Abstract
This chapter introduces the socio-political context and events of November 3, 1979 as well as the context and events leading up to the formation of the Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission (GTRC). Drawing upon various accounts of Greensboro’s history, it highlights, in particular, city officials’ responses to both November 3, 1979 and the formation of the GTRC 25 years later. In doing so, it demonstrates that a central issue facing the GTRC was how to establish the authority to act efficaciously. This account leads into a discussion of the book’s theoretical framework—which involves using the concepts “rhetorical tradition,” “rhetorical performance,” and “reaccentuation” to explore the interplay between specific instances of language use and patterns of language use in the field of transitional justice. With this framework in place, the chapter introduces the book’s central arguments and concludes with a brief overview of each of the book’s chapters.
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Notes
- 1.
The story of the CWP’s development is a complex one. The United States Communist Party’s (CPUSA’s) interest in North Carolina as a site of resistance had begun nearly 60 years earlier. CPUSA members from northern cities had grown increasingly interested in the South as a site for resisting social, political, and economic inequalities in 1919; nevertheless, throughout much of the twenties, they did not intervene directly, focusing their activities on fact finding about southern injustices (Taylor, 2009, pp. 6–13). Historian Gregory Taylor (2009) recounted how the decision of the CPUSA to intervene in the South—and, in particular, in North Carolina—was tied to Paul Crouch, a native North Carolinian who had been discharged from the military and imprisoned at Alcatraz for supposedly claiming to want to overthrow the government (p. 13). As he grew in the ranks of the CPUSA, Crouch advocated for Party intervention in his home state (p. 18). In 1928, the Party decided to organize in Charlotte, and they began unionizing efforts in 1929 (pp. 19–20). The North Carolina Communist Party was active for three decades; however, as Taylor showed, the Party began to disintegrate in the 1950s as a result of McCarthyism, several tactical missteps by its leaders, “assaults by former members and FBI informants,” and arrests of its members (pp. 186, 206). According to FBI records, there was only one person listed on the membership roles by 1960 (p. 206). “By 1960,” Taylor wrote, “the North Carolina Communist Party was dead” (p. 186).
Nevertheless, in the early- to mid-seventies, there was a resurgence of interest in Communism from groups that had developed as an indirect result of the CPUSA’s activity but that wanted to distance themselves from the CPUSA. Elizabeth Wheaton (1987) recounted the development of these groups in her book Codename Greenkil:
A number of ultra-left sects studied the science [of Marxist revolution] intensely, convinced that the old Communist Party-U.S.A. had sold out to the capitalist system. The CP-USA had been around since the 1920s, and what had it accomplished? It had made some headway in union organizing in its early years, but had been steadily backsliding into oblivion since then. It was time to launch a new communist party, a party that went beyond Marxism to incorporate the more recent teachings of Lenin and Mao…By 1974 a host of preparty communist groups was active. The October League, which grew out of the Georgia Communist League, was predominantly white and based in the South. The Revolutionary Workers League was all black, with strongholds in the South, the Northeast, and the West Coast. In New York, the Puerto Rican Revolutionary Organization and the Asian Study Group became the Workers Viewpoint Organization. (pp. 20–21)
In 1975, a small group from Durham—Jim Waller, Paul Bermanzohn, and Sally Avery—formed the Communist Workers Committee. According to Wheaton, “[T]hey would soon join forces with the black revolutionaries in Greensboro, Nelson Johnson and Sandi and Mark Smith, to organize textile workers at Cone Mills” (p. 34). These individuals united under the banner of the Workers Viewpoint Organization, which changed its name in October of 1979 to the Communist Workers Party (p. 21).
- 2.
According to William Chafe (1980), in a 1949 study of southern politics conducted by V.O. Key, Greensboro had been celebrated for its “progressive outlook…especially [in] industrial development, education, and race relations” (p. 2). But this evaluation, Chafe argued, was incorrect: throughout the first half of the twentieth century, there were widespread racial inequities in the city. In 1957, three years after Brown v. Board of Education declared school segregation unconstitutional, desegregation in Greensboro was a mere pretense. At that time, six blacks were admitted to all-white schools; however, “the action was taken,” Chafe noted, “not to promote integration, but—as the school board leader later recalled—to ‘hold an umbrella’ over the rest of the state and preserve segregation” (p. 159). In 1961, the rate of desegregation in North Carolina was 0.026% (p. 159).
