Truth and consequences
A truth commission eased the transition to democracy in post-apartheid South Africa. Can another one help heal the racial wounds of a small city in the American South?
GREENSBORO, N.C. -- This quiet textile town in North Carolina's
But the city remains deeply divided over how to remember a more recent chapter in the struggle for racial justice.
On Nov. 3, 1979, an anti-Klan march in the African-American Morningside neighborhood, organized by the Communist Workers Party, ended before it ever started. The march was supposed to begin at noon, and as usual, the organizers gathered early. Residents from the surrounding public housing development drifted to the assembly point. But something wasn't quite right. The police, who always arrived ahead of time, were nowhere to be seen.
A few minutes before 11:30 a caravan of seven to nine cars carrying Klansmen and Nazis rolled into the neighborhood. Epithets flew back and forth between the white supremacists and members of the crowd. Then some of the Klansmen and Nazis, cigarettes dangling from their lips, pulled out rifles from the trunk of a blue Ford Fairlane and calmly fired into the crowd. The gunfire lasted 88 seconds. Car Cauce, Michael Nathan, Bill Sampson, Sandi Smith, and Jim Waller died. All were members of the Communist Workers Party, a Maoist-inspired group that was organizing workers in local textile plants. Ten others, including community residents, were wounded.
TV cameras captured the violence, but the six shooters, who pleaded self-defense in the state murder trial, were acquitted by an all-white jury; nine Klansmen and Nazis were acquitted in a 1984 federal trial by an all-white jury. Many dismissed the incident as a shoot-out between fringe groups -- white supremacists and (mostly white) communists -- and not a racial incident. Finally, in 1985 a civil court found two Greensboro police officers, one police informant, and members of the Klan and Nazis guilty in the wrongful death of Nathan, but not the other victims.
Lately, it seems that America's history of racial violence is being excavated daily. The US Department of Justice has reopened the case of Emmett Till, the 14-year-old black youth who was lynched and dumped in a river for allegedly whistling at a white woman in Money, Miss., 50 years ago. In Philadelphia, Miss., there are calls to reopen the investigation in the murder of civil rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner 40 years ago. And in the federal courts a class-action lawsuit is seeking damages for the survivors of a 1921 race riot in Tulsa, Okla., that left dozens -- possibly hundreds -- of people dead and turned a prosperous black community into an economic wasteland.
But some in Greensboro think there's another route to justice, and that when it comes to the crimes of the past the United States has something to learn from nations that have made the transition from autocratic to more democratic regimes. Last month, with the blessings of Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa, the city inaugurated the first truth and reconciliation commission in the United States. Modeled on the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the commission aims to set the historical record straight and allow the community to move forward by giving victims, perpetrators, and others a chance to let their voices be heard. The seven commissioners, including a woman who heard the shootings from inside her home, a university professor, and a retired corporate executive, will have 18 months to hold public hearings, take statements, and draft a report summarizing their findings and making recommendations for community reconciliation. No date has yet been set for the beginning of testimony.
Unlike the South African commission, which completed its final report in 2003, however, the Greensboro body has no legal standing, and no power either to compel testimony or to grant legal amnesty to those who cooperate. Still, supporters think the commission will provide a fuller historical accounting, and a better hope of true reconciliation, than any court case could.
"Courts are adversarial," says the Rev. Nelson Johnson, 61, who was stabbed in the attack and is now a driving force behind the Greensboro commission. "The commission is a breaking out of politics."
But there are many in Greensboro, particularly among the white elite, who reject the notion of a truth commission. Mayor Keith Holliday, who assigned a representative to help select the commissioners, says he thinks the white supremacists were guilty. But he still opposes the commission because it creates "a horrible image of this city" at a time when it desperately needs to recruit new businesses to replace dwindling textile jobs.
And then there's the question of just who will testify. Claude McBride, a former Nazi who was at the scene of the attack, says he for one doesn't want to talk to the commission. On the one hand, he says, "I don't have nothing to hide." On the other hand, he'd rather not think about that day when he was a 16-year-old following along with his stepfather. "I really want to bury it," says McBride, who lives in nearby Winston-Salem.
