WAR OF PERCEPTION

In Russia, Obama’s Star Power Does Not Translate

By CLIFFORD J. LEVY and ELLEN BARRY

MOSCOW — Let other capitals go all weak-kneed when President Obama visits. Moscow has greeted Mr. Obama, who on Tuesday night concluded a two-day Russian-American summit meeting, as if he were just another dignitary passing through.

Crowds did not clamor for a glimpse of him. Headlines offered only glancing or flippant notice of his activities. Television programming was uninterrupted; devotees of the Russian Judge Judy had nothing to fear. Even many students and alumni of the Western-oriented business school where Mr. Obama gave the graduation address on Tuesday seemed merely respectful, but hardly enthralled.

“We don’t really understand why Obama is such a star,” said Kirill Zagorodnov, 25, one of the graduates. “It’s a question of trust, how he behaves, how he positions himself, that typical charisma, which in Russia is often parodied. Russians really are not accustomed to it. It is like he is trying to manipulate the public.”

Others suggested that after decades of social turmoil, Russians were simply exhausted with politics, and had been so often disappointed by Western leaders that they were not inclined to get excited by the latest one. Asked by one Moscow newspaper what they expected to come out of Mr. Obama’s visit, most respondents had the same answer: traffic jams.

Some Obama aides said they were struck by the low-key reception here, especially when compared with the outpouring on some of his other foreign trips. Even Michelle Obama, who typically enjoys admiring coverage in the local news media when she travels, has not had her every move chronicled here.

In the background is the question of race, which Russians view through a complicated prism. For decades, Soviet propaganda hammered home the idea that the United States was an irredeemably racist country, as opposed to the Communist bloc nations. But Russia in recent years has been plagued by racist violence against people from the Caucasus region and Central Asia, as well as other immigrants.

Yet many young Russians, like David Zokhrabian, 21, who recently received a graduate degree in international relations from Moscow State University, said Mr. Obama’s race cut both ways. “Students in Moscow, they are pretty positive about this,” he said. “It’s cool, modern, progressive. All the students know American history, they know about segregation, so it shows us about democracy, how it can be.”

But the same cannot be said for average Russians, he said, adding: “It looks weird to them. They just think that America has gone crazy.”

Many here noted that Russia went through an enthusiastic phase with President Bill Clinton in the 1990s, when Russians were reaching out to Americans. Mr. Clinton conducted a town hall meeting in Moscow that was broadcast across Russia (and featured a woman in the audience jumping up and hugging Mr. Clinton on camera).

By contrast, Mr. Obama’s speech on Tuesday, billed as his third major foreign policy address after speeches in Cairo and Prague, was not shown live on any of the major Russian channels, to the White House’s disappointment.

Mr. Obama used the speech, at the New Economic School, to declare that Russia and the United States “share common interests.” The Kremlin tightly controls Russian television, and it was not clear why officials chose to disregard the speech.

They may have believed that there would be little public interest, or they may not have wanted to provide Mr. Obama with unfettered access to the country, which might have allowed him to overshadow Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin or President Dmitri A. Medvedev.

Tom Malinowski, who was a speechwriter for Mr. Clinton, said Russian audiences were always the toughest to connect with.

“It is a jaded political culture that has had a very hard experience with a system that professed universal idealism while delivering unbearable suffering,” said Mr. Malinowski, now Washington advocacy director for Human Rights Watch. “Some degree of cynicism about high-minded ideals is a natural outcome of that.”

He said Mr. Obama’s facility with language gives him the ability to talk around governments directly to people. Mr. Obama, he said, has the talent to “do that in every part of the world, except possibly Russia.”

Sergei Brilev, a top television anchor at Rossiya, the state-owned national channel, said that Mr. Obama’s oratory might not translate well into Russian. He recalled that when he watched Mr. Obama’s speech in Cairo with dubbing in Russian, he found it lackluster. It was only when Mr. Brilev, who speaks polished English, saw the original that he realized what all the fuss was about.

Russians tend to view Mr. Obama not so much with hostility as with indifference. “Despite Russia becoming part of the rest of the world in the last 5 or 10 years,” Mr. Brilev said, “the interesting thing about Russia is that so many things which fascinate the American and European publics are Page 26 stuff here.”

