The working title for this project is The Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission: A Reader in Race, Memory, and Justice, and it is co-edited with John Drabinski. 

On 3 November 1979, in Greensboro, North Carolina, members of the Ku Klux Klan and the American Nazi Party confronted a gathering of anti-Klan protesters. The protesters, many of them from the Communist Workers Party, had gathered under the banner of “Death to the Klan,” though also in support of various movements for racial and economic justice. The armed confrontation in front of Morningside Homes, a housing project with all African-American residents, left many dead and wounded protesters. The KKK and ANP members fired the shots that killed and wounded both protesters and residents. The entire event was caught on film, yet subsequent trials led to hung juries and acquittals, and further investigations into the shootings suggested complicity between Klan leaders and the Greensboro police department. Media coverage of the event and the turmoil that followed was divided along racial lines, salting Greensboro’s long-standing racial wounds.

In 2005, a quarter century following the original violence, independent investigators and justice workers founded the Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission (GTRC), which was dedicated to documenting the events of November 1979. In seeking some sort of deeper understanding of what happened in Greensboro, the GTRC was forced to confront the ghosts of slavery, Jim Crow, anti-segregation struggles, and the massive social and economic inequalities left unaltered by the civil rights movement. In the process of coming to terms with a painful event in their recent past, it became evident that Greensboro’s day of traumatic violence was rooted in the very origins of the Americas, in a long history of racial exploitation and disastrous violence. What does it mean to undertake this task in the early twenty-first century?

The challenges faced by the Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission reveal how little, if any, work of truth-telling and reconciliation has been undertaken in the United States. The purpose of our volume is to consider the meaning and impact of the GTRC’s work, both as a process specific to matters of racial justice in the United States, and also in its relationships to similar projects around the world.