The Path Toward Racial Reconciliation in Salisbury, North Carolina

Abstract

In January 2019, the city council of Salisbury, North Carolina passed a resolution to renounce its past racial injustices, recognize the ways it has continued to uphold racial inequality, and work to improve equity in the future. The city, from a governmental level, promised to remedy its violent, racially divisive history and specifically renounced a lynching that occurred there in 1906. The Resolution wasn’t easy to pass, and spent months in revision, protest, and standstill. The process by which the Resolution was presented, revised, and eventually approved opens up the question of to what extent the Resolution has had, or will have, an impact on racial justice in Salisbury.

This thesis also examines the ways that reconciliation is occurring in public space. In the three years since the resolution was first introduced, community members have been working with the Equal Justice Initiative’s Community Remembrance Project to erect a marker which memorializes the victims of racial terror in this town. The town has simultaneously engaged in a debate over its confederate monument, Fame. Through archival research, literature review, and narrative storytelling, I analyze the formal reconciliation process initiated in Salisbury as well as the role of memory, monuments, and markers in that work.