Elwin Wilson, Who Apologized for Racist Acts, Dies at 76
Andy Burris/The Herald, via Associated Press
Representative John Lewis, left, with Elwin Wilson in 2009, after Mr. Wilson apologized for attacking Mr. Lewis in 1961.
By WILLIAM YARDLEY
Published: April 1, 2013
Elwin Wilson, a former supporter of the Ku Klux Klan who made repeated apologies late in life for racist acts he committed decades earlier — including the bloody beating of a civil rights worker who later became a member of Congress — died on Thursday at a hospital in South Carolina. He was 76.
He had suffered from heart and lung problems and recently had the flu, his wife, Judy, told The Associated Press in confirming his death.
In the spring of 1961, the group known as the Freedom Riders arrived at the Greyhound bus station in Rock Hill, S.C., as part of their effort to end segregation in the South. When two Freedom Riders, John Lewis, who was black, and Albert Bigelow, who was white, entered a waiting area at the station that was designated for whites only, they were quickly assaulted by a group of young white men. One of them was Mr. Wilson.
Mr. Lewis and Mr. Bigelow did not fight back, and they declined to press charges. Over the next five decades Mr. Lewis became a prominent civil rights activist, and in 1987 he became a Democratic congressman from Georgia; Mr. Bigelow, a pacifist who once tried to sail into a nuclear testing area near the Marshall Islands to protest the testing,died in 1993; and Mr. Wilson said he had an awakening after President Obama took office.
Mr. Wilson said in an interview in 2009 that a friend had asked him, “ ‘If you died right now, do you know where you would go?’ I said, ‘To hell.’ ”
Seeking forgiveness, Mr. Wilson called The Rock Hill Herald in 2009 to say that he was one of the men who had led the bus station beating and that he had committed other violent acts — against, among others, civil rights workers holding lunch counter sit-ins. Only then did Mr. Wilson learn that one of his victims had become a member of Congress.
Mr. Wilson traveled to Washington and met with Mr. Lewis, who quickly expressed his forgiveness.
“He started crying, his son started crying, and I started crying,” Mr. Lewis said in an interview on Monday.
The two men made a handful of appearances together over the next two years, including one on the Oprah Winfrey show, and received awards from groups that promote social reconciliation and forgiveness.
Mr. Wilson, who spoke slowly and with a thick drawl, once told CNN: “Well, my daddy always told me that a fool never changes his mind and a smart man changes his mind. And that’s what I’ve done and I’m not ashamed of it. I’m not trying to be a Martin Luther King or something like that.”
He added: “I never would have thought I could apologize to this many people. I feel like I’m apologizing to the world right now.”
In addition to his wife, Mr. Wilson’s survivors include a son, Christopher.
Mr. Lewis said that he had not remembered the faces or known the names of the men who beat him that day in 1961, but that he believed Mr. Wilson was “very sincere” in his apology. He noted that the apology from Mr. Wilson was the first he had received for the violence committed against him in the civil rights era — and he said he had never questioned whether to accept it.
“It’s in keeping with the philosophy of nonviolence,” he said on Monday. “That’s what the movement was always about, to have the capacity to forgive and move toward reconciliation.”
