Ann George Atwater (July 1, 1935 – June 20, 2016) was an American civil rights activist in Durham, North Carolina.
Ann Atwater was born in 1935 in Hallsboro, North Carolina as one of nine children to parents who were sharecroppers; her father was also a deacon of the church.
Her father earned only five cents an hour; Ann and her siblings also worked on farms as children to help support the family.
[2] After marrying 19-year-old French Elbert Wilson at the age of fourteen, Ann moved with him to Durham in hopes of better job opportunities, as the city enjoyed large tobacco and textile industries.
Durham's prosperous black business sector made the city a beacon of hope for African Americans seeking to rise through self-help.
Atwater gave birth to two healthy daughters in the years immediately following this loss, whom she named Lydia Marie and Marilynn Denise.
She survived on a meager $57 a month from welfare, and struggled to pay rent despite working as a domestic laborer in white homes.
[6] When approached by Howard Fuller to join Operation Breakthrough, a program to help people escape poverty, Atwater found her life purpose.
Operation Breakthrough helped people define and accomplish a series of tasks in order to build a pattern of achievement.
One day when Atwater went to the welfare office to see if she could get $100 to pay her overdue rent and avoid eviction, she happened to meet Fuller.
[7][page needed] Afterward she attended the Operation Breakthrough meeting and discussed how the poor had to work together to get the government's attention in order to help solve poverty and what her concerns were.
She became an expert on housing policies; she copied and handed out welfare regulation manuals so that people could learn their rights, such as asking landlords to fix substandard conditions.
He invited Atwater to co-lead the charrette with C. P. Ellis, who was then the Exalted Grand Cyclops of the Durham Ku Klux Klan.
When Atwater had first met C. P. Ellis at a previous Durham city council meeting, she felt great resentment toward him.
They got all the good jobs and you’re all sittin’ here letting ‘em do it.” He said that black people should stay on the other side of the railroad because they had no business in town.
Ellis later said, “Here we are, two people from the far end of the fence, having identical problems, except her being black and me being white…The amazing thing about it, her and I, up to that point, [had] cussed each other, bawled each other, we hated each other.
They also proposed major changes in the school curriculum, such as more instruction on dealing with racial violence, creation of a group to discuss and resolve problems before they escalated, and expansion in choices of textbooks to include African-American authors.
In one meeting with a councilman, Atwater recalls that when he was not taking her seriously as she was trying to make her points, she would hit him on the head, surprising him so much that he would listen to her afterwards.
[8] From 2006 until her death, Atwater worked with Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove at the School for Conversion as a "freedom teacher," mentoring young people and activists in community organizing and fusion politics.