- 3.
Taylor (2009) has argued that the “murders and the failed court cases marked the end of the CWP and the end of active efforts on the part of various Communist groups in North Carolina” (p. 212). While Taylor may be correct that the activity of Communist groups diminished after the November 3, 1979 murders and court cases, the survivors of the CWP remained active in the public sphere long after the event. Over the next two decades, they would continue to tell their story—in a variety of venues—with mixed success. Along the way, some of the survivors changed some of their views about Communism. Others took on professional roles, as academics and medical doctors. In rhetorical terms, they began to affiliate themselves with other rhetorical traditions besides those of Communism. It would be through these avenues that their story would gain its widest hearing.
- 4.
One example was Emily Mann’s play Greensboro: A Requiem, which premiered on February 6, 1996 at the McCarter Theater in Princeton, NJ and was later performed in Greensboro by the University of North Carolina at Greensboro Theater Department as part of the twentieth anniversary commemoration of November 3, 1979. Composed of the primary sources surrounding the killings, the play was both a eulogy for the murder victims and a commentary on contemporary race relations (Mann, 1997). Several documentaries were also produced about November 3, including “88 Seconds in Greensboro,” produced by the Public Broadcasting Service’s Frontline Series (Cran, Tepper, & Cran, 1983); “Lawbreakers: The Greensboro Massacre,” an episode of The History Channel’s Lawbreaker series (Morowitz & Brummel, 2000); and “Greensboro’s Child,” which framed the event in light of the life story of Kwame Cannon, who, as a boy, attended the CWP rally with his mother and later received two life-sentences for burglary, a judgment which many in the community thought to be racially motivated and excessive given the nature of Cannon’s crimes (Coon, 2002).
- 5.
The phrase “enabling constraints” comes from Judith Butler (1997, p. 16).
- 6.
The writers of the pamphlet continued, “In responding to the obvious questions around the absence of police protection [for the CWP marchers], the Mayor and Police Chief promised a full investigation. Meanwhile, they pushed a Black police Lieutenant out front, claiming he had been in charge that day and could answer [the media’s] questions….By pushing the Black cop out front, the power structure obviously hoped to frustrate the developing protest by saying ‘If you want someone to attack, you have to attack this Black cop first’” (Cabral, 1980, para. 53).
- 7.
In their book Learning from Greensboro: Truth and Reconciliation in the United States, Magarrell and Wesley (2008) have described logistical aspects of the formation of the GTRC in greater detail. Remaking Transitional Justice in the United States focuses primarily on the rhetorical features of the Commission’s formation and authorization.
- 8.
In Learning from Greensboro, Magarrell and Wesley (2008) reflected on the importance of the question of authority to the GTRC’s operation. They wrote, for example, about the need to drum up public support for the process and the difficulties of engaging people, noting, “With no subpoena power or ability to offer immunity from legal action to entice people to come forward, one of the big questions was, ‘If we build it, will people come?’” (Magarrell & Wesley, 2008, pp. 53–54). Moreover, in the Foreword to Magarrell and Wesley’s book, former SATRC member Bongani Finca noted that an important aspect of the GTRC’s operation had to do with the “question of legitimacy” (pp. viii-ix). Magarrell and Wesley also cited Sofia Macher, a former member of the Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission, who, after visiting Greensboro in April of 2005, wrote, “The fact that the Greensboro TRC does not have official status means that the legitimacy of its work depends solely on the community itself, and this is no easy task” (p. 99).
- 9.
Leman-Langlois and Shearing (2003) considered a similar question in their inquiry into the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission: “Our focus,” they wrote, “is on this process of authorization [of the “truth” offered by the South African TRC] and its purposes and consequences” (p. 223).
- 10.
Dilip Gaonkar (1990) highlighted these two approaches in the Western Journal of Speech Communication’s special issue on rhetorical criticism.
- 11.