The commission, which has no legal authority, can't force him to dredge up the past. And that raises a crucial question: Without the carrot of amnesty or the stick of subpoena power, does a truth commission have any hope of getting at the truth?
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When Greensboro's seven truth commissioners were sworn in last month, a crowd of 500 gathered to hear a biracial choir sing "Let There Be Peace on Earth" and "Freedom Come," along with a stirring message by the Rev. Bongani Finca of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission and a letter from Archbishop Tutu. "To reveal the truth of our past is cathartic, it is healing, it is necessary to restore the dignity and humanity of victims and perpetrators alike," Tutu wrote.
Yet commissions face daunting challenges even under the best of circumstances. Even in South Africa, perhaps the most celebrated of the 30 truth commissions around the world to date, the truth-telling body left many disappointed when its work ended in 2003. While 22,000 victims testified before the commission, many South Africans felt betrayed by a decision that gave the apartheid regime's torturers amnesty in exchange for testimony. Some sued the government over the amnesty provision, even though it was the price paid for the peaceful transition from white-minority to black-majority rule.
Whatever its legal powers, the key to a successful truth commission is public support, says Priscilla Hayner, cofounder of the New York-based International Center for Transitional Justice, which is advising the Greensboro commission.
"When you look at most truth commissions, they did not have power to compel [testimony]," says Hayner. "But despite that, they have received cooperation from key insiders. There are two or three people from the inside who say, `I want to talk to the commission.'"
Once the truth-telling process begins, it develops its own momentum that often pulls in opponents. In El Salvador, where the military was accused of gross human rights violations, most members refused to testify before a UN-sponsored truth commission. But some people later flew out of the country to meet secretly with the commissioners, adds Hayner, author of "Unspeakable Truths: Confronting State Terror and Atrocities" (2002), a study of truth commissions around the world.
As in many previous cases, the momentum for the Greensboro commission came from the victims themselves. During the 20th anniversary commemoration in 1999, a play called "Greensboro: A Requiem" played to sold-out audiences, but in a series of community meetings survivors of the violence were shocked that so few of their fellow citizens knew the details of the case. A truth commission, they thought, would provide a grassroots vehicle for exploring the incident and deepening the racial dialogue on other issues in Greensboro.
The circle of supporters grew to include the Rev. Z. Holler, a prominent Presbyterian minister, and Carolyn Allen, mayor of Greensboro from 1993 to 1999. The group focused on recruiting a multiracial coalition of ministers, community and labor leaders to lead the process. Last February, with financial support from the New York-based Andrus Family Fund, which, in turn, led to a relationship with the International Center for Transitional Justice, the organizers solicited nominations for the committee that chose the seven commissioners.
Though Representative Melvin Watt, a North Carolina Democrat, and many local officials attended the June 14 swearing-in, the commission has so far failed to win an endorsement from the city council -- or any state or local funding. The reluctance isn't surprising, given the longstanding hostility to the victims' politics. In Maplewood Cemetery, far from downtown, the headstone honoring the five communists says, "Live like them. Dare to Struggle. Dare to Win." But in the aftermath of the shootings they were vilified by the city's elite as outside agitators. (Four of the five CWP members killed that day lived in Durham, about an hour away.)
In the first trial the district attorney expressed ambivalence about defending communists. And newspaper articles at the time suggested that the marchers had invited the violence. Posters for the march included the phrase "Death to the Klan," a few protestors (including one killed that day, Bill Sampson) were armed, and there were reports of some return gunfire, though the details remain hotly disputed.
"There's a big lie out there that we purposefully misled the police and did not tell the police where the parade was going to be, that we wanted this to happen to become martyrs," says Joyce Johnson, Nelson Johnson's wife and a commission organizer.
