On February 1, 1960, four African American students sat down at a Woolworths lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, and asked for service. They didn’t get their coffee or a menu, or a polite word, but the next day they returned, along with more than a dozen others. And the day after that.
Some of the older residents, black and white, warned them against stirring things up. But the students didn’t quit even when whites threw coffee or catsup on them. Gradually, more and more supporters joined in, filling the store and the streets outside, people everywhere began boycotting Woolworths stores, sales dropped dramatically, and the owner gave in and began offering service to all comers.
One of the first things I did when I got to Greensboro was to visit that lunch counter, where the shop floor, walls, counters, and stools are preserved as they were during that famous sit-in. The store is now part of the International Civil Rights Center and Museum, which opened on February 1, 2010, 50 years to the day after the first sit-in.
In the museum’s lower floors, displays offer context to the lives of the protesters and their families. I walked with other visitors through the “Hall of Shame” exhibits showing the lynchings and firebombings that terrorized African American communities during the hundred-plus years after slavery ended.
One small detail particularly caught my eye, chilling because of how ordinary it was: a Jim Crow–era guidebook that lists the places black travelers could safely stop for food, gas, or a bed for the night. The information in the booklet could make the difference between surviving a trip through the South or not.
The museum shows how the terrorizing of African American families held society in the grip of white supremacy. While the form changes, the race-based violence and exclusion continue.
Even opening the museum was a major struggle. In 1993, the Woolworths Corporation closed the store with the lunch counter and announced plans to demolish the building. It took local activists 17 years to secure the building, raise the money for renovation, and open the doors of the museum. Voters in Greensboro twice rejected bond measures to help cover the cost.
“This museum exists because there was a time that we don’t want to go back to,” Franklin McCain, one of the original sit-in participants, told National Public Radio. “It also represents a kind of beacon for what’s possible, and it says to people that all sorts of good things are possible if people work together and respect each other.”
I had come to Greensboro to learn about race and the battle over the story of race in America. We had just finished a special issue of YES! Magazine, entitled “Making It Right,” that explored what it would take to finally get to the root of persistent racial violence and exclusion in American society. Policies and elections, as important as they are, aren’t enough. The work we need to do involves shifting beliefs, changing institutions and obsolete habits, and, for white people, giving up our privilege. That sort of cultural work happens most powerfully in communities, in the places where we live, work, worship, debate, and raise our children. At least that was what I had come to believe.
I chose to visit Greensboro both because of its civil rights history and because the citizens of Greensboro embarked on a controversial Truth and Reconciliation Commission process to deal with a deadly racially charged incident from its recent past.
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) process has been practiced for decades, and it was most fully developed in South Africa after the fall of apartheid. The commission there was charged with hearing the stories of victims of apartheid and also those of the perpetrators; in some cases, it offered amnesty. According to reports, the nation was riveted by the hearings. Fania Davis, a prominent U.S. advocate of the TRC process, wrote in YES! Magazine that it “established a spirit of forgiveness that helped the country transcend hundreds of years of hatred and violence and liberated millions of Africans from the yoke of apartheid.”1 I had worked with Davis on her piece calling for a Truth and Reconciliation Commission process in the United States. So I wanted to see how it had worked in Greensboro.
On November 3, 1979, Ku Klux Klansmen and American Nazi Party members shot at a group of protesters organized by the Communist Workers Party in a black neighborhood in Greensboro, killing five protesters and wounding nine. One member of the Klan was also wounded.
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission in Greensboro was called to review these events and their immediate aftermath.
“I got there while there were still people on the ground and being taken away by ambulances,” Joyce Hobson-Johnson told me. She and her husband, Reverend Nelson Johnson, had helped organize the march for workers’ justice and civil rights that had been hit by the attack. I caught up with her after a community activity at her church and asked her about her recollections.
“I was desperately searching for our two children, who were seven and eight years old,” she said. “My husband had not only been stabbed by a Nazi, but was dragged by the police and arrested.” Hobson-Johnson is a small, middle-aged African American woman, who chose her words carefully as she answered my questions.
Joyce Hobson-Johnson was a witness to the massacre and one of those who advocated for a Truth and Reconciliation Commission in Greensboro.
The police had been notified that a march would be taking place, and a Klan member, who was also a police informant, told them that the Klan planned a violent attack. Still, the police chose to stay away until after the shootings. It turned out that the police informant was actually a key organizer of the attack.