Gaonkar (1990) productively described close reading as “neither an engaging paraphrase of what is ‘said’ nor a laborious cataloguing (troponomy) of formal features. The positive stress on the interpretative act suggests that ‘close reading’ is actually a mode of critical writing that aspires to reconstitute the text. And such reconstitution is attempted and sometimes achieved through an interpretative act of making explicit ‘the rhetorical dynamics implicit within’ the text. Thus, textual criticism is a species of grounded interpretation” (p. 312).
- 12.
- 13.
In subsequent work, Leff (1992) acknowledged this point, admitting that his approach “does not simply promote a direct encounter with rhetorical texts, but that it involves something very like a theory of rhetorical reading” (p. 223).
- 14.
Leff himself (1992) noted this problem as well. He wrote, “[T]he project is incomplete on its own terms, since it does not accommodate issues of power and social circumstance that decisively influence the focal object of study” (p. 226).
- 15.
This approach has some precedent. According to Leff (1992), many scholars have attempted to negotiate or to merge “the two opposing orientations” (pp. 225–226).
- 16.
As Leff revised his thinking about close reading, he also developed a framework with which to negotiate these tensions (1997). He argued that rhetorical production and interpretation are not distinct practices: rhetorical production is always only made possible by interpretation of prior texts—an “intertextual network,” which “constitutes a tradition” (Leff, 1997, p. 93). This insight implies that the practice of close reading involves tracing how texts under investigation make use of the resources of intertextual networks to make meaning (Leff, 1997; Jasinski, 2001, p. 95). One strategy that Leff (1992) advocated for bringing into relief the ways in which texts draw upon intertextual networks is to focus on controversy—or “oppositional discourse” (p. 229). For yet another strategy, see Leff and Sachs (1990) on the concept of iconicity as an interpretative strategy. By looking at controversies as embodied in texts, critics are able to expose “the issues of power and situated interest that inform their whole development” (pp. 229–230). This approach “pushes” close readers beyond texts-as-constructed-products as they identify the intertextual networks that rhetors make use of to produce their texts (Leff, 1992, p. 228; Jasinski, 2001, p. 95).
- 17.
My definition of “reaccentuation” includes three components: there is an action (elements of a rhetorical tradition are invoked in performance), which involves innovation (the elements are adapted or transformed), in order to accomplish a contextually defined purpose.
- 18.
- 19.
Murphy’s (1997) explanation of how rhetors derive authority was consistent with the term’s etymology (p. 76). Authority comes from the Latin auctōritas—a word that, as Lynn Clarke (2005) has noted, “embodied a respect for ‘tradition,’ an interest in preserving…the ‘sacred founding’ of the Roman body politic” (p. 2). But auctōritas did not simply involve passively respecting and preserving tradition; the term was also closely related to the verb augere (meaning “to augment”) and often entailed notions of “producing, production, [and] invention” and “deliberate judgment” as well (Arendt, 1993, pp. 121–122; Clarke, 2005, p. 2).
- 20.
Warranting this move is the fact that many scholars working in the field of rhetorical studies have seen a close relationship between authority and ethos, although they have articulated this relationship in many different ways (Farrell, 1993; Halloran, 1982; Reynolds, 1993). Halloran (1982) equated the two terms: “In its simplest form, ethos is what we might call the argument from authority” (p. 60). Farrell (1993) expressed the relation between ethos and authority differently from Halloran, calling authority a “variation of ethos” (p. 290). Nedra Reynolds (1993) highlighted the “potential of ethos…to examine how writers establish authority and enact responsibility from positions not traditionally considered authoritative” (p. 326).
- 21.
I have noted similar connections between ethos and positionality in analyzing Desmond Tutu’s “Foreword” to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa Final Report (Beitler, 2012, pp. 4–6).
- 22.
- 23.
Mack’s manuscript (2012) serves as a wonderful complement to Remaking Transitional Justice in the United States. She, too, has taken a rhetorical approach to the study of truth commissions, describing the topoi of the SATRC and exploring how such topoi travel beyond their initial contexts. Whereas Mack’s project primarily addresses rhetorical scholars to make the case that TRCs are rhetorical and are a generative site for exploring transnational rhetorical activity, my project addresses those working in the field of transitional justice and argues that the field has given rise to a transnational rhetorical tradition, which transitional justice stakeholders—such as the GTRC commissioners—can reaccentuate to establish their authority and bring about change.