The survivors counter that the permit stated the assembly point. Furthermore, newspapers reported that a police officer gave the permit to one of the white supremacists, though the organizers of the march weren't warned that there was a specific threat of violence.
But Jim Melvin, who was mayor at the time of the shootings, dismisses all that. "We had 40 police officers. If they had wanted protection, they could have gotten it. In my opinion, the commission is a waste of time," he says.
Some also dispute that the shootings, unlike the lunch-counter sit-ins memorialized downtown, have anything to do with the city's racial history. "It was labor-driven, it was class-driven. But a whole lot of people have tried to present it as a racial divide," says current mayor Holliday. "That's just inaccurate."
Holliday's view is shared by many of Greensboro's white elites. But many African Americans and others bristle at the perspective. Only one of the five victims, Sandi Smith, was black, but all of them were communists working to organize textile mill workers across racial lines in a state that remains anti-union today.
Many of the people who were involved in union organizing "came out of the civil rights movement, and the struggles that we were having in terms of working conditions and access to good jobs and decent wages were a part of that movement, a continuation of the struggle. That's what King was doing in Memphis around the garbage workers," says Lewis A. Brandon III, who helped to organize desegregation efforts in Greensboro in the `60s.
The Klan, says Brandon and other longtime Greensboro activists, had a long history of being used by the elite to stifle union organizing by dividing black and white workers. The Klansmen and Nazis who killed the five were themselves poor and working-class.
Indeed, some supporters of the commission hold out hope that it will provide answers to some lingering historical questions: Were the communists targeted as much for their labor organizing as for their antiracist activities? What was the role of a federal agent who had infiltrated the Nazis before the attack? Who else may have conspired with the Klan and Nazis?
"I want the acknowledgement of the truth and to know that it makes a difference in what people do in the future, that it alters their behavior for the better," says Signe Waller, whose husband was killed in Greensboro, where she now lives.
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So far, opponents of the commission say they probably won't testify. But Nelson Johnson is convinced that those who know what happened 25 years ago will come forward in time. "I'm persuaded that the Klan will testify," he says. "The commission's integrity and its meaning to the community will drive people to come forward."
Johnson, who is African American, has tried to talk with some of the Klansmen involved in the attacks, and even asked Claude McBride to attend his church. He didn't come, but the two have spoken a few times.
McBride was 16 years old when he was captured on videotape with members of the Klan and Nazis during the shootings. The blue Ford Fairlane that carried the guns used to kill the communists belonged to his stepfather, Rayford Milano Caudle, who didn't hold a steady job. McBride wasn't tried for murder, and neither was his stepfather, though Caudle later went to federal prison for plotting to blow up Greensboro if the white supremacists were convicted in the shootings.
When Caudle died of cirrhosis of the liver 12 years ago he called himself an ex-Nazi. McBride says he has changed and even mentions making an apology, though he won't explain for what. "The Lord has touched my soul. I know everybody has a right to live," he says.
Still, it's unclear if he will testify, given the potential risk of incriminating himself or others. And why would any previously unknown participants offer information to the commission, and thus risk being charged for the first time?
But whether the process can provide the answers the survivors seek isn't the only measure of the commission's success. It could help create a common narrative of the event, says historian John Hope Franklin, professor emeritus at Duke University, a former advisor to a state-sponsored inquiry into the Tulsa riots and a plaintiff in the class-action lawsuit.
"History that is commonplace in one community may be totally unheard of in another community," he says. "Commissions can create a common history if the other community is ready for a common history."
It remains to be seen whether, as Hayner suggests from the experience in El Salvador and other places where commissions lacked subpoena power, the testimony of victims will persuade perpetrators to come forward and speak out -- either to tell their side of the story or unburden themselves of secrets and guilt.
Whatever the outcome, Franklin considers the basic impulse behind the commission necessary. "I think we have to revisit the past, whether it's good or bad," he says. "We cannot possibly do justice to ourselves and to planning for the future if we don't know what happened."
Susan Richardson is a writer living in Cambridge. She is working on a book about the Greensboro shootings.
