ICTJ in the News

May 28, 2006

Bellwether City : A Book to Read on the Train Ride Home

Greensboro News-Record

From under the high old steeple at Pfeiffer Chapel the other night, you could hear the whistle getting closer.

It sounded like the 6:32, coasting over dry gravel beds through town, shuffling faster, then speeding headlong away, off into the tunnel of vines on its way to Atlanta. But in the moment that it was passing by, it loomed up large and the ground rumbled.

Delivering a final report on the Morningside shootings of Nov. 3, 1979 - at the time, the worst civil rights bloodshed since the '60s - the Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission ended its work in the room where much of this story began.

Bennett College, the black Vassar, the place to which, for generations, families had sent their daughters to learn to speak French, to play the concertina and to preside over a tea, might seem an unlikely place on the map.

So might Greensboro - the city Time magazine once called the South's "bellwether," the sheep that walks out in front, wearing a bell around its neck to lead the flock.

Unlikely or not, this is the place. Here, in this chapel, the Bennett Belles met with their professors in the bleak winter of 1937, and planned a boycott of movie theaters.

On this stage in 1958, Pfeiffer was the only podium in town turned over to a young visiting minister who had gained a name in the Montgomery bus boycott: Martin Luther King Jr. Listening from out on the lawn that day were two of the future A&T freshmen who one day made world news in 1960, right there on Elm Street.

Bennett allowed its students to follow to the lunch counter and then to jail - so long as they kept their grades up. By the next generation, class president Sandi Smith stepped out of the chandeliered chapel and the ivy-covered walls of Bennett to do union organizing under the smokestack at Revolution Mills, and ultimately lost her life in a doomed "Death to the Klan" rally, where, unarmed and defenseless, she was shot in the head.

Thursday night, all this came back to Bennett as the private commission handed over its two-year, 400-page report on what happened at Morningside. Looking around the full chapel, a small place all at once was part of a larger picture.

"I saw the world there," Marsha Paludan, a drama director from UNCG, was saying the other day. "There are places in this country that are matrixes, or power centers. It's as if you're drawn to them. There's something about this place."

But what is it? For those who have studied truth and reconciliation commissions, from South Africa to Northern Ireland to Peru, that's the one question people ask in every place. Why did this happen here?

"That's really at the heart of exploring and understanding these traumatic events," observed Lisa Magarrell, an adviser from the International Center for Transitional Justice. "History is made by people being willing to stand up for others. Greensboro has a pretty good place on the map."

And people can believe a lot of things about why it is. That the city was predestined. Blessed or cursed, set apart by some unseen marking, like science fiction crop circles, you can only glimpse from the air.

But there is a reason for everything. And there are reasons for what happened Nov. 3, 1979, and for all that has played out since - on a crowded, blue-denim canvas of Quakers and rednecks, Communists, neo-Nazis, college students, textile workers, Jewish business magnates and fine Southern ladies who believe, above all else, in never giving offense.

We can't make a long story short. We have to read the book. Because however unlikely, this is our place on the map, our bend in the rail line.

And when history brushes close as it passes through, it looms up large in that moment, shaking the ground like the 6:32.