Democratic Narrative, History, and Memory

Confronting the Legacies of Violence

Confronting the Legacies of Violence Lessons from Kent State and Greensboro, North Carolina Renee Romano Therecomesatimeinthelifeof everycommunitywhenitmustlookhumbly and seriously into its past in order to provide the best possible foundation for moving into a future based on healing and hope. —Mandate, Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission Shots ring out as a group of heavily armed men opens fire on unarmed, peaceful protesters gathered for a demonstration. Several fall, mortally wounded; more are injured, some very seriously. Afterward, those in positions of authority and many inthelargercommunityblametheprotesters:itwastheirfaultformakingtrouble; they were outside agitators seeking to foment revolution; they were Communists and deserved to die. Demonstrators and their supporters blame the killings on governing authorities, who, they charge, either ordered the killings or helped create an environment that encouraged and fostered violence and the excessive use of force. And, despite the existence of reams of evidence about the shootings, victims prove unable to secure justice through the legal system. Thisscenario,initsbasicoutline,hasapatternthatmanysurvivorsmightrecognize as their own, including those in the Kent State community. There, on May 4, 1970, membersof theNationalGuardopenedfireonstudentsprotestingtheVietnamWar, killingfourandwoundinganothernine.Yetwhilethedescriptionmightresonatefor many at Kent State, it specifically describes shootings that took place in Greensboro, NorthCarolina,onNovember3,1979,whenagroupof laborandcivilrightsactivists calling themselves the Communist Workers Party (CWP) led a march to protest the KuKluxKlan.WhentheprotestersgatheredatablackhousingprojectinGreensboro 159 160 democratic narrative, history, and memory tobegintheirmarch,anine-carcaravanof Klansmenandmembersof theAmerican Nazi Party arrived on the scene. As four different television news crews shot video, Klansmen and neo-Nazis took guns from their cars and opened fire on the crowd, which included many children from the project among the demonstrators. Four of the CWP leaders were killed, and another ten people were injured.1 The 1970 shootings at Kent State are sometimes viewed as a singular event in American history. Philip Caputo, the famed writer who was a young reporter at the timeof theKentStateshootings,describesthemassacreasa“uniqueevent...thefirst and only time American troops fired upon and killed American students.”2 Searching for a parallel, Caputo could find only the Boston Massacre of 1775, where British troopsshotandkilledAmericancolonists.Butthoseseekingparallelsdonotneedto lookasfarbackasthecolonialera,norneedtheyignoreeventsthathavetakenplace since the Kent State shootings. In Greensboro, as at Kent State, unarmed protesters facedashortbutintenseperiodof horrificviolenceinitiatedbyawell-armedgroup.3 Despite the one-sided nature of the violence, the media in Kent and in Greensboro held the protesters responsible for what happened. And perhaps most significantly, although the violence in each place only lasted seconds, it left a raw wound in both communities that has festered for decades. While many years have elapsed since these stark moments of violence, they remain present in the memory of many who were there and of others who heard about them at the time or since. In both Kent and Greensboro, the ruptures that originally led to violence have continued in the form of debates and differences about what actually happened on those fateful days. History, these two episodes make clear, can become contested terrain in the face of politicized violence. At both sites, even some of the most basic facts of what happened have been debated for years. But when history itself becomes a field of contest, when there is no consensus about what happened or why, it can be difficult, if not impossible, to put a violent past to rest. The episodes at Kent State and in Greensboro have remained raw because the shootings have remainedthesubjectof continuedcontroversy,unansweredquestions,andcharges of conspiracy and cover-ups. Moreover, steps taken in both communities to try to rectify the violence demonstrate the limitations of common mechanisms of social repair—specifically the legal system—to bring divided communities back together or to settle disagreements in the historical record. For both the Kent State and Greensboro communities, the criminal justice system proved an inadequate mechanism for holding accountable those responsible for violence, for fostering community reconciliation and healing, or for establishing the historical record. Yetthecaseof GreensboroprovidesnotonlyapowerfulparalleltoKent,butalso an instructive comparison. For in Greensboro, the community has taken steps to grapplewithitscontestedhistorybyturningtoamodelpopularoutsidetheUnited Confronting the Legacies of Violence 161 States,atruthandreconciliationcommission.Greensboro’sexperiencesuggeststhat before communities can hope to find meaningful ways to move on from historic violence, they must first find mechanisms to establish some basic truths about the event. Assessing divergent historical accounts is a first step toward resolving longstanding social divisions. Intheintroductiontoa1982anthologyontheshootingsatKentState,ScottBills noted that at Kent State, “as with other sudden, violent historical events, the past lives uneasily in the present.”4 In Kent, a well as in Greensboro, the past continues toliveinthepresent.Butwhy?Whyhavetheseviolentepisodesremainedsopowerfully salient for more than three...