Race, truth, and reconciliation in the United States: reflections on Desmond Tutu's proposal

Abstract

Desmond Tutu's suggestion that U. S. society should have a truth and reconciliation process about its racist past prompts this investigation into historical scholarship on racial violence. The lynchings of Zachariah Walker (1911) and of Willie Earle (1947) reveal different regional memories which deny or acknowledge the past. By contrast Wilmington, NC in 1998 re-collected a white supremacist coup (1898) in ways that were transformational for the present. The essay points to legacies of racial violence in hate crimes, in backlash against affirmative action and in continued racialization of citizenship and the census.