http://www.pacificsun.com/story.php?story_id=3267
Former KKK member sees the lightglowing from flames of eternal damnation
by Ronnie Cohen
July 31, 2009
It took Elwin Wilson almost half a century to apologize to the
African-American man he beat to a bloody pulp in the early 1960s.
The black man's crime: daring to walk into a bus station waiting room
marked for whites only. But Wilson's victim, John Lewis, had forgiven
him long ago, even as the white supremacist punched him and left him
immobilized in a pool of blood in the Rock Hill, South Carolina, bus
depot in 1961.
Now a Georgia congressman, Lewis, 69, repeatedly suffered the wrath
of white supremacists like Wilson. Despite the vulgarities and
violence they leveled at him, he has refused to return their hate.
"I saw them as innocent children," Lewis said during a recent
telephone interview from his Washington, D.C., office. "Something
went wrong. We don't come into this world hating someone because of
their race or color. We're taught to hate. I don't know a single
person in this world that I hate. As Dr. King would say, hate is too
heavy a burden to bear."
Hate became too heavy a burden for Elwin Wilson. He feared it would
send him to hell. And, he said in a telephone interview from his Rock
Hill home, it alienated him from his son and his grandson, who
abhorred his racism. So, spurred by a look back at the segregated
South in the wake of the election of the United States' first
African-American president, Wilson has apologized to people he hurt,
including Rep. Lewis.
The Worldwide Forgiveness Alliance, based in Marin County, will laud
Wilson and Lewis as heroes of forgiveness on Sunday, Aug. 2, as part
of this year's annual International Forgiveness Day at Dominican
University. Wilson, who marched with the Ku Klux Klan, and Lewis, who
marched with Martin Luther King Jr., are scheduled to share the stage
to accept their awards and discuss forgiveness.
A religious friend of Wilson's lit the spark for the unlikely reunion
when he asked the 73-year-old lifelong South Carolina resident if he
expected to go to heaven or hell. Given his escapades with the KKK,
Wilson knew he had to do something if he wanted to redirect his path
in the afterlife. "I'd been wantin' to get this off of my shoulders,
out of my heart. I didn't know how to do it," he said.
The answer came a day after Barack Obama's inauguration. Wilson's
local newspaper, The Herald, ran a story about Rock Hill residents
who risked their lives and served jail time for protesting
lunch-counter segregation. These civil rights activists were
celebrating the election of a president whose father would not have
been able to drink a soda at the lunch counter they helped integrate.
Wilson called the reporter who wrote the story and asked him to
arrange a reunion with the protesters so he could apologize to them.
The former white supremacist and the people he pulled off stools at
the whites-only lunch counter in 1961 got together in the beginning
of 2009 at the restaurant where they first met. The protesters
accepted Wilson's apology. Then they got to talking, and the subject
turned to the day King's Freedom Riders stopped in Rock Hill. Wilson
quickly admitted being the one to pound the black man who dared to
sit in the whites-only waiting room.
The black man was Rep. Lewis, "an American hero and a giant of the
civil rights movement," according to Obama. The great-grandson of a
slave and the son of an Alabama tenant farmer, Lewis has represented
Georgia for more than two decades. ABC News arranged for Wilson to go
to Washington, D.C., to meet Lewis on Good Morning America.
Both dressed in sports jackets and ties, the two men sat side by side
and talked about the day in May 1961a few months before Obama was
bornwhen they first met.
"I'm sorry for what happened down there," Wilson said in a thick
Southern accent. He extended his hand. Lewis shook it. Wilson reached
to hug the man he once pummeled, and the two embraced like old
friends while Lewis said, "It's OK; it's all right."
"I feel like I got saved," Wilson responded, shedding a tear.
"I never thought this would happen," Lewis said, also with a Southern
accent. "It says somethin' about the power of love, the power of
grace and the power of people to say, 'I'm sorry.' "
It also says something about our time.
"We've come such a distance," the Democratic congressman said on the
phone. "We've made a lot of progress. Today, the fear is gone."
In his 1998 memoir, Walking with the Wind, A Memoir of the Movement,
Wilson writes that he felt no fear when he stepped into the
whites-only waiting room at the Rock Hill bus depot. He also felt no
hostility toward his assailants.
After the beating, the memoir says "police arrived, including a
sympathetic officer who asked if we wanted to press charges.... We
said no to the offer to press charges. This was simply another aspect
of the Gandhian perspective. Our struggle was not against one person
or against a small group of people like those who attacked us that
morning. The struggle was against a system, the system that helped
produce people like that. We didn't see these young guys who attacked
us that day as the problem. We saw them as victims. The problem was
much bigger, and to focus on these individuals would be nothing more
than a distraction, a sideshow that would draw attention away from
where it belonged, which in this case was the sanctioned system of
segregation in the entire South."
Influenced by his friend, Dr. King, his study of Gandhi and a family
bent on reconciliation, forgiveness has been a cornerstone of Lewis'
life. "It's been in keeping with my very being," he said. "You have
to learn to forgive to move on."
When Lewis and his siblings or cousins bickered, he said his mother
would make one of the children go to the left of their house and the
other to the right. "When we came around to the front, we had to be
standing together, hooked up together," Lewis said. "You had to find
some ways to peacefully co-exist."
Wilson is not the only person to tell Lewis he is sorry for the way
he abused him in the 1960s. Rock Hill's mayor publicly apologized to
Lewis when he returned to South Carolina to deliver a Martin Luther
King address last year. In 1996, Lewis said Joe Smitherman, mayor of
Selma, Alabama, from 1964 until 2000 and an avowed segregationist,
told him he was the bravest, most courageous person he ever knew.
"We made a lot of progress," the congressman said. Nevertheless, he
sees more work to be done. "People ask me whether the election of
Barack Obama is the fulfillment of Dr. King's dream. It is a down
payment. We still have a distance to go before we lay down the burden
of race, before we create a truly multi-racial democracy."
--
Spiritual teacher and author Marianne Williamson will lead a
Forgiveness Masters Workshop on Saturday, Aug. 1, from 1 to 5pm in
Dominican University's Angelico Hall. Advance tickets are $60;
tickets at the door are $65. Williamson, Lewis and Wilson will
receive forgiveness awards on Aug. 2 from 7 to 9:30pm during the
International Forgiveness Day ceremony in Angelico Hall. The
Worldwide Forgiveness Alliance suggests a $20 donation. For more
information, go to www.forgivenessalliance.org . Contact Ronnie Cohen
at ronniecohen@comcast.net.
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