(I'm looking for someone here to do a better diary on this story because I think it is pertinent to what is going on today. I'm looking at you, Denise Oliver Velez and Shaun King!)
In 2005, I read this obituary in The Guardian UK. "A reformed white racist, he fought for black workers"
C P Ellis was an Exalted Grand Cyclops in Durham, NC. After interacting with a black woman and activist, Ann Atwater ( who once took a knife to him after hearing his racial obscenities), he finally saw the light!
After reading the above article, I googled Studs Terkel & C P Ellis interview and got this..
C.P. Ellis was born in 1927 and was 53-years-old at the time of this interview with Studs Terkel. For Terkel, America's foremost oral historian, this remains the most memorable and moving of all the interviews he's done in a career spanning more than seven decades, for C.P. Ellis had once been the exalted cyclops of the Ku Klux Klan in Durham, N.C. During the interview, Terkel learned that Ellis had been born extremely poor in Durham, North Carolina; had struggled all his life to feed his family; had felt shut out of American society and had joined the Klan to feel like somebody. But later he got involved in a local school issue and reluctantly, gradually, began to work on a committee with a black activist named Ann Atwater, whom he despised at the time. Eventually, after many small epiphanies, he realized that they shared a common concern for their children, common goals as human beings. More surprising still, Ellis became a union organizer for a janitor's union—a long way from his personal philosophical roots. The Ellis-Atwater story is best documented in The Best of Enemies, a book by Osha Gray Davidson that tells of the unlikely friendship that developed between Ann and C.P. Ellis, when they first met in the 1960's. Apparently, their commonalities as oppressed human beings proved far stronger than the racial hatred that initially divided them.
And this from
IndyWeek from 2002
An Unlikely Friendship
A new documentary by Chapel Hill filmmaker Diane Bloom gives Ann Atwater and C.P. Ellis an opportunity to tell their own story
...Bloom's documentary, An Unlikely Friendship, tells a simple story about a white man and a black woman, from opposite ends of the political spectrum, finding common ground. ... The pair [Atwater & Ellis] ultimately recognized that though they lived on opposite sides of the tracks, they shared the same problem: poverty. "We began to talk about what was on our heart," Ellis says. "And both of us wept. ... It was because the kids were suffering."
I live in South Carolina. It has been a heartbreaking few weeks for A LOT of us. I really don't think the poor white racists who love that flag have any idea what that flag stands for. It sure ain't "heritage!"
It's a symbol of racism and opression. Plain and simple.
Here's a comment I made in douglassmyth's diary, The Flag of the Confederacy:
Alexander Hamilton Stephens (1812-1883) served as vice president of the Confederate States of America during the Civil War (1861-65)
http://www.history.com/...
A speech by Stephens which lays out the purpose of the new Confederate government and the proper status of black people:
"…Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner- stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. …"
http://teachingamericanhistory.org/...
The flag of the Confederate States of America is a symbol for racism.
Images of the CSA flags
Let's educate our fellow citizens - ok??
(I'll be leaving soon to take sick 8 yr old kitty, who is a victim of stomatitis, for a checkup. He's ok - at least he tolerates the injections every other day, but he has bad days, too)