C.P. Ellis

Ellis’s story does not offer a credible way of overcoming misunderstanging and hatred between races. Ellis begins with telling us how he got involved with the Klan. To me he never truly hated black people to begin with, but he was sort of in a depressed state. He constantly reminds us that he was a low-income white person. He was also bitter from the fact he does hard work 7 days a week and barley has anything to show for it. When he was offered to join the Klan it gave him a feeling of belonging. He then felt like he was doing something. I think that he got so involved that he was practically brainwashed into believing the “Klans” ideals. I mention this because I feel he was never truly racist to begin with. Hating blacks was a way for him to have a reason for why his life sucked, and it was what everyone else in the Klan was doing.

Ellis becomes the president or Cyclops of the Klan. Because he is the leader of the Klan in Durham, he was invited to a meeting. At the meeting would be people of all walks of life., from whites, blacks, Jews, Catholics, and liberalists. Most of the people at the meeting wanted things in life to change. They were willing to make a change. In our society I don’t believe the majority are as willing and wanting for change as those people were. Ellis’s situation is also conditional. I don’t believe that doing what Ellis went through would work on a large scale. There are too many variables in his story. To say that it would work would be assuming that everyone in this program went through similar circumstances, and the only way to assure success would be if they people in this program were exactly like Ellis. Since we are all individuals and different, a large scale effort would not work for our society. We’ll just have to do it one person at a time.