Being Wrong - Kathryn Schulz [140]
When Anita Wilson started to question her faith in God, her life got a lot more miserable before it got better. When astronomers started discovering inconsistencies in Aristotelian theory, their understanding of the universe got a lot more confusing before it got clearer. When you redo your kitchen top to bottom—from the wiring in the walls down to the crud under the sink—things look a lot messier before they look nicer. For C. P. Ellis, life didn’t get better when he first started questioning his racial ideology. It got messy, confusing, and miserable. He had nightmares in which his father, a Klansman in his own time, was alive again and walking toward him, yet seemed unable to recognize him. When the nightmares didn’t wake him, the death threats did. Worse still, his children, like him, became the objects of threats and taunts—a particularly painful consequence, since his children were the reason Ellis had gotten involved in the workshops in the first place.
But the transformation that was taking place inside Ellis now felt as inexorable as the larger societal changes that had made integration seem inevitable. As a kid from the wrong side of the tracks, Ellis had always been sensitive to poverty, and even before his experience with Atwater, he had registered, reluctantly, the economic sufferings of Durham’s African-Americans. “I’d look at a black person walkin’ down the street,” Ellis told Terkel, “and the guy’d have ragged shoes or his clothes would be worn. That began to do somethin’ to me inside.”
The workshops turned that faint whisper from Ellis’s conscience into a steady series of questions, and then into disconcerting answers. Black people were not the problem, he realized: not his problem, not Durham’s problem, not America’s problem. For the most part, the African-Americans he met during the workshops lived in substandard housing, sent their kids to substandard schools, and worked substandard jobs (often two or three of them at a time) for substandard pay, if they were lucky enough to work at all. In other words, they were like him, with one crucial difference: he was their problem. Davidson put it well: “What, [Ellis] wondered, had the Klan actually accomplished for white working people with the endless meetings and bitter fights against desegregation? Not a damned thing, he thought. All it had done was to make a miserable existence a little more miserable for poor and uneducated blacks.”
Before the series of integration workshops was over, Ellis went to the local Ku Klux Klan chapter and turned in his keys. Beginning to end, the workshops had lasted only ten days. From the moment Joe Becton first invited him to participate to the moment Ellis found himself standing up to speak at the closing ceremony, only a handful of weeks had elapsed. It was the merest fraction of his forty-four years, a stunningly small amount of time in which to turn around an entire life. And yet, he told the assembled crowd, “Something…has happened to me.” He paused a long time before continuing. “I think it’s for the best.” A lot of people, Ellis said, had told him that his participation in the program had cost him his standing among conservative whites—the power brokers of his community, and for that matter of the country. “That may be true,” Ellis acknowledged. “But I have done what I thought was right.”
C. P. Ellis died in 2005. From shortly after he left the Klan in 1970 until 1994, he worked as an organizer for the International Union of Operating Engineers. After he retired, he was asked about his greatest professional accomplishment. Without hesitating, he declared that it had been helping forty low-income African-American women negotiate the right to take Martin Luther King Day as a paid