All of these facts were established during the trials. And television news cameras, on site to record the protest, captured video of the shootings. Still, two criminal trials ended with acquittals for the white-supremacist shooters by all-white juries. A later civil trial held the shooters, the police, and the Klan jointly liable for one death.
I met Joyce Hobson-Johnson at the Beloved Community Center, which shares a brick two-story building with the Faith Community Church near downtown Greensboro. The name comes from Martin Luther King Jr.’s vision of relationships that “realize the equality, dignity, worth, and potential of every person,” according to the center’s website.
Reverend Nelson Johnson, Hobson-Johnson’s husband and a cofounder and executive director of the Beloved Community Center, is also a pastor at the Faith Community Church. Hobson-Johnson, who has been a civil rights activist since the 1960s, currently serves on the North Carolina NAACP State Executive Board.
“Those of us who were spared our lives were maligned for years,” she replied when I asked her about the aftermath of the shootings. “People were too afraid to continue the organizing.” And the community was polarized, unsure how to interpret the event. Some wanted to call it a shoot-out; others termed it a massacre.
In 2004, 25 years after the shootings took place, Hobson-Johnson, Johnson, and other Greensboro citizens formed a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to get to the bottom of what had happened and who was involved, and, they hoped, to begin the healing.
The move was controversial. The Greensboro City Council voted, along race lines, not to participate, and many residents, black and white, opposed holding the hearings, believing they would stir up old wounds and anger. Without official sanction, the commission had no power to subpoena witnesses. Nonetheless, a group of citizens convened, held hearings, interviewed hundreds of residents, and issued their findings in May 2006.
Still, the controversy over the commission findings was almost as great as the controversy over the massacre itself. According to Jill E. Williams, executive director of the commission, some residents, especially white residents, had hoped the commission would bring about increased trust and even forgiveness. “Although there were a few notable moments during the truth process in which apologies and forgiveness were offered, this group tends to assume that Greensboro’s truth and reconciliation process was not successful,” she wrote in a 2009 report on the commission.2
Others were more interested in institutional reform, according to Williams. The commission recommended, for example, establishing a police citizens’ review board.
The commission’s clearest outcome may be that it helped end what Ed Whitfield describes as “a kind of he-said-she-said argument.” Whitfield, a prominent African American activist and comanaging director of the Fund for Democratic Communities, was one of the group of community leaders who helped establish the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The commission’s report is the most thorough narrative of “what really happened, and how it happened, and what difference it made,” he told me.
“Most local media outlets report the facts more accurately now than they did prior to the report’s release,” Williams wrote. “Similarly, Greensboro residents, as evidenced in part in local blogs, discuss the 1979 events with a more accurate understanding of the facts.”
Michael Ignatieff, who reported on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa, put it this way: truth commissions “reduce the number of lies that can be circulated unchallenged in public discourse.”3
In the summer of 2015, community leaders placed a plaque marking the location where the shootings occurred. I went to see it with my host in Greensboro, James Lamar Gibson, a 20-something African American activist and an early volunteer for the commission. He and his Haitian American partner, Roodline Volcy, offered me the use of their spare bedroom in the duplex they share with their dog.
The word “massacre” appears on the marker, Gibson pointed out—an important step toward laying to rest the phony “shoot-out” narrative that had been used to excuse the shootings. That marker is one outcome of the TRC process.
I happened to be in Greensboro on the thirty-sixth anniversary of the shootings, and Gibson and I attended the commemoration at the Maplewood Cemetery marking the event, standing with a handful of others as the November sky darkened and the group read out loud the names of the people who had died.
In any community, big events, such as a massacre, have effects that continue to ripple out. The same is true of an intervention, like the TRC process. Two researchers, Mary Louise Frampton, a law professor at Berkeley, and David Anderson Hooker, now a professor of conflict transformation and peace building at Notre Dame, conducted hundreds of interviews in Greensboro to determine how the public viewed the commission’s work. What they learned, according to Gibson, is that many people didn’t want to focus on the massacre, which they find traumatizing or embarrassing, but they do want to address the core issues of race and inequity, and their impacts on policing, housing, and education.
