How this civil rights icon befriended a KKK chief and satisfied him to surrender his gown

As a civil rights activist, Xernona Clayton helped to enforce the segregation of all hospital facilities in Atlanta, worked side by side with Coretta Scott King and Martin Luther King Jr., helped, among other things, in organizing the March on Washington before she launched the first Black TV Became a moderator in the south.

But perhaps her most notable achievement was her influence on Calvin Craig, a kite belonging to the Ku Klux Klan. Craig, an Atlanta heavy machinery operator, was a KKK leader who was a strong advocate of racial segregation. In 1968, Clayton met Craig in Atlanta, Georgia. You were both involved in the Model Cities program, a federal initiative to reduce urban poverty. At the time, the KKK was notorious for its rallies, cross burns, and racist violence.

“I thought, if I fight with him, we’re going to get nowhere,” Clayton recalled during a recent Guardian interview from her Atlanta home. “I was hoping that he would change his negative attitude.”

When they first met, Craig Clayton barely shook hands. He also didn’t want to sit next to black members at their first meeting. But when he and Clayton debated their conflicting views on race and other matters on a daily basis, the two formed an unusual relationship.

Clayton told the Guardian she was appealing to Craig’s Christianity. “I would say, ‘You go to church so many times a week and have the ideas that you have?’ This is how our conversation would go. He would come any day. And he would laugh, laugh, laugh and I would challenge him. I liked him. “

On a Saturday in 1968, Clayton returned home to find dozens of reporters, television cameras, and police cars outside their home. “It turned out that they were looking for me,” she recalls. “Because Calvin Craig had previously held a press conference announcing he was leaving the Klan, denouncing the Klan, and attributing a black woman to having changed his negative attitudes. And I was this black woman. “

Craig’s exit from the clan shocked everyone at the time, even more because he converted because of Clayton, a black woman.

Growing up in Jim Crow South, Muskogee, Oklahoma, Clayton said she came into contact with whites often and was never afraid of them. As one of seven children, her father was a Baptist minister who was respected by both blacks and whites in the ward. Clayton’s mother was a neighborhood Cherokee, and so the family was often in contact with Native Americans: “We saw Native Americans, and we kept seeing white people come into our home.”

One night after Clayton was threatened by a restaurant owner for being black, Clayton began working undercover with the National Urban League (NUL) in Chicago, Illinois, right out of college in 1954, to address discrimination in the city government Bring light to shops.

And after she married Ed Clayton, a renowned journalist and editor at Ebony and Jet, in 1957, she met civil rights icon King and his wife Coretta. Clayton’s husband Ed was then the media officer for the King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). The Claytons soon got close to the kings while working with them and helping them organize the 1963 March on Washington.

Clayton herself launched her own campaigns, including helping with integration in hospitals in Georgia and across the south. Back then, pregnant black women were only allowed to visit public hospitals on certain days of the week. Black doctors could not practice in certain hospitals either. Clayton has helped reverse this thanks to her activism.

In the late 1960s, Clayton had entered the television realm after talking about how white dominated the industry was, from presenters to cameramen to editors. A broadcaster, CBS subsidiary Channel 5, later asked Clayton to host a live talk show five days a week. This made Clayton the first black television presenter in the south.

She hosted the Xernona Clayton Show until 1975, where she brought not only local personalities but also some distinguished guests, including Belafonte, Jesse Owens, Lucille Ball, Mahalia Jackson, Sidney Poitier and Lena Horne. After that show, she started working for a local television station owned by Ted Turner, who later founded CNN. Clayton and Turner became good friends. Eventually, Clayton became vice president of urban affairs for Turner Broadcasting.

In 1993, the two then founded the Trumpet Awards, with which African American successes are celebrated. Although Clayton retired in 1997, she still plays a huge role on various committees and boards, as well as in the media. “People treat me like I’m 50 instead of 90,” she said. “I have a lot of energy and a lot of things that I want to do. I enjoy interacting with people, I enjoy the goals that I set myself, I enjoy the things that happen around me. “

Clayton has received numerous awards for her commitment, including the Distinguished Leadership Award from the National Association for Equal Opportunity in Higher Education; the SCLC Drum Major for Justice Award; the Mickey Leland Award from the National Association of Minorities in Cable; and the State of Georgia Commission on Equal Opportunity’s Leadership and Dedication in Civil Rights Award.