In that town with its public image of good race relations was born CP Ellis, the son of a cotton mill worker. White people who worked in mills were at the bottom of the white social ladder. They lived in shacks, were not usually educated past middle school, and lived lives devoid of hope for improvement. They breathed in the cotton dust all day in their stifling factories, leaving their lungs weak and their color paler than usual. Other whites called them Lintheads. Similar to black lung suffered by coal miners who inhale the coal dust, many of them died from exposure to the cotton dust, as well as typical dangers associated with factory work and poverty living conditions. Alcoholism was rampant, and CP’s father was violent when drunk. CP was ridiculed by classmates for being so poor. His classmates were poor, too, but they could feel superior because at least their fathers weren’t Lintheads like CP’s.
The first time that CP felt that his social position might be better than somebody else’s was when he was about 8 years old and realized that blacks were even lower on the Durham ladder than Lintheads. Having grown up in a world of institutionalized segregation, it seemed perfectly normal to him that his world of school and church and neighborhood was entirely white. He was about 8 and playing football with black kids from across the tracks when nighttime came and some of the older white boys, using the N word, told the black kids that they should be getting home. They used the N word. It probably wasn’t even meant as an insult by the kids, it was just the way things were. But for the 8 year old at the bottom of his ladder, the N word and the introduction of the idea of race were empowering. He relished the notion that while he may have been the poorest of the poor, he could never be called that N word. If he worked at the mill as an adult, his skin could become pale and give away the fact that he was a Linthead, but he would never be black, and this realization comforted the boy.
Ann Atwater was not born in Durham. Her husband had come to Durham to get a job at the central leaf Tobacco Company, then he sent for his family. They had both heard that Durham was supposed to be different from their tiny farm town of Hillsboro. In Durham black people were able to get ahead, to own things, to live in nice houses, or so it was told. In 1953 when the 18 year old woman arrived by bus with her two year old daughter she was appalled. The black neighborhood was called Hayti, H-A-Y-T-I, and the streets were not even paved. The houses were sub-standard shacks and it seemed that she had moved from the frying pan into the fire. Many of the black men who worked at the factory, including Ann’s husband, drank their wages, feeling hopeless for any chance of betterment. At least in their rural life, the young family had not been exposed to what would eventually tear them apart—alcohol and the hopelessness of living in urban housing filth.
When Ann’s husband left her and the two kids she went to work as a domestic, her family’s sole provider. This meant that she left her children with neighborhood women to go and care for the home of a white family. At her first home she did not know the local customs and accepted $5 a day--about half of the going rate. Her employer knew better but took advantage of her inexperience in the matter. She got another job but still was held apart from her employers--from the white world that ruled hers. Even at $10 a day she could barely feed her family. As the 1950’s came to a close, she was aware of the boycotts going on and of black organizations trying to gain justice and equality for blacks in the south, but was too tired to participate. She was a churchgoer—she likened her black oppression by whites to that of the Hebrews in Egypt--and believed that things would get better for her people, but she could not imagine how it would happen. She did not see herself as somebody who would be the mover and shaker, helping others who felt helpless.
By 1960, Durham had seen its own lunch counter boycott and was a hotbed of civil rights activism. Martin Luther King had even visited to affirm the boycott efforts. The truth behind the public image, the truth that Durham had terrible race relations, poverty, and Jim Crow laws, was coming out. CP Ellis had quit school, gotten married, had some kids, and worked in the mill for awhile. Opportunity knocked in the form of his finding a co-signer to help him purchase a rundown service station. He had dreams of being his own boss, of raising his children proud of their father who was not a Linthead. What he actually discovered was that he had to work longer hours for less pay as his own boss. He wanted to be different from his father, to have hope for his and his family’s life. The first time he attended a Klan rally he finally felt like he was part of something. CP had always understood blacks to be inferior, but soon he embraced the Klan’s teachings of who the enemy actually was. The Klan taught him that his real enemies were the Jews, liberals, and Communists who used the inferior intelligence of blacks to keep the deserving white man down. Their tools were desegregation, equal rights, bussing, and integrated schools and businesses. The blacks, while still to be reviled, were actually pawns in this huge conspiracy to break up white families through interracial marriage and the weakening of the white race. CP Ellis bought the Klan conspiracy theories wholesale and rose in the ranks of the Klan, achieving the position of Exalted Cyclops of his local chapter. He felt that it was his civic duty to protect his family from these forces that threatened his very existence. He was usually quiet, keeping to himself. Along the way he found an inner voice that could come out when necessary, when he needed to speak for his position at school board meetings and the like. He was affirmed over and over when public officials called him, sent him money “for the cause,” and winked at him at meetings. He thought he understood politics, and knew that they could not publicly endorse the Klan. He felt special anyway.
