There are many remarkable moments I witnessed five years ago. My purpose has been to give the families, especially their children, some sense of the actors and larger forces that neither children nor parents could control.
On an early May morning in 2018 my wife was getting ready to travel to Thailand with a university team to meet officials and learn about the precarious urban lives faced by refugees waiting and hoping to be among the lucky few permitted to leave for safe places like Greensboro. When the possibility of such a trip arose she hesitated because of the cost and our modest income. We withdrew money from our savings account, updated her passport, and made a list of my home duties. These consisted of watering the vegetable garden, feeding the cat, and minding the dozen chrysalises due to split open and become monarch butterflies in a few days. When they emerged they would be vulnerable while their wings unfolded and dried. My job was to unzip the hamper so they could fly off or they’d die in a day or so.
A few days before her plane departed a fire swept through an apartment unit located in a notorious complex of three buildings used by refugee agencies to house clients. Five children from one family died. Much attention focused on the safety of the old stoves of the type found in all the units and subject of residents’ complaints. The father and mother, refugees from the Democratic Republic of Congo, had been working a low-pay shift while the other stayed with the kids, then reversing roles when the other returned. This was a common practice for families eager to get a good start in America even if it imposed very large stresses on them, preventing them from regularly attending English language classes and other life skills programs, and lengthening their dependence on low-skill, low pay jobs that were essential to our region’s economy. But parents were also expected to accept work presented to them by resettlement agencies because it was a condition of their continued government-funded help. Most families complied because they had so few choices. And most accepted the housing they received upon arrival at Piedmont Triad International Airport for the same reason.
I knew these Summit-Cone apartment units well and the extreme unlikelihood the owners would ever repair them. In 2013, five years before the fire, Beth, the director of a housing assistance nonprofit, said I could offer residents their new rent downpayment if they moved to a safer place. Their lack of savings to move, poor English, and mistrust of our social system constituted just some of the many reasons they stayed. The Summit-Cone apartments consisted of three buildings. In the 3100 building Mr V, a Vietnamese man with young children, would sit on his apartment steps and smoke while I asked him for the third or fourth time if he’d consider moving. His time in the U.S. exceeded the five-year limit that qualified refugees for special services. This was true for all the families I met. Mr. V would take a cigarette puff and shake his head. You’ve got kids, I’d say. This is a dangerous place for them. Answer: No. I figured he thought that home was home, no matter how terrible the conditions. And for some refugees who’d spent a good part of their lives on the run, Summit-Cone was their refuge. Mr W, also Vietnamese, was an elderly man who kept the grounds around his unit at 3100N meticulous. He, too, was disinclined to leave. Mr and Mrs X, from the Bahnar Montagnard tribe, lived in 3100D and took care of their Black-Montagnard grandchild. They laid out their rent receipts for me to examine while I sorted their mail. Mr and Mrs. Y, an elderly Khmer Krom couple, ethnic Cambodians from southern Vietnam, lived next door. In winter they wore their coats inside their dilapidated apartment and in summer they collected scrap wood to make raised beds for the little kitchen garden outside their door.
In the 3102 building, a single couple lived with their child and father. The other 13 units were empty with their doors decorated with condemnation notices from city inspectors. The couple was eager to leave. Some apartment doors facing Summit Avenue were half open, an invitation to trouble. As we prepared to go to court with photographic evidence of collapsing ceilings, broken windows and inoperable stove burners, they said that no repairs had been done. The owners, counting on their no-show, used the threat of court action to collect several months of back rent as both a punishment for leaving and an incentive to stay. The parents lost a day’s income taking off from work to appear, another factor which discouraged residents from leaving. As soon as the owners’ attorney saw we arrived with a lawyer from Legal Aid, he immediately dropped charges.
In the 3104 building, I helped the Z family leave, one of whose members was a survivor of the 2011 triple homicide, a case in which a Montagnard man shot and wounded his former girlfriend and their friend’s daughter, and killed the daughter’s mother, the man dating his former girlfriend, and the six-year old son of the Montagnard man and his former girlfriend. In 2012, my wife and I were invited by the grandparents to attend the quiet one-year anniversary of their grandson’s death held at their home. It was heartbreaking.
