Their eyes were watching Greensboro

[Sapphire Blue]

Their eyes were watching Greensboro
by Kate Foran
SojoMail 2-15-2006

(Excerpt)

To spend any time at the Beloved Community Center in Greensboro, North Carolina, is to gain a sense of the moment in which history finds us. Here, the moment is felt urgently as birth pangs. If you have ears to hear, you can discern the sound before it arrives - the vibration on the train tracks near the sign marking the last meeting of the Confederate Cabinet in downtown Greensboro, before the cars rumble into sight. There's the knowledge that the moment carries a whole history of what delivered it here. It is heavy with possibility.

The original Freedom Summer took place in 1964, as volunteers in the deep South registered blacks to vote. According to Nelson Johnson, executive director of the Beloved Community Center, the freedom struggle of the '60s and '70s represented a rise to power for African Americans unseen since the Reconstruction period following the Civil War.

However, Johnson said, just as gains toward justice and democracy were stymied or dismantled in the decades after the Civil War, the established power structure fiercely resisted the movements in the 1960s and '70s.

On Nov. 3, 1979, when labor organizers planned a march to unite black and white workers in a movement for racial and economic justice, a group of Klan and Nazi party members gunned down demonstrators - killing five and wounding 10. The murders were part of a larger pattern of disrupting, disorganizing, and dismantling movements of social change. There is ample evidence of police and government collusion in this tragic event, as the civil trial's verdict of the joint guilt of police and Klan supports. Despite footage from numerous cameras that captured the shootings, however, no one has been convicted in criminal trials.

Continued @ http://www.sojo.net/index.cfm?action=news.display_article&mode=C&NewsID=5222

(Find out more about the Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission @ http://www.greensborotrc.org/)

[Sapphire Blue]

1. ...

:kick:

[Straight Shooter]

2. And some in the U.S. would have us go back to those days.

:(

Thanks for sharing this.