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By Root 1102 0

every day of his life yet could barely afford to clothe his three children, the last of them born blind and developmentally disabled—white supremacy made a difficult existence a little more tolerable. The Klan gave Ellis an explanation for why his life was so hard (because of black people), and it gave him a community. He thrived within it and quickly began rising through its ranks, culminating in his appointment as Exalted Cyclops—i.e., head honcho—of the Durham Klavern. Pretty soon, the white power structure in town knew who Ellis was and began working with him, albeit behind closed doors. (As Ellis told Terkel, “councilmen would call me up: ‘The Blacks are comin’ up tonight and makin’ outrageous demands. How about some of you people showin’ up and have a little balance?’”) Thanks to the Klan, and for the first time he could remember, Ellis was enjoying some measure of confidence, respect, and power.

Then something happened: the course of C. P. Ellis’s life intersected, in a small but significant way, with the course of history. In 1970, the federal government funneled $75 million to North Carolina to desegregate its schools. That money should have been unnecessary—sixteen years earlier, the Supreme Court had declared, in Brown v. Board of Education, that school segregation was unconstitutional—but the state’s schools were still a legal, racial, and educational disaster. The federal funds were divvied up, and $80,000 was earmarked for a series of workshops to persuade Durham’s citizens to cooperate in integration.

For the organizers of those workshops, the first order of business was to identify the city’s most important leaders and convince them to participate. One of the people charged with doing so was a man named Joe Becton, at the time the director of the Durham Human Relations Commission. Becton realized that the city’s poor, white, anti-integration citizens could derail the process if they weren’t invited to participate, and he decided that the best person to represent them was the leader of the local KKK. Ellis’s initial response to the invitation was unequivocal: “I don’t intend to associate with a bunch of niggers.” But Becton kept after him—insisting, in essence, that Ellis’s constituents needed a spokesperson—and eventually Ellis gave in.

Meanwhile, across town, the organizers were recruiting another community leader, an African-American woman named Ann Atwater. If Ellis was to be the spokesperson for some of Durham’s most impoverished and disenfranchised white citizens, Atwater would represent its most impoverished and disenfranchised blacks. Atwater’s life, like Ellis’s, had been hard; she had her first child at sixteen, to a husband who left her soon after, and her work as a nanny and housecleaner never brought in enough income to lift her and her family out of poverty. Like Ellis, she was angry about her plight, and, like him, she poured that anger into activism—organizing housing protests against unscrupulous landlords, educating welfare recipients about their rights, planning sit-ins and rallies to protest racial and economic injustice, and, in general, serving as the de facto mayor of Hayti, the poor black neighborhood of Durham.

Ellis had crossed paths with Atwater before the workshops and had not been favorably impressed. Here he is describing his feelings about her to Studs Terkel: “How I hated—pardon the expression, I don’t use it now—how I just hated that black nigger. Big, fat, heavy woman. She’d pull about eight demonstrations, and first thing you know they had two, three blacks at the checkout counter.” Predictably, their encounter at the first meeting to plan the integration workshops did not go well. According to the journalist Osha Davidson, who chronicled the relationship between C. P. Ellis and Ann Atwater in his 1996 book Best of Enemies, Ellis got the ball rolling by losing his temper over the very premise of the workshops: that racism was a problem in the schools. “If we didn’t have niggers in the schools, we wouldn’t have any problems,” he shouted. “The problem here today is niggers.