America's First Truth and Reconciliation Commission

Twenty-five years after the five killings at Morningside Homes, Greensboro did something no American city had done before. In two thousand four, a group of survivors, community members, and civic leaders formed the Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission. It was the first truth and reconciliation process in United States history, modeled explicitly on the South African commission that Archbishop Desmond Tutu had chaired after apartheid.

Tutu served as an advisor. The commission drew on commissioners with experience in South Africa and Peru. Over two years it conducted public hearings, interviewed survivors and witnesses, and worked through the documented record of what had happened on November third, nineteen seventy-nine, and why.

The city of Greensboro refused to officially endorse the commission during the period it was working. City officials did not participate. The commission completed its work without the city's backing and issued its final report in two thousand six. The report named what the city's own records and the trial evidence supported: that the Greensboro Police Department bore responsibility for the massacre, that the presence of a paid informant who delivered the march's location to the Klan and the absence of police at the start of the rally were not coincidences, and that the all-white juries that acquitted the killers reflected the racial dynamics of the judicial system rather than the weight of the evidence.

The city finally apologized on October sixth, two thousand twenty. Forty-one years after the killings. The city council's vote was a rare formal apology by an American city for police complicity in a specific act of racist violence. Survivors and family members were in the room. Some said the apology came too late. Some said it was necessary regardless. Both things can be true.