Media and resettlement agencies often presented feel-good stories to the public about refugees. Less told and reported were accounts that reflected not only the trauma families faced in their homelands but the avoidable stresses, trauma and resulting tragedies their communities faced here. There were exceptions, however. In 2005, the News-Record reported that Summit-Cone owners had been sued by the court-appointed guardian of a young Montagnard girl for causing the child’s lead poisoning. The girl lived at another property controlled by the owners, who owned numerous low-rent units. In 2009, the local paper reported that the housing conditions and support experienced by Iraqis were so poor that they would prefer to get on a plane and face the chaos back home. They did not live at Summit-Cone and their apartment was not owned by the Summit-Cone owners, proof that Greensboro’s unsafe housing could not be pinned on just one family of owners. Still, the uproar was so great that representatives from the state came to inspect the Iraqis’ housing. Less than a year later the resettlement agency responsible closed its doors in disgrace.
And yet.
And yet it was possible to defend the owners who rented to the Iraqis because they, like Summit-Cone’s owners, were the few willing to work with resettlement agencies. Some might even regard them as minor heroes and champions of Greensboro’s newcomers because, after all, arriving families must live somewhere. Today, we speak of the housing crisis which affects first-time buyers faced with exorbitant asking prices. It now affects the middle class, but it’s been a longstanding problem faced by poor and working families — and also refugees — searching for housing. At Summit-Cone in 2013, $440 rental affordability came at the price of safety. Standard repairs and maintenance were absent. Of the 42 apartment units, perhaps 20 were occupied. The rest were condemned. I went door to door with my Asian face and downpayment promises trying to convince refugees to move because the City of Greensboro had sought to empty the buildings by residents’ voluntary departure, an approach that would avoid the inevitable bad publicity for the City if poor families were forced into the streets while TV and newspaper reporters stood by. And it would seem that instead of getting tough, enforcing housing code violations that carried serious monetary penalties to the owners, the owners were allowed to make enough repairs to pass inspection. By 2016 resettlement agencies were once again placing arriving refugee families into the Summit-Cone apartments. These were not Montagnards from Vietnam’s Central Highlands but those who fled the Democratic Republic of Congo’s brutal wars that had killed more than six million. Among them would be the family who lost five children on May 12, 2018.
After the 2018 fire, inspectors found code violations that numbered in the hundreds. The media came. Elected officials came. The fire made national news.
What followed could not be covered up or wished away. A month before, a freak tornado downed power lines and wrecked houses on Greensboro’s historically Black East Side. Strong Black leadership and response led by so many residents and organizers meant that accountability measures would be in place and help would follow. Although the neighborhood around the Summit-Cone apartments wasn’t affected, it was part of East Side. A District 2 community town hall meeting attracted Black faces from the Summit-Cone apartments and long time residents because top agenda items were the fire and tornado. Meetings led by the City’s International Advisory Committee (IAC) brought in elected officials and housing and fire department officials. Other meetings would occur that revealed in the presence of elected officials the sharp differences between resettlement agencies and the refugee families they served, at long last alerting city council members of their responsibilities to refugees as city residents, not charity cases. Clear voices from refugee families spoke out that did not need and did not welcome intermediaries speaking for them. The mayor, city council members, city officials and agencies charged with their welfare heard from speakers who spoke in clear English that Summit-Cone resembled a refugee camp, that discrimination prevailed, that to work with one resettlement agency was to put one’s life at risk. And finally, from the father of the dead children came the pointed rhetorical question to the room’s leadership about whether there was any coordination in this system of seeming non-accountability. Such frank assessments caused an indignant uproar from one agency representative but clearly, refugees’ words were heard and could not be silenced. The single thoughtful response I recall from that meeting came from a former resettlement agency director who regretted actions under her watch that might have contributed to the children’s deaths. What happened that day was a significant change in the relationship between the City of Greensboro and all of its refugee communities. No longer could the City rely on refugee resettlement agencies and their long time supporters to be the prime representatives, consultants, and representatives of refugees and their interests. The deaths of children, the solid work by the small team of IAC members elected from refugee and immigrant communities, and the undeniable voices of community leaders who lived through the fire were the price newcomers paid in order to be heard by our political establishment. When yet another refugee family living in a house owned by the same Summit-Cone landlord almost suffered the same fiery end, this time the mayor showed up in a hurry.
