Writing our own history
Edward Cone
News & Record
5-1-05
The Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation process is off to an exciting start. Lots of folks around town are pitching in, even some who think they are not. Take the Greensboro City Council. Please.
Having uglied its way to a racially divided 6-3 vote not to endorse the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the council is not exactly with the program. But it has been helpful nonetheless, and in ways beyond making the Truth and Reconciliation folks look good by comparison. For a project predicated on the idea that ill-will and distrust linger around Greensboro's understanding of the 1979 Klan-Nazi killings, the council meltdown was like a marketing event.
Certainly there is marketing to be done, and the Reconcilers should have done more of it before showing up for the vote. The council, however clumsy it has been in this affair, is not a clueless or racially insensitive group, and it is reasonable to assume that the fear and confusion so manifest in its deliberations are shared by many far beyond the Melvin Municipal Building.
Most people probably don't even know the difference between the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which is the panel of seven people appointed by a broad-based group of community representatives to research and report on the killings and their aftermath, and the Truth and Reconciliation Project, a support organization closely associated with Nelson Johnson, an organizer of the fateful "Death to the Klan" rally and still a controversial figure. The latter group should consider changing its name or even declare its mission complete and yield to some successor organization.
In any case the commission will now go ahead and produce a document, and by the quality of that document it should be judged. If the work is thorough and thoughtful, it will speak for itself, although some people will never listen. A tendentious or inaccurate report would show that the self-styled truth-seekers have come no further in explaining this tragedy than has the Establishment that wants to ignore them.
But the commission report is unlikely to be the last word on the subject, and it may not even end up as the No. 1 Google search result. Already there is an online chorus of voices discussing the project, and the conversation and commentary seems likely to continue growing. The Truth and Reconciliation process is playing out on the Web in real time, and the result will be an archive of thoughts, facts, disagreements and conclusions that may help redefine the way we address knotty political issues.
This is a city writing its own history and practicing a new kind of journalism. Read the weblog of City Councilwoman Sandy Carmany, a thoughtful opponent of endorsing the commission, and you will meet an elected official who is willing to think in public. Listen to the audio files of the contentious council meeting posted by the News & Record, and check out the long thread of comments from readers at editorial page editor Allen Johnson's page. Click from the righteous wrath of David Hoggard to the skepticism of Sam Hieb, from the laissez-faire equanimity of the blogger Gate City to the caustically constructive comments of Mr. Sun to the commission's own weblog, and you will see the new media making its mark.
Part of the challenge of this project has always been the complexity of its subject matter, of the events and economics and social dynamics of 1979 and their echoes in the present day. The Web gives us a way to distribute the problem, to break it up among any number of writers and thinkers, to let individuals speak, listen and learn for themselves. There will be some central places on this network, including news articles and the commission report itself. But the Truth and Reconciliation process should be larger and more inclusive than the traditional media and a formal document can make it, and that may be the key to its success.
After the City Council fiasco, Allen Johnson asked at his blog, "Can we talk? Sure. Will we talk? That remains to be seen." But we already are talking. Just a few of us so far, but the movement is growing. The result won't be a tidy history that satisfies a few partisans on one side or the other, but a messy, many-threaded view of something that may approach truth, and do so from enough angles to support, at last, reconciliation.
Edward Cone (www.edcone.com, efcone@mindspring.com) writes a column for the News & Record most Sundays.
Subscribe today | Electronic archives
Last update: 5/1/2005; 8:58:15 AM .