- 24.
In 1993, before the SATRC was established, the authors of the postamble to South Africa’s interim Constitution used the term to describe what the country’s transition from an apartheid regime to a democracy needed to look like. “There is a need,” they wrote in their historic postamble, “for understanding but not for vengeance, a need for reparation but not for retaliation, a need for ubuntu but not victimization” (as cited in Tutu, 1999b, p. 45). It was this threefold call for understanding, reparation, and ubuntu that prompted the South African Parliament (1995) to pass “The Promotion of National Unity and Reconciliation Act,” the legislative act responsible for establishing the SATRC.
- 25.
For example, in describing the approach taken by truth commissions, Magarrell and Wesley (2008) stated, “Methodologically, truth commissions involve an amalgam of history, sociology, law, psychology, plain common sense, and whatever else is needed…” (p. 39). While these disciplines are certainly crucial to the approach that truth commissions take, it is also the case that the activities of truth commissions are, for the most part, discursive in nature. To give a second example, when writing about the mandate for the GTRC, Magarrell and Wesley (2008) noted, “The mandates of other truth commissions provided some guidance to people in Greensboro tasked with producing a draft for discussion. From there, drafters went to work on deciding the level of detail in setting out the Commission’s tasks…” (p. 52). Here Magarrell and Wesley mentioned the influence of past commissions on the Greensboro process, but they did not elaborate on the specific discursive features of past truth commissions’ mandates that were adapted to create the GTRC’s mandate. My book suggests that we need to pay greater attention to the rhetorical moves at work in truth commission approaches and processes.
- 26.
This distinction is, of course, somewhat artificial: all descriptive accounts involve choices about what to describe and what not to describe and are, therefore, normative. It is worth noting that, regarding the scholarship on truth commissions in particular, Leman-Langlois and Shearing (2003) distinguished between “three broad types”: normative or jurisprudential analysis, ‘therapeutic’ evaluations, and descriptive accounts (p. 223). Most therapeutic evaluations, however, tend to double as normative accounts.
- 27.
For predominately descriptive accounts of transitional justice, see Elster (2004); Minow (1998); and Doxtader and Villa-Vicencio (2003). Regarding truth commissions in particular, Hayner’s (2001) Unspeakable Truths remains one of the most comprehensive descriptive accounts to date. Hayner (2001) described the purposes for truth commissions, surveyed 21 commissions, and considered some of the key issues surrounding truth commissions as they have arisen in various cases.
- 28.
Aukerman (2002), Crocker (1998, 1999), and Zalaquett (1995) have all attempted to develop normative frameworks of transitional justice. Regarding TRCs in particular, Garkawe (2003) and van Zyl (1999) have expressed cautious optimism about using the TRC model as a means of dealing with other human rights abuses, while Landsman (1996) has expressed greater skepticism about doing so. For additional examples of normative accounts, see Amstutz’s (2004) call for political forgiveness as a strategy of transitional justice; Daye’s (2004) development of a model of political forgiveness based on the transition in South Africa; and Posner and Vermeule’s (2004) assertion that recent scholarship mistakenly treats transitional justice as distinct from ordinary justice and lawmaking as it occurs in democracies.
- 29.
There has been, moreover, a tendency to focus on transitional justice initiatives as separate from one another. While initiatives have often been compared and contrasted with one another, the interconnections between initiatives have been explored less often.
- 30.
That said, some studies have taken a sustained look at the rhetorical performances constituting and underlying the large-scale practices of transitional justice (Doxtader, 2001, 2003, 2004, 2007, 2009; Mack, 2012; Phelps, 2004; Salazar, 2002; Shaffer & Smith, 2004; Teitel, 2002). Though these language-oriented studies have not explicitly referred to the “rhetorical tradition” of the field of transitional justice, they have provided the grounds for one of this project’s central arguments—namely, that there are rhetorical traditions circulating within the field of transitional justice. Chapter 2 explores these studies, and others, in greater detail.
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Beitler, J.E. (2013). The Problem of Power: Authorizing a Truth and Reconciliation Commission in Greensboro, North Carolina. In: Remaking Transitional Justice in the United States. Springer Series in Transitional Justice. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-5295-9_1
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