What does truth telling, reconciliation, and repair look and feel like?

Brainstorm students initial thoughts on this question before sharing one or more of these stories with the class.

Video: Uprooted, a documentary about a descendent of a lynching victim 

Video: Abbeville, a documentary about a community coming together to memorialize a racial terror lynching

Transmedia Project: Journalist Karin Berry researches the racial terror lynching of her maternal great-great grandfather in the project, The Undefeated. Read about, listen to, and view photographs of her family’s journey.

Debrief as a class.

* What words or images were most compelling?

* After viewing one of these stories, how would you answer the opening question to this lesson, 'What does truth telling, reconciliation, and repair look and feel like?'

Teacher Note: Before showing the film clips from True Justice, clarify the terms of truth telling, reconciliation, and repair and discuss their meaning in the context of the work of the Equal Justice Initiative. For your reference, these definitions are from Merriam-Webster.com: 

Truth: the body of real things, events, and facts Telling: (as in to tell) to relate in detail, narrate

Reconciliation: the state of restoring to friendship, harmony 

Repair: to restore by replacing a part or putting together what is torn or broken, to fix 

Distribute Handout One - Note Catcher: Truth Telling, Reconciliation and Repair. 

Teacher Note: Ask students to review the questions outlined on the Note Catcher before watching the clips. Invite students to take notes on the handout during  the film and allow for a few minutes after each clip to complete their notes. 

Watch Clips One and Two.

Clip One: "The Sound of Suffering" (runtime 7 min) 

This clip explains the genesis of EJI’s Community Remembrance Project and the work of individuals and groups to collect soil samples from racial terror lynching as an act of memory and as a visual representation of the story of this brutal period of American history.

Clip Two: "Truth and Reconciliation are Sequential" (runtime 6 min)

In this clip Bryan Stevenson explains EJI’s legal advocacy and narrative work, and explains the need for truth and reconciliation work in this country if racial justice is to be achieved.

Teacher Note: The film-makers conducted numerous interviews to produce True Justice with nine of these interviews free and accessible in the Interview Archive on the this website. A selection of these interviews, edited together here to create interview threads, are available for your students’ learning.

Two interview threads were created for this lesson that teachers and students can choose from, or use together, to deepen their understanding of the lesson topic.

Print and distribute Handouts 2 and 3 in the "Resources" section in the lesson so students can follow along with the interview transcripts. 

Handout Two: "Reconciliation and Repair" Thread

Handout Three: "The Power of Memory" Thread

Watch the Interview Threads and have students follow along on the transcripts, under-lining details that catch their attention, and jotting down questions and insights that come to mind after viewing each thread. 

Teacher Note: The narrative, educational, and memorial work of the Equal Justice Initiative has been inspired and informed by nations and sites from around the world. In True Justice Bryan Stevenson speaks of these efforts, and in the “Power of Memory” Interview Thread he expands on this point explaining how the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg is a narrative museum, the Kigali Genocide Memorial in Rwanda commemorates the 1994 Rwandan Genocide, and the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin, Germany as well as the Stolpersteine Project of “stumbling stones” around Berlin all influenced his thinking about how to acknowledge, memorialize, and commemorate the history of slavery and of the genocide of native people. 

Directions:

Ask students to share any memorials or monuments they have visited or heard about. 

Explain to students that they will be exploring many of the places that informed EJI’s  National Memorial for Peace and Justice and The Legacy Museum in Montgomery, Alabama. If internet access is unavailable, share pictures of the sites for the class to discuss.

Distribute Handout Four: Exploring Memorials and Museums and Sites of Memory Around the World and have students complete the survey at home or in class. 

In the Power of Memory interview thread, Bryan Stevenson says: 

“You know, we're a country that takes great pride in our greatness. We have a lot of strategies, and tactics, and habits that go with achievement and victory. We do the Olympics well. We do military success well. We do accomplishment well. But we don't do mistakes very well. We don't own up to our mistakes very well.” 

Discuss:

* Do you agree with this assessment of our country? Why or why not? 

* What are the cultural forces that make it difficult to own up to our mistakes? 

* How do we change our national narrative to include our greatness and our mistakes? 

* What might a national narrative that includes our achievements while acknowledging our mistakes looks like? 

Option One:

Truth Commissions, Inquiry Commissions, and Truth and Reconciliation Commissions are non-judicial bodies that have helped sort through the truth of what happened after atrocities, human rights violations and armed conflicts. 

Choose a commission from the list published by the U.S. Institute of Peace to learn about how a Truth and Reconciliation process worked in another country. Write an essay comparing and contrasting that response to what has happened in the U.S. in response to the periods of slavery, racial terror lynching, segregation and mass incarceration. 

Option Two: 

There have been many modern calls for Truth and Reconciliation Committees in the U.S. In Greensboro, N.C. a Commission studied a 1979 incident in Greensboro where anti-Ku Klux Klan protesters were shot and killed by white supremacists at a rally. The city empaneled a Truth and Reconciliation committee in 2004 in an attempt to heal the racial rifts that persist there. Read the Commission’s Executive Summary to assess what the commission did, and research the effects in that community. 

Another Truth and Reconciliation attempt took place in Maine between the Wabanaki tribes and non-natives in the area. Read about that effort in this Yes! Magazine article to learn about what this effort might look like in other parts of the United States.