Many of us were moved at the sight of an african american candidate and his ascension to the presidency, not just bc he was of our party but bc it spoke volumes to how the country has changed when it comes to race and its history.
Follow me below the fold for a story of hate, racism, the KKK and the healing power of love and change. We read comments at freeper from people who think like Mr. Wilson did and rightly despise them. Yet we forget they are also human and as such can overcome and change for the better. This is a story of such a change.
Update: I am adding the first article the author of the 3 in this diary wrote, which promped the two phone calls from Mr. Wilson and Mr. Coleman to apologize, about the Friendship Nine
"Us" is the Friendship Nine. The nine men from Friendship Junior College in Rock Hill who demanded service at the all-white McCrory's lunch counter on Rock Hill's Main Street on Jan. 31, 1961. All were arrested, refused bail and spent a month on the chain gang.
They spurred on a nation.
Elwin Wilson was one who in 1961, consumed with hate for blacks, had joined the KKK and beat two men in Rock Hill SC for trying to enter through a 'whites only' door. 40+ years later he has come to disavow his hate, and face it and Obama's Inauguration was part of his decision to apologize. The following quotes come from the herald in rock hill. I need to tell some ppl I am sorry
These two people who hated blacks for so long -- Elwin Wilson and Steve Coleman -- called me because they wanted to apologize for all their hatred. They called me because I wrote about the hate those blacks endured without hating back.
I wrote about those proud blacks again in Wednesday's special inauguration edition of The Herald, when Barack Obama became America's first black president. The column Wednesday was about the women who protested in 1960 and 1961, who risked injury and death, over segregated lunch counters and a segregated world.
It was amazing enough that two separate people who had been part of the hate filled legacy called the reporter after his piece.
The first voice on the other end of the telephone Wednesday said to me, "My name is Elwin Wilson, and I need to tell some people I am sorry."
This is not just a man who didn't like blacks and thought of them privately as lesser human beings but one who fought to keep them down and unequal with all he could.
Sure enough, Wilson sat in a chair in his house and looked at the picture and said, "That's me." There was Elwin Wilson 49 years ago, in 1960, smirking in the background as a black man wipes egg off his hat. The man and so many others -- mostly blacks but a few gutsy whites, too -- wanted blacks and whites to be equal.
Wilson and so many others were having none of that.
Some people play golf, Wilson said, "What I did was hate blacks."
But Elwin Wilson did a lot more than throw one egg at one black man.
For years, he said, he was in the Ku Klux Klan. He marched against integration and went to rallies that beat hatred into the air along with ash from burning crosses. He threw cantaloupes and watermelons at blacks and beat up blacks who dared to be seen where he was. He called blacks every name in the book.
We have seen the hate spewing from people like this even now, we all have seen the dogs and the beatings. Prayed that these men (and women) would be punished or at the least just go away and be marginalized. Few of us expect anything decent from them.
That N-word.
"I used it every day," Wilson said. "Whites who took up for them, I called them that, too. I hated blacks. Hated 'em."
On May 9, 1961, Wilson said he was one of the white men who beat up a black man and a white man, called Freedom Riders, who came to Rock Hill on a bus to protest segregation in the South. That black man is now U.S. Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga.
I asked Wilson what he used to beat those men on the bus, and he said, "My fists. I sure remember I didn't shake hands."
Who says that the symbolism of the Inauguration was just pomp and circumstance? I know many republicans have but it also helped lead to the apology
But a few months ago Wilson took up an offer from a black man he had known since childhood, a man of whom Wilson said, "For some reason I always thought of him as equal to me."
Wilson went to Hermon Presbyterian Church, filled with blacks, and what he found is people loved him even with his life of hate. "I found peace there in that church."
His life started to change. The hate started to seep away. The election of a black president came. And then on Tuesday, Wilson spent the whole day in front of the television watching Barack Obama get inaugurated.
"I saw people come together, all these people and I knew that I had done wrong," Wilson said. "I got close to Obama. I didn't vote for him, but I felt like I wanted to go up there and work for him and get a job and be around that family."
Now Mr. Wilson did not just leave it at that. As is told in the article, he met with two women of the Freedom 9 and apologized in person. But there was one more apology that he wanted to make. To Congressman Lewis, who had read the story in the herald.
Congressman Lewis was, as ever, gracious and forgiving when he read it:
In a telephone interview Monday night from his office in Washington, D.C., Lewis said he read about the apology of Elwin Wilson for past acts of hate published Saturday in The Herald. "I accept that apology, and would love to have the opportunity some day to talk to that man if he wants to," Lewis said. "I have no ill feelings. No malice. This shows the distance we have come. It shows grace on his part. It shows courage."
Wilson when asked about his apology offers it to all blacks:
Wilson said last week he hoped blacks could forgive all the hatred of his life, including the Lewis beating. That happened Monday.
"This is one of the best things I have ever done," Wilson said of apologizing. "I am sorry. I’m just now trying to do what’s right."
Then came Good Morning America's offer to Elwin Wilson to fly him to DC to apologize in person. The reporter at the Herald who was also there talks about the fists that beat Cong. Lewis:
Tuesday, those same white fists came back into his life. The hands were inches from Lewis' black face again. This time, not clenched. This time, trembling, hoping. That long-ago white face of hate sat in a chair next to him.
"I am ashamed of it," said the man behind the fists. "I hate to admit it."
The right fist came to Lewis on Tuesday in the form of an outstretched hand hoping to be shaken.
Finally
Lewis described this in-person apology as "amazing, unreal, unbelievable."
But it was real, offered by the man with the fists.
"For Mr. Wilson to come here and offer an apology, it is many, many miles down a long road," Lewis said. He talked about the "power of reconciliation." The "capacity to change."
Then he said again: "I forgive you."
Hat tip to bumblembums for the youtube:
Hat tip to Muzikal for the GMA meeting bw the two men