“I won’t run away from people.”
It
takes courage to sit down and talk with someone you probably loathe. It’s even more
remarkable when two people who should despise each other sit and listen to
each other. And it’s astonishing when such a dialogue opens someone’s heart.
That’s
what happened in 1968 in Atlanta when Ku Klux Klan Grand Dragon Calvin Craig
and civil rights activist Xernona Clayton had the courage to start talking to
each other.
During
the 1960s, Clayton worked for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
Among other duties, she planned civil rights marches for Dr. Martin Luther King.
(She later became the first black woman in the South to host an evening TV talk
show. After that, she became an executive at Turner Broadcasting.)
In
1966, she became the community affairs director for the Model Cities program in
Atlanta. The goal of this federal initiative? To improve the quality of life
in newly desegregated neighborhoods.
The
following year Mayor Ivan Allen Jr. warned her that Craig lived in one of those
neighborhoods.
“I
don’t know how you’re all going to get along,” the mayor sighed.
“Well,
I won’t run away from people,” Clayton replied.
Craig
was a heavy equipment operator who had joined the Klan sometime between 1957
and 1960. His official title was Grand Dragon of the Georgia Realm of the
United Klans of America, Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. He was “the most courtly
nineteenth century gentleman,” according to one reporter, and Clayton remembers
him as being tall, handsome, well dressed. He also had a great sense of humor,
according to her.
Looks
can be deceiving. For her book “The Klan,” author Patsy Sim interviewed Craig.
He told her “I can take five men in a city of 25,000, and that is just like
having an army….five can almost control the political atmosphere of that city.”
One
day at one of her local meetings, Clayton met a man who wouldn’t shake her
hand. He would only touch her fingertips. She suspected that he was Craig. (In
fact, at the Model Cities meetings he attended, if a black person sat next to
him, he would move to another seat.)
Change
a man's heart
The
next day he came to her office. “Every day he would come by and make it his
business to get into a discussion with me about race,” said Clayton. “Every
time I asked him a question he didn’t want to answer, he just laughed.”
He
baffled her. He was a deacon at his Baptist church. He went twice a week to
services, yet he also attended evening Klan meetings. “I did want to change his attitude, because I was listening
to Dr. King preach, saying that you’ve got to change a man’s heart before you
can change his behavior. I never forgot that,” said Clayton.
Upon
learning he was a deacon, she asked him. “What part of the Bible are you
reading? Where does it say to treat someone differently because they don’t look
like you” She told him he had too much intelligence to be “so ignorant.”
Clayton surprised Craig when she told him white
people often came to dinner at her home. When he said that he would never do
so, she knowingly replied, “You’ll not only be eating at my house, you’ll be
eating out of my hand.”
James
L. Townsend, the founding editor of Atlanta magazine, offered this peculiar
analysis: “Calvin Craig is not a killer, and most assuredly he’s not a nut.
It’s just that he’s got a few killers and a few nuts in his organization, and
he, personally, doesn’t have the moral courage to repudiate them….It’s too bad.
He’s a nice guy.”
In early April 1968, Clayton drove Dr. King to the
Atlanta airport for his flight to Memphis, Tennessee, where he would lead a
march on behalf of striking sanitation workers. On April 4, 1968, King was
assassinated there.
Strangely,
that night Craig came to Clayton’s home. He would not come in but instead stood
in her front yard to show his respects.
Four days later he held a press conference. He denounced
the Klan and said he was leaving the organization. “Black
men and white men can stand shoulder-to-shoulder in a united America,” he told
the media.
Clearly,
Clayton’s gentle patience had paid off. “Extremists
of both the black groups and the white groups [must] sit down at the conference
table and work out the problems so we can have peace in America today,” he
said.
A
good streak hidden
Three
months later he ran for sheriff of Fulton County (where Atlanta is located). He
said that if elected he would hire black law-enforcement officers and jail
matrons and would have no compunctions against arresting Klansmen.
Craig’s
conversion became national news. Clayton won the moniker of “the Dragon
slayer.”
Mail
for Craig poured into Atlanta by the sack. No one knew where to deliver it. One
day the mayor called Clayton and asked if she would give Craig his mail.
“Only in Atlanta could the contact to a Klansman be
through a black woman,” the mayor joked.
Atlanta’s newspaper The Journal Constitution published a
strangely worded editorial about Craig’s conversion. It reflected the era's morally
conflicted notions: “Just supposing that we have to have a Ku Klux
Klan—which we emphatically and categorically deny, but just suppose—we couldn’t
have had a much less objectionable Grand Dragon for one than Calvin F. Craig.
We always suspected that he had a good streak hidden in him some place.”
During
the months when Clayton got to know Craig, she sensed that underneath his Southern courtliness and good
cheer lay a great deal of anger. “He was more at peace,” after quitting the
Klan, according to her. This unlikely duo even traveled around the United
States giving joint interviews on civil rights.
Craig
was a complicated and troubled person. Though he attended and led rallies in
which crosses were burned, he claimed he was opposed to violence. “When I seen
the men were kind of restless, I would always go out and promote some type of
activity to let them get a lot of the steam off,” he told "Klan" book author Sims. “I think it helped on both sides because long as
you got people organized that feels the same way, you got control of them and
you can keep violence down.”
That
wasn't always the case with Craig. In 1960 blacks protested school segregation
in Crawfordsville, Georgia, according to Sims. A black teenage boy attempted to
board a school bus. According to her, news articles said Craig grabbed him,
twisted his arm behind his back, and slammed him on the hood of a police car. All
the while, white protestors shouted, “Kill him! Kill him!”
Craig
admitted to Sims that he had run two bomb-making schools. In a 1970 interview,
Craig said, “I trained most of my people for some of the most violent…” leaving
his sentence unfinished.
The
House Un-American Activities Committee said that he had previously attended
such training sessions himself in October 1961. Craig was never convicted or
accused of any violent crimes. Congress did hold him in contempt in 1966 when
he refused to provide one of its committees with Klan records.
Craig’s daughter Gail met with Clayton
for a joint interview in 2011 for Atlanta Magazine. “My grandmother—my father’s
mother—was in the Klan,” she said. “She invited my mother to join the Klan. So
my mother went into the Klan first, and then my father [in 1960]. It was all
around the same time.
“I
was five when he first told me. He brought me his robe, those green robes of
the Grand Dragon, and he showed it to me. He talked to me a little bit about
the Klan, but the main thing was the secrets. I should never tell anyone.” By
the time, her father quit, Mayes was 18, and she hated the Klan.
For
the rest of his life, Craig's heart wavered. In 1970 he helped found the
Christian American Patriotic Society. Five years later, he led efforts to
revive the KKK in Georgia.
But
in 1984, he had a change of heart again. He left both groups and donated his
robes and other artifacts to Emory University.
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