The Best of Enemies: Chapters 9–10

Labor unions, an avenue for upward mobility for Northern workers, had been rendered ineffectual or were demolished altogether by the Dixie plutocracy.

For C.P. and other poor marginalized whites, the Klan served as an extended family, providing a release from the squalor, tedium, and isolation of everyday life and promising the hope—misguided as it was—that in white supremacy a better day was coming.

It was a sublime moment for Paul Ellis’ boy, the uneducated son of an uneducated linthead standing before several hundred of his peers, recognized as a leader in the battle to restore the beloved South.

The attention flummoxed state officials, who were still struggling to cast North Carolina as “different” from the Deep South.

More hours were spent discussing news items gleaned from Jesse Helms’s editorials and from various Klan publications.

A particularly ludicrous example of this potential miscegenation was a 1968 photograph of Pat Nixon dancing with a black man at a White House function.

What particularly galled the Klan was that the union could have been prevented.

So C.P. decided to start off slowly and obliquely down this new, more open road.

A surprising number of them responded favorably to the Klansman's overtures.

Summertime riots had become an annual event in America’s inner cities, starting with the Los Angeles Watts conflagration in 1965, and the climate in Durham that spring was particularly volatile.

Coming from an advocate of Black Power, a man who had been linked, however tenuously, to a recent firebombing incident, Fuller’s statement had a powerful effect on the council—and on the city as a whole when reports of the council meeting appeared in the morning paper.

Moreover, they considered that they had already demonstrated patience and forbearance in the face of decades of neglect and outright hostility on the part of the white town leaders.

Ruffin and Fuller jogged along the line of agitated protesters ensuring that the march didn't turn into a melee.

When school officials conceded to black demands that the rebel anthem "Dixie” be banned from school functions, for example, C.P. was there to fulminate, although unsuccessfully, against the decision.

There was a branch of a competing Klan group, the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, led by a former member of the UKA Klavern, a saturnine housepainter named Lloyd Jacobs.

C.P. never heard him utter the epithet...

Less fastidious than his comrade, Joe High was pure New South.

A venerable bank underwrote the construction of the new meeting hall.

They drove new cars, vacationed at summer houses more commodious than C.P.’s tiny frame house, and kept fine stables of horses instead of a chain-link kennel with a couple of dogs inside.

They were white people all, with faces turned to the cynosure of race.

To make common cause with reviled blacks, the dupes of Communists and despoilers of Southern women, would be to betray America and the South.

The marches of the summer (which whites saw as “black riots," even though most of the violence had come from whites) were seized on by conservatives as a pretext for getting rid of Howard Fuller, “that militant from Chicago."

In his typically phlegmatic manner, Asa Spaulding, head of the North Carolina Mutual, defended the beleaguered militant, stating, “I doubt seriously that removing Mr. Fuller from the Durham community would be a better cure of its ills than his remaining here as a reminder of its ills until they are cured."

In his typically phlegmatic manner, Asa Spaulding, head of the North Carolina Mutual, defended the beleaguered militant, stating, “I doubt seriously that removing Mr. Fuller from the Durham community would be a better cure of its ills than his remaining here as a reminder of its ills until they are cured."

If you do not wish to aid us in the perpetuation of progress, then we shall not aid you in the preservation of peace.

When the tenant told them what they already knew—that the money had been deposited in an escrow account—the officials left, but returned a half hour later and demanded that the man come downtown with them.

As usual, the city council refused to rule on specific complaints about the Housing Authority, referring them to "the proper committee”—Durham’s necropolis of grievances.

Louis Austin, his aging finger still on the pulse of black Durham, warned in a Carolina Times editorial that the residents of Hayti would not be patient forever: “Durham citizens are sitting on a veritable powder keg.”

She had seen her mentor Howard Fuller vilified.

Writing in the Carolina Times with his trademark trenchant humor, Austin had pointed out: “The question of seeking employment is not one of upholding southern customs or not upholding them, it is a question of eating. We would like to inform our white fellow citizens that on our side of the fence, food is an important matter.”

On February 8, state and local police, erroneously believing that one of their officers had been shot by demonstrators, let loose a fusillade into a crowd of students gathered in front of a dormitory.

That anyone could continue to believe this notion is testament not only to the persistence of myth but, more importantly, to the failure of white leaders and institutions, including the press, to tell whites the truth about their city.

For once not wearing his red carnation, the mayor was asked to describe Fuller and replied, “He has a proclivity for vexation.”

Blacks and whites alike scratched their heads at Grabarek’s abstruse testimony, but it was clear the mayor was no friend of Fuller.

“Then," he explained, "you've got something to show. Something to say to people. It’s not pacification. It’s movement.”