Being Wrong - Kathryn Schulz [139]
It was not an auspicious beginning—but it was, at least, an informative one. Bill Riddick, the man charged with running the workshops, saw immediately that Ellis and Atwater were the two people in the room with the power to either salvage or sabotage his efforts, and he decided that his most pressing task was to get the two of them to work together. Not being a man to do things by half measures, Riddick asked them to co-chair the desegregation workshops.
Across the board, the initial reaction was horror. The African-American community and its allies were outraged: Who in his right mind would invite a KKK leader to chair a committee on desegregation? Ellis, meanwhile, was almost equally appalled. As he later told Davidson, his first thought was, “ain’t no way I can work with that gal!” Still, his resistance was tempered by two factors. The first was that the Klan had accustomed him to positions of leadership, and the idea of playing a role in a larger, city-wide process appealed to him. The second and more surprising factor was that Ellis had privately accepted that segregation was a lost cause. He knew about the Supreme Court decision, he had seen what had happened in other states, and he had concluded that the Klan was powerless to stop this particular train in its tracks. There wasn’t much he could do, he decided, except (in Davidson’s words), “help make desegregation less painful for white children”—including his own. To do that, he would need to accept Bill Riddick’s invitation. When he learned that Ann Atwater had said yes, he followed suit.
Like the first planning meeting, the first meeting of the committee co-chairs was disastrous. It took place in a café in downtown Durham, and Ellis spent much of it pacing around the restaurant, unwilling to sit down in a public establishment with black people. When he finally did take a seat, he refused to talk to Atwater directly, speaking instead through Riddick, who’d come along to facilitate the meeting. When Atwater, Ellis, and Riddick parted ways afterward, it was deeply unclear to all three of them how the supposed committee co-chairs would ever work together.
Then, a few nights later, the phone rang in Ellis’s apartment. “You keep working with those niggers and you gonna get yourself shot,” the person on the other end of the line said before hanging up. It wasn’t the first nasty phone call Ellis had received since becoming involved with the desegregation committee; after he had agreed to serve as co-chair, people had called up accusing him of being a race traitor and asking him “what the fuck you doing working with niggers?” But it was the first explicit death threat, and, after getting it, Ellis made a decision. Instead of putting the phone back in its cradle, he called Atwater and said he wanted to try to make the program work.
Shortly after that, Ellis and Atwater found themselves alone in an auditorium where one of the workshops had just ended. The two of them, not normally given to intimate conversation, somehow started talking about their own children’s educational experiences. As it happened, Ellis’s son and Atwater’s daughter both attended Durham’s Hillside High, the most racially and economically plagued school in the district. As Atwater described her concerns as a parent—the difficulty of convincing her children that being poorer than their classmates didn’t mean that they were lesser; the humiliation and pain of not being able to provide for them as well as she wanted to; the struggle to keep them from feeling ashamed of their background—Ellis felt a jolt of recognition. Atwater’s struggles as a parent were his struggles, too. To both Atwater’s shock and his own, he began to cry: for himself and his children, but also—astonishingly—for her children, too, and for Atwater herself.
Ellis later told Studs Terkel that in that moment in the auditorium, his relationship to Atwater changed—to Atwater and, by extension,