Copyright by Michael Scott Pryor 2012
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Copyright by Michael Scott Pryor 2012 The Report Committee for Michael Scott Pryor Certifies that this is the approved version of the following report: The Matter of Memory: Visual and Performative Witnessing of the Greensboro Massacre APPROVED BY SUPERVISING COMMITTEE: Supervisor: Randolph R. Lewis Steven D. Hoelscher The Matter of Memory: Visual and Performative Witnessing of the Greensboro Massacre by Michael Scott Pryor, B.A. Report Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts The University of Texas at Austin August 2012 The story depends upon every one of us to come into being. It needs us all, needs our remembering, understanding, and creating what we have heard together to keep on coming into being. - Trinh T. Minh-ha, Woman, Native, Other Acknowledgements As Trinh T. Minh-ha suggests, stories do not come into being alone. They are communal endeavors. The story told in the following pages is no exception. My thanks to Erin Brown Craven, Andy Coon, Jeremy Eaton, Aliene Howell, Emily Mann, and Signe Waller for spending generous interview time with me, sharing their reflections on making and witnessing art about the Greensboro Massacre. I am honored to be in their company. I am especially grateful to my advisor Randy Lewis, who was a patient guiding force throughout the writing process, and who has helped me think big about what constitutes legitimate scholarship within the frame of American Studies. Finally, special thanks to Kaitlin McNally-Murphy, who was a source of steady support, inspiration, and insightful critique when I needed it most. The survivors of the Greensboro Massacre, and the community of visionaries who organized, supported, and participated in the Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission process continue to inspire and inform my work. This small bit of scholarship is ultimately for them, and for people everywhere who struggle to confront honestly the truth of our collective pasts. v Abstract The Matter of Memory: Visual and Performative Witnessing of the Greensboro Massacre Michael Scott Pryor, M.A. The University of Texas at Austin, 2012 Supervisor: Randolph R. Lewis This report explores the role of documentary art in the constitution of collective memory in Greensboro, North Carolina, between the years 1999 and 2004. In that city on November 3, 1979, Ku Klux Klan and Nazis killed five labor organizers in broad daylight. Television news crews, on site to cover the anti-Klan march scheduled for that day, captured the killings on film. In spite of this evidence, all-white juries twice acquitted the Klan/Nazis of any wrongdoing. In the weeks and months that followed the massacre, city officials and mainstream media sought to disassociate Greensboro from the event, generating a master narrative that portrayed both the Klan/Nazis and labor organizers as outsiders, and the city as an innocent bystander. This narrative covered up the fact that the Greensboro police had extensive prior knowledge about the potential for violence, and yet were mysteriously absent when the Klan/Nazis arrived on the scene. In a third trial—a civil suit brought against the city by survivors of the shooting—Klan and police were found jointly liable for wrongful death. Twenty-five years later, the massacre and its aftermath served as the impetus for the first Truth and Reconciliation Commission in the United States. In the years leading up to the Commission, six artists—including the author—made or presented artwork in Greensboro about the killings. Importantly, none of the artists were from Greensboro or had any direct connection to the massacre. However, through their creative processes and final artworks, they made an implicit claim about the political relevance of remembering and engaging with the full history of November 3, 1979. Collectively, the art spanned a variety of mediums, including theater, paintings, music, and dance. Through interviews with the artists, archival research, and qualitative analysis, this report argues that the artists helped to generate the potential for an expanded, poly-vocal collective memory of the massacre. They did this through practices of citation and translation—converting the archive of factual history into aesthetic and material forms—that made the events of November 3, 1979 available to community members for encounter and interpretation in the present. vi Table of Contents List of Acronyms and Abbreviations ................................................................... viii Prologue .................................................................................................................. 1 Introduction ............................................................................................................. 4 Artist Profiles ........................................................................................................ 19 Emily Mann: "Greensboro: A Requiem" .................................................. 19 Aliene Howell: "The Greensboro Massacre Paintings" ............................ 26 Erin Brown Craven: "Revolutionary Edges (Memories Unheard)" .......... 32 Jeremy Eaton: "You Know What Happened" ........................................... 37 Reflections on the Personal: "The November 3, 1979 Song Cycle" ......... 43 Citation and Translation: On the Circulation of (Post)Memory ........................... 49 Conclusion: Assessing the Impact of the Greensboro Massacre Artworks .......... 56 Appendix: The Greensboro Massacre Paintings, by Aliene Howell .................... 62 Bibliography ......................................................................................................... 67 vii List of Acronyms and Abbreviations BCC: Beloved Community Center CWP: Communist Workers’ Party GJF: Greensboro Justice Fund GTCRP: Greensboro Truth and Community Reconciliation Project (referred to below as “the Project”) GTRC: Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission WVO: Workers’ Viewpoint Organization viii Prologue April 29, 2002 I turn left and park the car where the pavement meets temporary pasture. One lone oak tree provides shade on this bright April afternoon. The green grass, rich in color from the springtime warmth, is interrupted here and there by mounds of dirt, the only sign suggesting the recent presence of bulldozers. Otherwise, the large field is sparse and open, with the exception of a few scattered trees. The open space is bounded on three sides by east Greensboro neighborhoods and, on the fourth, by Morningside Cemetery. The emptiness of the space belies the teeming presence there, the ghostly shapes of buildings recently razed to make way for a new housing project. The old one— Morningside Homes—had fallen into disrepair. Undoubtedly, new well-built houses will be welcome—a much-needed upgrade. But stories have been circulating about how people were evicted from their homes, disheveled as they may have been, without any guarantee that they would be able to call the soon-to-be-built Hope VI houses their own. For a piece of land so recently full of buildings and streets and people who made it their home, the large field before me is eerily quiet. I am here to prepare myself emotionally and spiritually for a performance. Tonight I will present my undergraduate senior thesis to the Guilford College community, a thesis that I have worked on for nearly half my undergraduate tenure, for which I have written a collection of songs to tell the story of the Greensboro Massacre and its aftermath. Tonight I will sing those songs in public for the first time. I am trying to make sense of the artistic, intellectual, political, emotional, and communal journey that 1 I have been on for the past year and a half, a journey that has made November 3, 1979 arguably more important to me than any other date. I am here to gather strength and inspiration, to commune with the ghosts that linger in this place. I have watched countless hours of film footage and poured over hundreds of pictures of the very place where I now stand. This is the ground where members of the Ku Klux Klan and Neo-Nazi party gunned down labor organizers Cesar Cauce, Michael Nathan, Bill Sampson, Sandy Smith, and Jim Waller on November 3, 1979. But in spite of this meticulous research, I hardly recognize the space. The landscape constructed in my head from fragmentary documentary images is almost entirely different from the one before me. Without the physical structures of Morningside Homes—the public housing complex featured so prominently in the background of the film footage from November 3—I am disoriented, unclear where to face or direct my attention. Fortunately, the enormous oak tree remains, like a Rosetta stone, making the strange, flattened landscape legible: Michael fell somewhere around here, in the middle of the street; Jim was shot in the back over there under the tree; Cesar went down in the grass by the street corner; Bill was on the grass on the other side of the street; and Sandy, well, I never could place Sandy because she was never shown in the footage. I think she would have been somewhere over there where the new community center now stands. However, these are all approximations. The only things that provide a sense of continuity between the physical present and my imagination of the past are the oak tree and the corner of Everitt and Bingham Streets. But “Bingham” is a new name for what used to be Carver Street. The corner of Everitt and Carver