Claiborne Paul Ellis (played by Sam Rockwell, above) grew up in poverty, like Atwater. Unlike Atwater, however, he was white, and was influenced by his father and community to blame poor blacks for his troubles. As his obituary in The Guardian in 2005 stated, he couldn't understand why he worked hard and never got ahead.
This disillusionment led Ellis straight into the arms of the local Ku Klux Klan, who encouraged his beliefs that black Americans, Jewish people, liberals, and Catholics were the enemy and the root of all his problems. His obituary in the Los Angeles Times describes how Ellis would show up at city council meetings armed and scream racist rants through the meetings. He also began a youth group to indoctrinate children with white supremacist views.
Ellis rose into leadership roles in the KKK, and he was soon elected the "Grand Cyclops," or local leader, of the Durham, NC, chapter. In 1971, he was elected as a cochair to a committee on desegregating local schools. His cochair was Atwater, but this was not the first time they'd met: at one of the council meetings where Ellis spewed racist invective, Atwater lunged at him and tried to stab him, only failing because her friends held her back.