After relations with the United States curdled in the final years of President George W. Bush’s tenure, many people here were relieved by Mr. Obama’s election. But that does not necessarily mean they are overly optimistic about his pledge to improve ties.

Valery Kanishev, 68, a designer for the state circus company, said he was pleased that Mr. Obama had brought his children with him to Russia. But Mr. Kanishev said Mr. Obama’s address on Tuesday would not get him far with many older Russians, who grew weary of political speeches after enduring the wooden recitations of Leonid I. Brezhnev, the former Soviet leader.

In Soviet times, speeches were composed by committees, Mr. Kanishev said, “10 or 12 people who would drink a glass of cognac and then put something together.”

“Russians are the smartest people in the world,” he said. “The main thing is results. Our people don’t trust anyone.”

Younger people were generally more welcoming. Oksana Sytnova, 24, graduated first in her class at the New Economic School, an honor that was particularly sweet because Mr. Obama presented it to her at the graduation on Tuesday.

“For my generation, he is a very attractive politician,” Ms. Sytnova said. “And today’s speech showed that.”

British cops bust Obama's half-brother for child sex assault

President Barack Obama's half-brother was denied a visa to enter Britain following an accusation that he attempted to sexually assault  a young British girl.

The British newspaper The Sun reports that Samson Obama, a Kenyan national, tried to enter Britain while he was on his way to Washington, DC for his brother's Presidential Inauguration on January 20.

However, according to The Sun reporter Gloria Di Piero, immigration agents at East Midlands Airport, using the latest biometric tests, discovered he was linked to an incident in the United Kingdom that occurred in November, 2008.

Information on the database revealed that Samson -- who manages a mobile phone shop just outside Nairobi, Kenya -- was in fact the man who was arrested by police officers in Berkshire after he allegedly approached a group of young girls, including a 13 year-old, and allegedly tried to sexually assault one of them.

According to The Sun report, the children took refuge inside a cafe, but Obama followed them and became aggressive towards them at which point the cafe owner asked Obama to leave and called the police.

When police officers arrived, Samson Obama was still in the vicinity and, after questioning him, he was placed under arrest by the officers.

He then followed them into a cafe where he became aggressive and was asked to leave by the owner.

That's when police were called to the scene and Samson was arrested.

During his processing, Obama gave officers a false ID -- claiming to be Henry Aloo, a genuine refugee and asylum seeker -- and supplied his mother Mum Kezia's address in Bracknell, Kenya, according to Di Piero. 

Mum Kezia, 67, who has lived in Bracknell for six years, had married President Obama's father Barack Obama, Sr. in Kenya while still a teenager.

After Samson's arrest he was fingerprinted but not formally charged and then he was allowed to leave the United Kingdom. But his "pedigree" and the details of the arrest were stored on the Home Office's new database of prints and biometric details.

Samson Obama was apprehended as he attempted to slip back into Britain to visit relatives en route to his half-brother's inauguration.

The Sun also reports that the White House was informed and a Home Office source is quoted as saying,"This was obviously an extremely sensitive issue when it was flashed up by the database."

"But the system is designed to flag up people who have come to the attention of the police in the UK and are then trying to return," he said to The Sun reporter. "This was a good example of how people who may be undesirable can be refused another visa."

It is thought that Samson Obama -- one of the President's 11 half brothers and sisters by his father who had four partners -- managed to travel on to Washington for the inauguration after boarding a connecting flight to the States from East Midlands. He was able to do so despite not having a UK visa because he remained in transit and never left the airport.

On April 10, a Home Office spokesman confirmed that Samson Obama was refused a visa after immigration officers noticed one of the documents he supplied with his visa application was false. That led them to make further inquiries.

A UK Border Agency spokesman to The Sun: "We consider all visa applications based on their merits. We will oppose the entry of individuals to the UK where we believe their presence is not conducive to the public good."

By Jim Kouri

10 Holy Cross priests object to Obama invitation

SOUTH BEND, Ind. – Ten priests from the order that founded the University of Notre Dame say the school risks its "true soul" and could distance itself from the Roman Catholic Church by inviting President Barack Obama to campus next month.

The members of the Congregation of the Holy Cross, which helps run the university, asked the Rev. John Jenkins, the Holy Cross priest who is Notre Dame's president, and the university's board of fellows to reconsider the invitation to Obama because he supports abortion rights.