Meanwhile Ann Atwater, by the 1960’s, had discovered that her inner voice could create change when spoken. She was, is still, a very heavyset, very dark black woman who was not known for her quiet nature. She could become very vocal when she was upset, at work, in her community, with anyone who was treating her unfairly. She lived a hard life of injustice, raising children on her own, facing white bosses every day who clearly believed her to be inferior to their own family, and she had health issues related to weight, poverty, and bad health care. Sometimes all she had was her loud voice and large frame to try to get what she needed. Her turning point toward self-empowerment came when she was fed up with living in her condemnable shack. Opportunity knocked on her door, literally, in 1965 when Howard Fuller, a black college graduate and activist, was canvassing the neighborhood trying to start Operation Breakthrough. Ann had never met a black college graduate or an activist in person. Fuller and his agency wanted to help Ann hold her landlord accountable for the sinful state of her home. Funded by the Urban League, Operation Breakthrough sent activists like Fuller into black neighborhoods to improve lives for poor southern blacks through empowerment and self-help. Ann had learned early in her life that not only whites were out to keep blacks in their place, but so were other blacks—the elite class. Her landlord was black, of the elite class, and never heeded her complaints. He was ready to dismiss her as usual, but when she complained to him with Fuller at her side, he listened and made minimal improvements to her home. Ann was delighted and signed up to attend meetings with Fuller and Operation Breakthrough. Soon she rose through the ranks as neighborhood canvasser, learning to help her neighbors get needed improvements, then to neighborhood organizer. With her large frame, large voice, and large attitude, she quickly became a spokesperson for her community of Hayti. Before too long, she, too, was meeting in public forums to fight for her people. Often CP Ellis and Ann Atwater would be at the same meeting, sometimes both were slated to speak. Their hatred for each other and mutual mistrust was palpable.
At one meeting Ann’s friends had to stop her from knifing CP Ellis when he felt confident enough to actually use the N word publicly at a town meeting regarding desegregation. During a march for fair housing, anticipating violence from the black marchers, CP and some of his Klansmen were ready to help the police by standing by with their own weapons. When no marchers got violent or out of hand, and CP did not get to shoot anybody, and his whole chapter went home, disappointed. Brown vs. the Board of Education, the 1954 ruling that called for desegregation of schools had been ignored by Durham for more than 10 years. By the end of the 1960’s, after having lost too many lawsuits and becoming a public media disgrace, Durham’s white leaders were finally allowing minimal advances to be made toward integration.
CP Ellis and his fellow segregationists were fighting a losing battle, even if they would not concede.. Durham blacks were beginning to win the desegregation war and Ann Atwater was at the forefront of many events. Her fight was not for blacks and whites to live together, but for black housing to improve. She was strongly tied to many black leaders by the end of the 1960’s, as well as having a public persona of her own. Howard Fuller, her opportunity knocker, had coined the phrase “Black Power” in Durham, and was her close friend. Floyd McKissick, head of Congress of Racial Equality, known as CORE, worked with her on marches and rallies. Louis Austin, the editor of the black newspaper, the Carolina Times, called her Roughhouse Annie for her passion in advocating tenants’ rights. Howard Clement, the head of the North Carolina Mutual Insurance Agency, helped to bridge the gap between Durham’s wealthy blacks and Durham’s poor blacks by working with Ann Atwater. At the close of the 1960’s Durham was still a racially segregated city in many ways, but changes had happened, and promised to continue. These changes were too slow for Ann and too fast for CP.
