lot of demand for reckoning in America right now. Cities around the country are debating and in some cases instituting some form of reparations for Black residents. In February, Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.) and Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) reintroduced a bill to establish a United States Commission on Truth, Racial Healing, and Transformation to examine systemic racism; it has 169 co-sponsors. Last summer, Wesley Morris, Pulitzer Prize–winning critic for the New York Times, called for truth and reconciliation to come to the United States in the form of a “broadcast spectacle,” something that could look “like court, a telethon, therapy, an Oprah show—and more.” On Presidents Day, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi announced plans for a “9/11-type commission” to investigate the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol.