"Failure to do so will damage the integrity of the institution," said the letter published Wednesday in Notre Dame Observer.

Notre Dame announced last month that Obama would deliver the university's May 17 commencement address and receive an honorary degree. The decision by the nation's best-known Catholic university sparked widespread anger among many Catholics who said Notre Dame should not honor someone whose policies on abortion and embryonic stem-cell research clash with core church teachings on human life.

Hundreds of abortion opponents protested on campus Sunday, and the priests said the invitation has opened a "fissure" between Notre Dame and many bishops. More than a dozen bishops have denounced Obama's appearance, including Cardinal Francis George of Chicago, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.

Jenkins has said the university does not condone all of Obama's policies, and spokesman Dennis Brown has said Notre Dame does not plan to rescind the invitation.

"We respect the opinions of members of the Holy Cross community and others," Brown said.

Obama would be the ninth U.S. president to receive an honorary degree from Notre Dame and sixth sitting president to address graduates. Other commencement speakers have included Dwight Eisenhower, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and George W. Bush.

Cecilia Prinster, president of the Notre Dame Alumni Association, noted in a column also published in the campus newspaper that Obama's policies in areas such as health care reform, economic security and environmental stewardship are in line with Catholic social teaching.

"Although we disagree with Mr. Obama on some core issues, we must not condemn," Prinster wrote.

Four days before his Notre Dame speech, Obama is set to deliver a much less controversial commencement address at Arizona State University. But the public school in Tempe is denying the president something he's getting at South Bend: an honorary degree.

"It's our practice to recognize an individual for his body of work, somebody who's been in their position for a long time," Sharon Keeler, an ASU spokeswoman, told The Associated Press. "His body of work is yet to come. That's why we're not recognizing him with a degree at the beginning of his presidency."

Recent recipients of honorary degrees at ASU include J. Craig Venter, an internationally known scientist credited for developing high-volume genome sequencing, and Wu Qidi, vice minister of education of the People's Republic of China.

The university's policy is different from the one at Notre Dame, where Brown said it's customary to confer a degree on every guest speaker.

By KEN KUSMER, Associated Press Writer Ken Kusmer, Associated Press Writer

Barack Obama Quietly Packing Senior Levels of Government with Blacks

It has become a painful and dangerous truth that to discover what is going on in the Obama administration, particularly on matters of race, you have to read the British press.  

This has been proven again as the prestigious “Independent UK” published an article entitled “Barack Obama hands more senior jobs than ever before to ‘sisterhood’ of black women.  President Barack Obama has engineered a quiet racial revolution in Washington,” giving more power to blacks than at any point in American history. 

It went on to say that while Obama plays down the influence of race in his government and policies, Washington insiders are watching as he hands control of American domestic policy, White House social events, environmental issues, food safety and other issues impacting on Americans to African Americans, particularly African American women. 

Obama used his press conference last week to joke that interest in his own race lasted "about a day" after his election. But below the radar, Obama has been quietly transforming the upper echelons of government into one where blacks hold power far beyond their numbers in the general population. 

The article stressed the influence of black women, claiming that they hold “only” 192,000 of more than 1.7 million government jobs.  This means that black women who constitute 6% of the population hold 12% of federal government jobs.  This will grow drastically under Obama as will packing black men into the federal bureaucracy. 

To date, Obama has given 20% of Senior federal jobs to black women.  Black men will undoubtedly be given an equally high number in what is becoming a black racial takeover of government by an undereducated, high crime group comprising 13% of the population, but bearing responsibility for more murders than the rest of the American population combined and having a 72% illegitimacy rate. 

Barack Hussein Obama has been a long time proponent of Black Liberation Theology.  Economically socialist and socially fascist, this race based philosophy is consumed with redistribution of wealth from hard working whites and Asians to the lowest social level of blacks.

One Man's Ambivalent Retreat From His Racist Past

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.

But Wilson doesn't feel like a hero. He feels confused. He cannot fully answer the lingering questions, the doubts. Where did all the hate come from? And where did it go?

And the question he gets asked most often: Why now?

"All I can say is that it has bothered me for years, all the bad stuff I've done," Wilson says, speaking slowly and deliberately. "And I found out there is no way I could be saved and get to heaven and still not like blacks."

