On Dec. 9, 2005, a white New York City police officer was sentenced to 500 hours of community service and five years probation for the May 2003 murder of an unarmed 43-year-old West African immigrant, Ousmane Zongo. The officer, Bryan Conroy, had been guarding a storage locker containing hundreds of counterfeit CDs and DVDs, and got into a scuffle with Zongo, who was unconnected to the counterfeit ring. He used a nearby storage locker to repair African artifacts. Zongo was shot four times – two wounds were in his back.
Conroy was convicted in October of criminally negligent homicide, but a Manhattan Supreme Court judge determined he deserved mercy. To his supporters, the lenient sentence was a great relief. But to people of African descent in the United States it evoked the recent acquittal of four NYC cops who brutally shot and killed Amadou Diallo in 1999. These examples of police brutality, combined with social ills such as 40-50% unemployment in some communities and one out of three black men facing time in prison, represent a terrible lineage of governmental tolerance for racial discrimination and abuse.
Indeed, the sentencing came just two days after African-American survivors of Hurricane Katrina testified in Washington, D.C., to a congressional subcommittee about the disaster and its aftermath. Several described police offers directing racial epithets at their families and one woman reported military troops focusing machine gun laser targets at her granddaughter's forehead. “No one is going to tell me it wasn't a race issue,” said 53-year-old Patricia Thompson, a New Orleans evacuee, to several dubious white members of Congress (according to the AP). (For more, see “New Orleans: A Choice Between Destruction and Reparation” by David Billings, Fellowship, Nov/Dec 2005.)
So how can we move forward to create a new day together in a nation that continues to be fractured along racial and economic lines? A recent initiative in the southern city of Greensboro, North Carolina, offers an encouraging answer to this question: the launching of the first-ever truth and reconciliation commission in the United States.
On November 3, 1979, Nazi and Ku Klux Klan members killed five labor organizers and shot several more activists as they rallied in a poor black neighborhood in Greensboro. The victims were white, black, and Latino, and had been working to unionize one of the region's textile giants, Cone Mills, and to battle a surge in racist hate crimes. The dramatic event was witnessed nationwide, as television cameras had captured the 88 seconds of gunfire.
This rally and subsequent massacre occurred 15-25 years after dozens of civil rights workers died during the 1950s and ’60s. Yet it was indicative of a struggle for racial equality that continued to insist on the rights of impoverished black people. Furthermore, it highlighted the ways that white communities – and their governments – failed to hold killers accountable. In Greensboro, two criminal trials before all-white juries ended without convictions. Only after a third, civil, trial did survivors of the massacre receive a measure of dignity – through a modest financial settlement by the city of Greensboro, not the imprisonment of the murderers.
It was clear that the government was directly complicit in the massacre. During the three trials, evidence appeared that two informants – one working with the local police, Eddie Dawson, and one with the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, Bernard Butkovich – had worked hand-in-glove with the Klan and Nazis. The white hate groups had been provided with critical information about the labor organizers (such as the date, time, and site of the November 3 march), and had even been encouraged to purchase illegal firearms and to bring weapons that fateful day. The government’s efforts to cover up the role of these informants is yet another example of how the state sanctions violence against communities of color.
Yet instead of responding to hate with hate, the survivors of the massacre have done something profound. They have created a truth and reconciliation commission (TRC), seeking to bring the community together to find common ground through an honest exploration of its painful history.
Unlike the famous commissions in South Africa, Peru, East Timor, and elsewhere, the Greensboro TRC is not an “official” effort, as no governmental body has supported the initiative. It is community-organized and funded. Marty Nathan, whose husband Mike Nathan was one of the five activists killed in 1979, said that she and the other widows had never pursued criminal prosecution and preferred this TRC process because “if we had to choose, better to have truth than jail. Truth is more valuable … we want to know why.”
Over the past two years, this TRC has received testimonies from survivors, Klansmen, historians, politicians, community activists, and many others. Perhaps the most powerful tribute to its work was the public testimony of two young adults, one black and one white, who were not even born in 1979. Through tears, Cesar Weston and Alison Duncan spoke about how the tragedy has affected their lives. According to Weston, “It seems that the silence of this nation about this event is an attempt not just to deny what actually happened, but to deny that it even took place.”
While having a truth and reconciliation process doesn't fix police brutality, poverty, health problems, mass imprisonment, and other social ills, it does mean that a community has agency over its own story - and perhaps, ultimately, its destiny. For all of us who seek to overcome racism, this spirit of change is a powerful challenge to find hope for the future.
Dear readers: in addition to a range of articles on the theme of “unfinished business,” this edition of Fellowship offers three new highlights. Nonviolence in Daily Practice succeeds our long-running Nonviolence in the Arena column. To express our commitment to increased focus on environmental issues, we are launching a new column, Global Balance. And this issue is our first designed in full by Kathy Mills, our new graphic designer. We hope you'll enjoy the fresh look she brings to these pages.
– Ethan Vesely-Flad
editor@forusa.org
