Rhetorics of Interdependence: Composing the Ethos of the Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

Abstract

On the morning of November 3rd, 1979, the Communist Workers Party organized a “Death to the Klan” rally and parade in Greensboro, North Carolina. Violence ensued when, later in the morning, Ku Klux Klan and American Nazi Party members arrived at the parade starting point and fired on the protestors, killing five CWP members and injuring ten others. Local news crews captured the events on film, but despite this evidence the killers were not found guilty for the deaths. Twenty-five years later, Greensboro citizens hoping to redress injustice and heal “long-standing divisions in the community” formed the first truth commission of its kind in the United States--the Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

This dissertation explores both spoken and written rhetorical performances surrounding the operation of the Greensboro TRC in order to demonstrate how its members and advocates attempted to establish the authority to carry out the Commission’s mandate and legitimate its claims about the “context, causes, sequence, and consequence” of the 1979 killings. Through a series of close readings, the project argues that they did so, in part, by drawing upon the rhetorical traditions circulating within the field of transitional justice. These traditions provided rhetorical resources that the Commission’s members and advocates reaccentuated in their rhetorical performances to construct the Commission’s ethos, thereby establishing the grounds for their actions and claims.

Grassroots truth commissions and other commissions of inquiry are increasingly common in the United States, and this dissertation brings into relief some of the ways that these organizations are able to garner authority--a prerequisite for understanding how the field of transitional justice is developing in the U.S., how truth commissions construct social change in response to past violence or injustice, and how they may be implemented more effectively in other contexts in the future. Furthermore, as various chapters of the project trace how facets of the traditions offered by transitional justice were performed to meet the contingent demands of the Greensboro context, they simultaneously advance contemporary rhetorical theory by complicating recent scholarship on middle ground arguments, constitutive rhetorics, corporate constructions of ethos, and definitional arguments.