In 2019, with the approaching anniversary of the fire I asked Jeremy and Daniel, two highly regarded peace mediators, if they would host a series of three meetings for anyone interested in participating in a reflective discourse about what had happened at Summit-Cone. The meetings would be freighted with emotion because so little frank talk had taken place with those battling to minimize the tragedy. At the first meeting I certainly didn’t expect the owners to show up. They were facing serious charges brought by city lawyers about payment of large housing violation fines. But I did believe that if given the chance that others such as City officials and resettlement agency leaders might come, speak, listen, and perhaps be prepared to compromise. I thought that the thirty or so families forced to move after the city finally found the political will to do what it could not do in 2013, close the entire complex, were owed a factual account of what happened. I thought of the future when the children who played with those who died grew up and wondered what happened, because I did not believe that the gofundme donation given to the parents would be a sufficient answer. I considered what effect it might have on both children and their parents to walk past the burned out apartment for four months while they searched for new places to live. To remind participants, the mediators taped the names of each child to an empty chair. “The weight of this sad time we must obey, Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say” were the words Shakespeare used to conclude one of his most disturbing plays, King Lear. But the three sessions we held yielded little talk about accountability. There were words about love and care, as I recall, “kumbaya talk” as James described afterward, but not about stepping up or accepting moral responsibility when failure on every level was so obvious.
Politically, I saw progress with City leadership. But would these agencies, contractors entrusted by the state’s Department of Health and Human Service to ensure the safety of refugee families, change their ways? Our three peace circle meetings did not result in a “clearing of the air”, clarification by NC DHHS of its oversight of resettlement contractors operating in Greensboro, acknowledgement by those agencies of community leaders’ preeminent roles, or assurances by the City or state contractors that the placement of vulnerable populations into dangerous housing would cease. Our original purpose in holding these meetings one year after the fire was to give some kind of community response in the absence of any official recognition or remembrance. It took the City thirty years to offer a “statement of regret” concerning its role in the 1979 Greensboro Massacre, and six more years before it placed a marker at the site.
In 2020, following the killing of George Floyd, street protests took place in many cities including Greensboro, and the response was predictable with downtown storefronts boarded up. In 2021, the former owners of Summit-Cone — they had sold the property by then — agreed to pay $200,000 of the $682,000 originally charged. This was due to an error by the city, our mayor stated. With Trump gone, more refugees were accepted into the U.S., including hastily evacuated Afghans who eventually arrived in Greensboro. Young people involved in the 2018 fire have grown into positions of responsibility and influence. I was recently delighted to see one young man whose family I had visited at Summit Cone immediately after the fire serving as a role model for youth. College students who themselves came from immigrant backgrounds and who had organized and run the community center and after school program have continued to do social justice through their professions. According to one community leader, many of the families forced to move in the months after the fire have not done well, a predictable result of refugees already traumatized by war and persecution. Those who held positions of responsibility when the fire occurred have also grown older, too. Some have physically left the region, in one instance sore and ready to blame me. One individual recently took the opportunity to blithely declare their pride in having worked with refugees for twenty years, meaning they knew about the apartments’ notoriety, the owners’ reputation for poor maintenance, the Iraqis who wanted to go back rather than remain here, and the failures of a system they were incapable of criticizing. (“Thou shouldst not have been old before thou hadst been wise”, said Shakespeare’s Fool to Lear.)
The children’s deaths forced some changes. City housing inspectors were given authority to take proactive steps investigating violations. The city’s human rights department elevated the role of its liaison to international communities. The voices of refugee and immigrant community leaders have been taken more seriously. In the last elections there seemed to be more awareness by candidates about the presence of newcomers as potential voters. Immigrant candidates ran for office. Housing has become a national issue, interconnected with wages, homelessness, mental health, policing, and health disparities defined by race and income. COVID-19 revealed just how poorly prepared our local institutions, including healthcare and government, were to respond. Despite the horrors of the times during which refugee and immigrant workers were expected to be on the job, often without being given proper safety gear, I was amazed to see some of our most conservative institutions recognize that they hadn’t a clue about how to reach newcomer families with news, warnings and updates about the pandemic, and that they’d have to rely on refugee community leaders and youth to deliver life-saving supplies. I saw the risky work that Montagnard, Bhutanese, Liberian, Swahili and other community youth and leaders were doing. Their work saved lives.