It took an outside agitator, one of the very people that CP Ellis hated, to usher in the change that makes this story so unique. By 1970 the White House had released some funds for states that were still not integrated to get up to speed. Bussing had not worked, because whites opened private schools. “Separate but equal” was often still the unwritten law, but the black schools were not equal, not even close. A black man named Joe Becton, head of the Durham Human Relations Commission, hand-selected black and white people in poor parts of Durham to help him with the process of integration. He also called in Bill Riddick, another black man, trained to move communities through this process by the use of charrettes. Charette is a “French word for extended forums, in this case, to open the lines of communication in order that all people might understand each other’s role as it relates to desegregation problems.”
When Bill Riddick met CP and Ann, both recruited by Joe Becton, he decided that they were the natural co-chairs of the meetings. Ann thought it made perfect sense for her to be the co-chair representing the black community. Young and old blacks turned to her for advice and support. She was known for helping poor blacks, and for getting the black elite to stop dragging their feet on particular issues. CP took more convincing. Mainly, he did not want to work with Ann or these blacks from outside the state. He feared what his Klan brothers would say if he actually agreed to work with the enemy. Secretly, he had felt for some time that segregation was a lost cause. Only recently he had figured out that he and other poor whites, other Klan brothers, were pawns for the white elite. He had tried to speak with a local politician out in the open on a Durham street, but was snubbed by that same politician who secretly passed him money and thanked him for doing a good job. These wealthy men could afford to send their kids to private schools, and CP could not. These elite white racists had been relying on CP and people like him to keep the poor whites in their place, in factories and mills. Now these wealthy whites were going to cave in to federal pressure and integrate the schools because they did not care that the children of CP Ellis would have to rub shoulders with the children of Ann Atwater.
CP agreed to work on the charrette process out of sheer will for survival, and because he wanted things to be as good as possible for his own children. Some people in Ann’s neighborhood thought she was crazy for working with a Klansman. By agreeing to work with Ann, and to be seen with Bill Riddick, even lunching with both of these black people in public, CP received threatening phone calls. His children were threatened at school. Ann and CP both kept working together to get blacks and whites to attend ten days of long discussions. The planning phase took several weeks during which time they grew accustomed to each other, if not exactly friendly. Riddick modeled for them how to speak your truth and keep the conversation going. His aim was to fight the beasts of class, race, poverty, and poor government funding. The first time that CP Ellis saw the humanity of Ann Atwater was when he realized she was a concerned mother. The first time Ann Atwater decided she would not knife him was when she realized that he, too, had been a victim—of classism, not racism. The same white people who legislated injustice for Ann also disdained CP and other poor whites. When he actually engaged in those first discussions with Ann, it was as parents of high schoolers whose children were both under fire. Midway through the planning process, before the charrette began, CP opened up to Ann. Their kids went to the same school and were each receiving pressure over this new endeavor by their parents.
From the book entitled “The Best of Enemies” I will let the author speak of their breakthrough: “This led them into a discussion about all of the difficulties they’d each had working on the charrette. They forgot their exhaustion in the excitement of discovering how similar their experiences were. Soon they were talking about other things, about how hard it is raising kids without much money, and about how they were always having to tell their kids that they were just as good as kids from middle class homes. About the problem of trying to convince their kids never to be ashamed of who they were, while all the time hiding their own shame for not being better providers….
CP couldn’t believe what he was hearing. But even more amazing to him was what he was saying, and to whom. He was sharing his most intimate grievances, all of his doubts and failures, with the hated Ann Atwater. And yet, here they were, talking like old friends. As if she wasn’t black at all, or he wasn’t white, or as if all that didn’t matter. He looked at her and was stunned by what he saw. Mirrored in her face were the same deeply etched lines of work and worry that marked his own face. And suddenly he was crying. The tears came without warning and, once started, he was unable to stop them. Ann tried to comfort him, stroking his hand and murmuring, “it’s ok, it’s ok” as he sobbed. Then she, too, began to cry. If anyone had walked into the auditorium just then, they would have found it hard to believe what they saw: the exalted Cyclops of the Ku Klux Klan and Durham’s most militant black leader sitting together, hand in hand, weeping copiously and oblivious to the world around them.”