For the last year, a group of 15 to 20 people have been meeting as part of the Counter Stories Project to organize “restorative” conversations. The name references both the original lunch counter sit-ins and the need to “counter” the contentious narratives that still divide Greensboro residents.
“We’ve been stuck in an old conversation for a couple of decades now,” Gibson said. “We want to have an army of people with restorative conversation skills, so we can get past the divisiveness and imagine together a different sort of Greensboro.”
They began with facilitators’ trainings and then developed story circles, in which police officers and other residents were able to have the difficult discussions about police-community encounters that don’t ordinarily take place. There have been two rounds of each so far, according to Gibson, who is one of the core organizers. The local alternative weeklies have covered the conversations, which involved groups ranging from churches and social agencies to the police force and city council. And, as with the original TRC process, there has been plenty of controversy. Still, trained facilitators now help bring a skillful anti-racist voice into community conversations and broaden the imagination about what’s possible, Gibson said.
There is discord over police-community relations all over the United States. But is combatting racism place-based work?
“You have to bring it home,” Hobson-Johnson said when I asked her this question. “Ultimately, we have to fight racism, economic disparity, health disparities, education disparities, all those things at home because that’s where we live.”
Hobson-Johnson acknowledged that combatting injustice at the state and national levels is also important—she is deeply engaged with her work on the statewide NAACP Executive Council.
“But to really make a difference, you have to have relationships and build a new culture of possibility, what we call beloved community.
“We’ve met with some of the Klan and Nazis,” Hobson-Johnson told me. “They, too, struggle for their livelihoods and unfortunately have bought in to the lie that black people, Jewish people, gay people, immigrants are the problem, as opposed to the system.”
It takes courage to meet with people who advocate racist violence. And it also takes courage to bring neighbors together to talk about race. But that’s part of the process, she said, “even if it sometimes means we have to pull each other kicking and screaming together. When we get together, more and more we realize, hmmm, it’s not so bad. . . .
“I don’t mean everybody’s gonna be hugging and kissing,” she added, smiling. “But you respect and honor their dignity and worth, the equality of every person. That’s something that is in itself revolutionary.”
I was moved by her willingness to continue year after year reaching out to people who have advocated violence and brutality toward her community. And I was surprised again when Hobson-Johnson expanded her definition of those deserving respect to include nonhuman life: “the environment, the Earth, all of what’s here,” she said. “You can do that in place.”
Greensboro, like the rest of the country, has a long ways to go to put racism behind it. The poverty rate is more than three times higher among African Americans than among whites, for example.4
As I found often on this trip, in communities, people understand that the issues overlap. Gibson took me to see an old grocery store building that has been vacant for 18 years and will soon house a new food cooperative. Fresh, healthy food will be available to a predominantly African American neighborhood that “has been left out for years and is sick of being left out,” Gibson said. “In the past, the government talked about addressing blight, but they didn’t invest—in fact, they disinvested. The co-op came out of the sense that we needed to do something to address this for ourselves.”
To make clear that the co-op is truly community owned, everyone who joins is called an “owner” rather than a member, he told me.
“For years, we wanted to create an ownership culture,” said Ed Whitfield, an organizer of both the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and the co-op.
“This is not a radical neighborhood or community,” Whitfield said. “A lot of folks are just trying to make ends meet, to succeed individually. The idea that people can do something together if they pool their resources, draw on sufficient amounts of support, and maintain the onus—this is a new idea that people are getting to like.”
“It’s huge,” said Gibson. “There’s new energy. Now everyone is thinking about what we are going to build next.”
Greensboro has many unresolved issues. Still, this community evolved from one where a KKK shooting took place with the complicity of police to one where police and community members sit together in circles. African Americans, who were excluded from the simplest participation in community life, like sitting at a lunch counter, now own their own lunch spot—and the grocery store that comes with it. The change seems slow, but perhaps the tough truth telling, the persistent search for reconciliation, and the new community ownership culture are shifting Greensboro’s sense of itself. The system of white supremacy is powerful, but so is the vision of a beloved community.
My next stop was Harrisonburg, Virginia, a national center of restorative justice. I also planned to visit Newark, New Jersey, where a newly elected African American mayor is working to revitalize the city in a way that will benefit, not displace, communities of color; and Ithaca, New York, where a theater ensemble is using community-based storytelling and plays to open up conversations about race in a predominantly white college town.