The Best of Enemies: Chapter 11–Epilogue

Wheeler, Cook, and King had been classmates at Morehouse College, while the older Stewart was an intimate of King’s father and had known the future civil rights leader when “Little Mike” (the name Martin came later) was a precocious toddler.

Durham whites were, as a group, far less sanguine about King and his impending North Carolina tour.

Jesse Helms used his TV editorials to abrade King’s reputation, denouncing him as “a sham, an agitator, a fellow traveller with known communists.”

When approached for comment by the press, the normally unflappable Asa Spaulding could only choke out that the news "was so shocking and distressing that it has not only left me speechless, but also not able to think clearly.”

The young, even those who felt that the African-American apostle of nonviolence was an anachronism, reacted with anger.

There had been larger marches in the past decade, but none of them matched in tone, the gravitas of this slow cortege through the streets of Durham.

There had been larger marches in the past decade, but none of them matched in tone, the gravitas of this slow cortege through the streets of Durham.

Riots had already broken out in other cities, including several in North Carolina, on the night of King’s death, and not even Howard Fuller’s admonitions could contain Hayti’s rage forever.

Finally, one protester stood up and informed Harris that “the Duke Vigil is not a draft resistance vigil. Our main object here is for the employees at Duke.”

Middle-class white students expiating their guilt over the death of Martin Luther King—that was how many viewed the demonstrations.

Richard Nixon, who as a law student at Duke, had alienated many of his (white) classmates with his diatribes against Jim Crow, was, in April 1968, well on his way to winning the presidency by playing the race card, further polarizing an already dangerously divided America with his antiintegrationist "Southern strategy.”

Knight’s membership in the Hope Valley Country Club—a symbolic issue and probably a moot one in the president’s absence—was his own affair, and the discussion about union recognition would commence when Knight “felt better.”

As C.P. continued his harangue, unaware of what was going on behind him, Ann rose to her feet and headed toward him.

The best of the true progressives—always a small group, in the North or the South—did attempt to reach out to this rejected crowd, but they were usually rebuffed.

The gangly white kid with rural roots was affable and intelligent, and it wasn’t long before he was voted vice president of the Corps.

Somewhere in the retelling, the swimming suits the participants actually wore were removed from the story and the innocent diversion became a...debauch.

With representatives of other violent far-right groups, the Klansmen—young and old—ringed the house of James McMillan, the federal judge who was the author of the busing plan, tearing down a section of his fence and burning him in effigy before the police stepped in.

Once, while waiting for a traffic light to change on his way home from work, C.P. spotted a long-haired white man, a quintessential hippie in C.P.’s eyes, in the car next to him.

After celebrating his courtroom victory, C.P. went back to serving the Klan, leading the weekly meetings, organizing the Youth Corps, and meeting clandestinely with city officials.

C.P. knew the FBI had infiltrated his unit—agents once had the temerity to try to recruit him.

There were, of course, many other cities (in both the North and the South) engaged in the same Sisyphean struggle, but few of them matched Durham in the sheer amount of energy expended on this one issue over time.

Most pundits noticed only the change in the racial makeup of the schools, but the process concentrated poverty, not just race.

Late at night, he’d crank up the radio in his hotel room, lie down on his bed and nurse a glass of Jack Daniel’s, and sleep fitfully until dawn.

Clement was dressed in a dashiki—an African shirt that was to the Klan leader what a red flag is to a bull.

He launched into a historical disquisition on racism in North Carolina schools, tracing the roots of the issue back to the 1914 state report on Jim Crow education, which concluded that “the average Negro school house is really a disgrace to an independent civilized society...[revealing] injustice, inhumanity, and neglect on the part of white people.”

Riddick hoped that the conflict would produce an annealed group capable of directing the charrette once it got started.

And certainly it was hard to think of a more reckless gambit than throwing C.P. and Ann together.

There was even one moment of levity that first evening.

The years had passed with a stultifying sameness.

For the first time since joining the Klan, he was beset by unanswerable questions.

C.P. put away his concerns from the night before and concentrated on leading a group discussion of interracial violence, the subject he had broached on Monday night.

Jesus appears to Saul and the persecutor of Christians nonpareil cries out, “Lord, what wilt thou have me to do?”

In these cases, race had been an embellishment, a façade tacked onto a superstructure of class. The façade was old and exceedingly well crafted, and those who had erected it had long since died and had taken with them the memory of their achievement.

But more commonly the two existed together, intimate, clinging, consanguine and inseparable.

To be sure, it had to be shared with landless and impecunious whites, but this was not a complete disadvantage since these whites functioned as a buffer class to absorb the shocks of race conflict.

Their leaders had been unable to stop urban renewal from rumbling through the heart of the black community like a tank overrunning an enemy redoubt.

At the celebration, C.P. stood in a corner, sharing a drink with Bill Riddick, who was ebullient about the charrette.

McKissick spoke for disillusioned ghetto residents when he called nonviolence "a dying philosophy” that had "outlived its usefulness.”

The case was eventually heard by the U.S. Supreme Court, which in 1969 issued an equivocal ruling.

Concluding that economics, not politics, held the key to black success in America, Moore started a new career as a corporate gadfly, disrupting stockholders' meetings with pointed questions about racial policies and hiring practices.