ICTJ in the News

July 1, 2006

Overseas truth groups to come here

Greensboro News & Record

By Lex Alexander
Staff Writer

Bennett College GREENSBORO -- Members of truth commissions from Peru, Sri Lanka, South Africa and Northern Ireland will meet in Greensboro next week with people from similar projects in Greensboro and across the United States.

It is the first such meeting to be held in this country.

The roundtable discussions Thursday and Friday at Bennett College are intended to compare the work of the Greensboro Truth and Community Reconciliation Project, particularly the commission's recent report, with the work of similar bodies in those countries.

The discussions are intended to help people from other U.S. communities that have begun similar projects, or are considering them, to consider options and avenues for their work. They are not public, although news conferences will be held after each day's sessions.

The two days of discussions will be followed Saturday by a day of free, public events at N.C. A&T celebrating the work of Greensboro's commission. Panel discussions from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. will be followed by three hours of "food, celebration, music and fun," organizers say.

Truth-and-reconciliation commissions generally seek to help a community or country address great wrongdoings, typically atrocities or human-rights abuses, in its past. They generally seek an acknowledgment of wrong done and some reconciliation between wrongdoers and victims.

Among those scheduled to attend is Irving Joyner, vice chairman of the 1898 Wilmington Race Riot Commission. That commission was created by the N.C. General Assembly to study and report on the 1898 seizure of power in Wilmington from a democratically elected, majority-black city government -- the only overthrow of a government in U.S. history. The group's report was released May 31.

Others attending include representatives from:

• New Orleans, where government inaction during and after Hurricane Katrina in 2005 has raised questions of race, class and politics.

• Moore's Ford, Ga., where the killings of four young African American men on July 25, 1946, remain unsolved.

• The Anthony P. Crawford Remembered Memorial Committee, which seeks justice on behalf of more than 5,000 people lynched in the American South during and after Reconstruction.

Sponsors in addition to Bennett include Greensboro's Beloved Community Center, a nonprofit community-building organization; and the International Center for Transitional Justice, which works with countries trying to address past atrocities or human-rights abuses. The group was a consultant to the Greensboro truth commission.

The Greensboro Truth and Community Reconciliation Project, the local group whose work led to the creation of the separate Greensboro truth commission, is sponsoring the Saturday events.

The discussions are being held in Greensboro in recognition of the Greensboro's Truth and Reconciliation Commission and its report on the Nov. 3, 1979, slayings of five Communist Workers Party demonstrators by Klansmen and Nazis. The gunmen were acquitted of all charges after two trials. A civil jury later found two Greensboro police officers jointly liable, with white supremacists, for one of the deaths; the city paid $400,000 to settle all claims.

The report, released May 25 after two years of research, concluded that the absence of visible police officers at the site, despite warnings from a police informant that violence was likely, was the single greatest contributor to the violence.

The report called for apologies by the city and the Greensboro Police Department to those they failed to protect, including not only the shooting victims but also residents of the Morningside Homes community in which the shootings took place, as well as from other parties involved. It also called for a memorial to the event, anti-racism training for city and county employees, and other measures.