by. HELEN O'NEILL, AP Special Correspondent Helen O'neill, Ap Special Correspondent – Sat Apr 4, 5:44 pm ET
ROCK HILL, S.C. – Elwin Hope Wilson leans back in his recliner, a sad, sickly man haunted by time.
Antique clocks, at least a hundred of them, fill his neat ranch home on Tillman Street. Grandfather clocks, mantel clocks, cuckoos and Westministers, all ticking, chiming and clanging in an hourly cacophony that measures the passing days.
Why clocks? his wife Judy has often asked during their 49 years together.
He shrugs and offers no answer.
Wilson doesn't have answers for much of how he has lived his life — not for all the black people he beat up, not for all the venom he spewed, not for all the time wasted in hate.
Now 72 and ailing, his body swollen by diabetes, his eyes degenerating, Wilson is spending as many hours pondering his past as he is his mortality.
The former Ku Klux Klan supporter says he wants to atone for the cross burnings on Hollis Lake Road. He wants to apologize for hanging a black doll in a noose at the end of his drive, for flinging cantaloupes at black men walking down Main Street, for hurling a jack handle at the black kid jiggling the soda machine in his father's service station, for brutally beating a 21-year-old seminary student at the bus station in 1961.
In the final chapter of his life, Wilson is seeking forgiveness. The burly clock collector wants to be saved before he hears his last chime.
And so Wilson has spent recent months apologizing to "the people I had trouble with." He has embraced black men his own age, at the same lunch counter where once they were denied service and hauled off to jail as mobs of white youths, Wilson among them, threw insults and eggs and fists.
Wilson has carried his apology into black churches where he has unburdened it in prayer.
And he has taken it to Washington, to the office of Congressman John Lewis of Atlanta, the civil rights leader whose face Wilson smashed at the Greyhound bus station during the famed Freedom Rides 48 years ago.
The apologies have won headlines and praise. Letters have poured in, lauding Wilson's courage. Strangers, black and white, have hailed him as a hero.
This is just half of the story. You can find the rest at http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090404/ap_on_re_us/one_man_s_apology;_ylt=Akiq34HRhhzNWP7V4y4a8U0azJV4
I feel that this guy is doing the right my apologizing, but is it too late? By his past actions, he has already hurt too many people. And a hero? Why are we calling a guy a hero that apologies about something he shouldn't have been involved in or did in the first place?
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Ah, interesting question. What do you all think? Is better late than never? Is there perhaps something else he can do to show some true reconcilation in a more meaningful way? There is something to the symbolism of asking forgiveness that has some psychological effect, and perhaps this is what people who are lauding Wilson for courage are doing. Can he, should he do something more direct, and something that can make a better future for young people (black and white) in Rock Hill?
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