Democracy, Dialogue, and Community Action

by Jovanovic, Spoma

• ISBN13: 9781557289919
• ISBN10: 1557289913
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2012-11-01
• Publisher: Univ of Arkansas Pr

Summary

On November 3, 1979, five protest marchers in Greensboro, North Carolina, were shot and killed by the Ku Klux Klan and the American Nazi Party. There were no police present, but television crews captured the shootings on video. Despite two criminal trials, none of the killers ever served time for their crimes, exposing what many believed to be the inadequacy of judicial, political, and economic systems in the United States. Twenty-five years later, in 2004, Greensboro residents, inspired by post-apartheid South Africa, initiated a Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) to take public testimony and examine the causes, sequence of events, and consequences of the massacre. The TRC was to be a process and a tool by which citizens could feel confident about the truth of the city's history in order to reconcile divergent understandings of past and current city values, and it became the foundation for the first Truth and Reconciliation Commission in the United States. Spoma Jovanovic, who worked alongside other community members to document the grassroots effort to convene the first TRC in the United States, provides a resource and case study of how citizens in one community used their TRC as a way to understand the past and conceive the future. This book preserves the historical significance of a people's effort to seek truth and work for reconciliation, shows a variety of discourse models for other communities to use in seeking to redress past harms, and demonstrates the power of community action to promote participatory democracy.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. vii
Introduction	p. ix
The Greensboro Massacre, November 3,1979	p. 3
Grave Consequences	p. 17
An Unfolding History of Social Unrest	p. 29
Truth and Reconciliation Commissions Seek Healing, Not Vengeance	p. 47
Greensboro's Truth and Reconciliation Commission: Principles and Processes	p. 65
The Commission's Final Report: Recovering the Truth	p. 91
The Public's Response	p. 115
The Politics of an Apology	p. 141
Measures of Success	p. 151
Greensboro's Legacy Is Hidden No More	p. 165
Appendix
Mandate for the Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission	p. 181
Guiding Principles of the Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission	p. 185
What Is Reconciliation?	p. 186
Final Report General Summary	p. 189
Discussing the Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission's Executive Summary in a College Classroom	p. 194
Lyrical Reflections of November 3rd, 1979	p. 196
Notes	p. 203
References	p. 209
Index	p. 219
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