Since the fire, I notice we tend to use words that more accurately describe problems and solutions. Terms that were once used to politely obscure or deflect criticism have become less
acceptable. If Trump unleashed a torrent of unashamedly bigoted hate, it forced those who had sat on the fence protected by good intentions and liberal values to state in plain English what exactly they meant. “Calling bullshit” has been far more direct than “check your privilege”, now an exceedingly old phrase. And if it seems that public discourse has continued on a downward trajectory of insults, “alternate facts” and lies, it is also an opportunity to reset not just the language we use but to base it on realities such as the Summit-Cone fire and the deaths of children. Before COVID-19 struck, rambling on and on about “lack of access” to health and other vital services was the way funding organizations and philanthropies framed solutions. Now the talk has become focused on solutions coming from communities themselves, including refugee communities. Supporting community solutions, setting up an underfunded diversity, equity, and inclusion officer, and giving them a token seat at the table is an old trick clothed in new corporate wrapping paper or it is a leverage point to force institutions and funders to redirect resources to where they are truly needed. In refugee communities change has meant the young questioning the old about racist views and their support for authoritarians like Trump. Even today I am still startled to hear refugee youth talk about white saviors, racism, and post-colonial mindsets. In 1984, when I came to Greensboro to teach at Guilford College, the prevailing notion was that Greensboro was a provincial backwater, a cultureless place stamped by racial, economic, and historical divisions that were best left unsaid. In 2018, following the fire, there were still voices among supposed refugee supporters who claimed poor, traumatized, and highly vulnerable families chose to live at Summit-Cone. Such amazing declarations cannot be made today without being called out for what they are.
Five years ago my wife got a taste for green curry while she was traveling in Thailand with the university group. As the monarchs emerged I made sure to photograph them. I got a few good ones that featured sometimes three or four that had emerged all in one morning. During her trip the group made an unscheduled excursion to investigate Montagnard families who had been trapped in the city for years and unable to come to the U.S. to rejoin relatives in Greensboro. A member of the Rhade tribe and former student of mine was also on the trip and was able to interpret. We celebrated my wife’s birthday at a Thai restaurant and she ordered the green curry. We heard that families had been cleared to leave Thailand. Some had just arrived.
Epilogue
There are many remarkable moments I witnessed five years ago. My purpose has been to give the families, especially their children, some sense of the actors and larger forces that neither children nor parents could control. I believe living in Greensboro for many years has given me a familiarity with the people, places and institutions that can create a slum like Summit-Cone. Some things I witnessed were accidental, for example when I chased children out of one of the units whose door had been left open and I saw a red glow from a stove that could not be turned off, validation of families’ complaints that these old appliances were dangerously and sufficiently unreliable to have caused the fire or other serious mishap leading to it.
The term “refugee” is both a legal term and a historical one; in the legal sense it establishes the extreme vulnerability and helplessness of the individual who, lacking the protection of the state, can be subjected to all forms of exploitation and harm without recourse, including wanton rape and killing; in Greensboro it is a historical term in the sense that it refers to the shared past of those who have arrived here from conflicts that have raged across the planet. At the time of the fire families were entitled to the type of societal protections and rights we only become intimately aware of when we encounter individuals, families and communities of refugee origin. When Louis, a resident of Summit-Cone and a natural leader respected by the Summit-Cone families, ended his remarks to a mostly uncomprehending group of elected officials and service agency representatives, he called for justice using the Latin maxim, Dura lex, sed lex, “The law is harsh, but it is the law.” I felt that I was seeing a new phase in the development of Greensboro as an international city. Refugees would no longer be schooled nor fooled, I thought.
—July, 2023
