Friday, September 22, 2017

The Dragon Slayer

“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.


MORAL: Love conquers all.

Buy the book "Courage 101: True Tales of Grit & Glory" at Amazon!

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