On November 3, 1979, Ku Klux Klansmen and Nazis opened fire on a group of protesters in a black neighborhood in Greensboro, North Carolina. Local police stood by and watched. Five protesters died and at least 10 were wounded.
Two criminal trials resulted in acquittals by all-white juries. A civil trial held the police complicit in one killing. The community was deeply divided over the outcome, and lingering tension led a group of Greensboro citizens to form a Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in 2004. According to its mandate, the TRC’s aim was to look into the past “to provide the best possible foundation for moving into a future based on healing and hope.”
Although city authorities declined to participate, the commission held public hearings, reviewed historical documents, and interviewed hundreds of people. In 2006, the TRC issued a report calling for official apologies, public monuments, a community justice center, a police review board, and anti-racism training for police and other officials.
Some of these recommendations were or are being implemented. Despite the city government’s lack of participation, the Greensboro TRC opened dialogue and increased trust, according to residents. Some of those responsible for the violence apologized.
Truth and reconciliation processes hold special promise for addressing the US epidemic of racial violence, exposing its deep historical roots, and working toward reconciliation. Truth-telling encounters between those who have caused harm and those who have been harmed can promote accountability, address the needs of everyone affected, and lay a foundation for reconciliation, justice, and transformed social structures.
South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission is the best known of about 40 truth commissions formed between 1980 and 2010. The commission investigated human rights abuses from 1960 to 1994, heard victims’ and perpetrators’ stories, and considered amnesty petitions.
Like the outcome in Greensboro, the results of South Africa’s TRC are mixed. The expected reparations were not made, and apartheid’s legacy of extreme poverty remains intact. Nonetheless, South Africa’s truth and reconciliation process established a spirit of forgiveness that helped the country transcend hundreds of years of hatred and violence and liberated millions of Africans from the yoke of apartheid.
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada was created by the federal government in 2008 to investigate the legacies of Indian residential schools. Beginning in 1874, aboriginal children were forcibly removed from their homes and taken to residential schools, where they were punished for speaking their language and practicing their traditions. Many suffered physical and sexual abuse; thousands didn’t survive. The last school closed in 1996, and to this day much of the alcoholism and drug addiction found in Native communities is attributed to the trauma suffered at these schools.
The TRC of Canada’s interim report from 2012 said these schools “constituted an assault” on First Nations children, families, culture, and autonomy. Survivors say this acknowledgement begins the healing process, although much more is needed. The commission, after traveling to more than 300 communities and taking testimony from 6,500 witnesses, will issue its final report this June.
The Ferguson Truth-Telling Project (FTP), for which I am an advisory board member, was formed in the wake of the killing of Michael Brown to initiate a process of truth-telling in which victims of police violence and their families share their stories – stories that will serve as documentation to support structural change. The FTP is also planning to create community groups to provide a space for empathetic listening and identifying solutions.
Healing is long, slow work. But if we start with authentic truth-telling and engage in an inclusive search for solutions, we can begin to transform relationships and move step-by-step down the path to reconciliation.
Truthout Is Preparing to Meet Trump’s Agenda With Resistance at Every Turn
Dear Truthout Community,
If you feel rage, despondency, confusion and deep fear today, you are not alone. We’re feeling it too. We are heartsick. Facing down Trump’s fascist agenda, we are desperately worried about the most vulnerable people among us, including our loved ones and everyone in the Truthout community, and our minds are racing a million miles a minute to try to map out all that needs to be done.
We must give ourselves space to grieve and feel our fear, feel our rage, and keep in the forefront of our mind the stark truth that millions of real human lives are on the line. And simultaneously, we’ve got to get to work, take stock of our resources, and prepare to throw ourselves full force into the movement.
Journalism is a linchpin of that movement. Even as we are reeling, we’re summoning up all the energy we can to face down what’s coming, because we know that one of the sharpest weapons against fascism is publishing the truth.
There are many terrifying planks to the Trump agenda, and we plan to devote ourselves to reporting thoroughly on each one and, crucially, covering the movements resisting them. We also recognize that Trump is a dire threat to journalism itself, and that we must take this seriously from the outset.
Last week, the four of us sat down to have some hard but necessary conversations about Truthout under a Trump presidency. How would we defend our publication from an avalanche of far right lawsuits that seek to bankrupt us? How would we keep our reporters safe if they need to cover outbreaks of political violence, or if they are targeted by authorities? How will we urgently produce the practical analysis, tools and movement coverage that you need right now — breaking through our normal routines to meet a terrifying moment in ways that best serve you?
It will be a tough, scary four years to produce social justice-driven journalism. We need to deliver news, strategy, liberatory ideas, tools and movement-sparking solutions with a force that we never have had to before. And at the same time, we desperately need to protect our ability to do so.
We know this is such a painful moment and donations may understandably be the last thing on your mind. But we must ask for your support, which is needed in a new and urgent way.
We promise we will kick into an even higher gear to give you truthful news that cuts against the disinformation and vitriol and hate and violence. We promise to publish analyses that will serve the needs of the movements we all rely on to survive the next four years, and even build for the future. We promise to be responsive, to recognize you as members of our community with a vital stake and voice in this work.
Please dig deep if you can, but a donation of any amount will be a truly meaningful and tangible action in this cataclysmic historical moment.
We’re with you. Let’s do all we can to move forward together.
With love, rage, and solidarity,
Maya, Negin, Saima, and Ziggy