The charrette went well, with hundreds of people in attendence. Seventeen years after the ruling, Brown vs. the Board of Education was becoming reality in Durham. Ann Atwater introduced CP to her boyfriend and children. CP introduced Ann to his wife. During one of the last nights of the charrette CP insisted on displaying Klan material at an exhibition hall display of community interests. This had been CP’s final attempt to cling to what he now knew were lies—that the Klan represented his way of life and that blacks were inferior. Ann herself told some black youth that they had better not destroy any of her co-chair’s display. Seeing this woman stand up for his right to have a display, even though she hated what it stood for, changed his heart in ways he could no longer lie about to himself. CP called his vice president from the local Klan to come and pick up his keys, saying that he would not be returning. At the closing night of the Charrettes his speech said in part, “Something has happened to me…I think it’s for the best. I used to think Ann Atwater was the meanest black woman I’d ever seen in my life. But, she trying to help her people just like I’m trying to help my people.”
By being forced to work together on a problem they shared—poor schools for poor children, CP and Ann became friends. Both of them lost some friends along the way who could not accept CP’s conversion. CP had a suicide attempt a year after the charrettes because of the disconnect in his life from Klansman to activist. He went back to school and worked as a union organizer and as a maintenance worker at Duke University. In 1977 he was elected as business manager of his local union where he served until his retirement ion 1994. His best accomplishment, his proudest moment, was negotiating Durham’s first paid holiday for Martin Luther King’s birthday. Ann Atwater worked until her retirement for Durham Housing Authority, continuing to this day to fight for justice in housing for the poor.
This whole chain of events captured national attention and they appeared on Good Morning America, talk shows, and a documentary was made called An Unlikely Friendship. Studs Terkel featured them in his book, Race, and the book whose contents I have shared with you is called Best of Enemies. When CP Ellis died in November Ann Atwater spoke at his funeral.
The story of his transformation and their friendship is not only a moving tribute to Martin Luther King’s dream for racial equality, but also to our first principle. As Unitarian Universalists we covenant to affirm and promote the dignity and worth of every person. CP and Ann had to meet several times and take risks before progress could occur. Race and class are still dividers in this country 35 years after their charrette. As Ann had known for some time, and CP learned eventually, money is a much greater divider than skin color. The black elite of Durham would have had no more in common with Ann than would have the white elite. Wealthy white racists snickered at and derided poor whites as much as blacks, possibly more. One of our premier theologians, Thandeka, has been saying for some time that our program of Journey Toward Wholeness, whose goal is undoing racism, will fail because it is class that divides this nation more than race. CP suffered an existential crisis when he realized he was not in league with the white political power. When he saw himself used as their pawn to keep white and black poor at bay, he no longer participated in the race war. Race and class are enemies of justice and love. CP’s salvation came in the form of friendship with one person, Ann. She saw him as he was, and allowed herself to be seen as fully human. Theirs is a story of redemption, of deep connection, and of hope for all of us today. The UUA has asked congregations to focus on the living wage initiative this year, and Black History Month is an unfortunately appropriate time to do so. Rev. Dr. King, for instance, knew that race issues would not improve until justice, economic justice, was achieved. In the case of this story, the racial epithets hurled at Ann and other blacks were not the only ones that contributed to the race war. The same white kids who called blacks names, called poor whites names too. Some people know they have power, and choose to use it for good or not. Some people do not know they have power, but eventually find their voice. Some people, even today in the US, do not have any power, and we need to right that wrong. That is the message of this day, and of this unlikely friendship.
Human Family
I note the obvious differences in the human family. Some of us are serious, some thrive on comedy.
Some declare their lives are lived as true profundity, and others claim they really live the real reality.
The variety of our skin tones can confuse, bemuse, delight, brown and pink and beige and purple, tan and blue and white.
I've sailed upon the seven seas and stopped in every land, I've seen the wonders of the world not yet one common man.
I know ten thousand women called Jane and Mary Jane, but I've not seen any two who really were the same.
Mirror twins are different although their features jibe, and lovers think quite different thoughts while lying side by side.
We love and lose in China, we weep on England's moors, and laugh and moan in Guinea, and thrive on Spanish shores.
We seek success in Finland, are born and die in Maine. In minor ways we differ, in major we're the same.
I note the obvious differences between each sort and type, but we are more alike, my friends, than we are unalike.
We are more alike, my friends, than we are unalike.
We are more alike, my friends, than we are unalike.