If you do get to heaven, his wife points out, they're going to be there with you.

___

All his life, Wilson has brandished his meanness like a badge of honor. To mess with Elwin Wilson, he says, meant a fist in your face. Especially if you happened to be black.

"I wasn't ever scared of no one, or nothing," says Wilson, still a tall, strapping man despite his illness.

"You were scared of the ghost of that black man you saw rocking in the chair," his wife reminds him, describing the nightmare several years ago when he furiously beat his fists into thin air.

Wilson narrows his eyes and scowls at her.

Wilson has a pale face, thin white hair and small pursed lips that rarely smile. Even recent fame hasn't encouraged him to be sociable. He doesn't care what people think of him and bluntly declares, "I might like you one day and not the next."

Wilson's 49-year-old son, Chris, describes his deep embarrassment growing up with a father who was always bracing for a confrontation. He would holler at blacks in restaurants, sneer at them in public, brazenly use the N-word in front of Chris' teen friends.

"He was real hard to live with," Chris Wilson says.

The recent apologies have stunned the son as much as anyone, inspiring a genuine pride in his father he never felt before.

For his part, Wilson seems unsure where his racism originated. It certainly wasn't inherited, he says. He was an only child; his parents treated everyone equally, though Wilson says his father, who owned several gas stations in town, once told him that his grandfather and grandfather's brothers had been involved with the Klan.

"I guess it was just the crowd I ran with," Wilson says with a shrug. "It was sport."

Sport was running moonshine with the likes of Junior Johnson, the famed NASCAR driver who honed his skills outracing police on the back roads of Wilkes County, N.C. Sport was gunning his 1955 Chevrolet — his "little red wagon" — in drag races all over the state.

Sport was marching down Main Street behind hooded members of the KKK. And taunting the young black students who, week after week, walked silently to the segregated lunch counters of Woolworth's and McCrory's only to get arrested by police.

Sport was drunkenly releasing flying squirrels in the bedroom where his young wife slept. Or dragging her to a black speakeasy after a day of catfishing, to show off his skills dancing shag.

"He could dance real well," she says. "But I was scared to death."

Sport was heckling the black protesters on Main Street as they solemnly held placards in front of the segregated stores. "Segregation, America's shame," the handwritten signs read. "No color line in Heaven."

And sport was lying in wait for a certain bus to pull into the Greyhound depot on May 9, 1961. Freedom Riders, they were called, black and white students traveling through the South, testing the new desegregation laws at bus station restaurants and restrooms.

Lewis described what happened in his autobiography, "Walking with the Wind: A Memoir of the Movement."

"I approached the 'WHITE' waiting room in the Rock Hill Greyhound Terminal, I noticed a large number of young white guys hanging around the pinball machines in the lobby. Two of these guys were leaning by the doorjamb to the waiting room. They wore leather jackets, had those ducktail haircuts and were each smoking a cigarette.

"Other side, nigger," one of the two said, stepping in my way as I began to walk through the door. He pointed to a door down the way with a sign that said 'COLORED.'... The next thing I knew, a fist smashed the right side of my head. Then another hit me square in the face. As I fell to the floor I could feel feet kicking me hard in the sides. I could taste blood in my mouth."

Wilson winces as he reads the passage from an autographed copy of the book that Lewis gave him. "I don't ever remember kicking him," he says. "But I know he got my fist."

For years Wilson didn't know the identity of the man he had beaten, though he says that over time, guilt began weighing heavy on his heart.

It was only recently, he says, that things became clear.

___

Willie McCleod. Robert McCullough. John Gaines. W.T. "Dub" Massey. Thomas Gaither. Clarence Graham. James Wells. David Williamson Jr. Mack Workman.

These are the men whom Wilson taunted all those years ago. The men to whom he has been apologizing in recent months, asking their forgiveness and blessing.

Their names are engraved on the stools at the counter of the Old Town Bistro on Main Street. The former McCrory's is now a family-run restaurant that bustles with hospitality and charm. Waitresses greet regulars by name and pour endless cups of coffee for patrons, black and white.

And yet it is impossible to walk in and not feel transported in time.

Sepia-toned photographs hang on the walls, images of young black men at this very counter, where "temporarily closed" signs went up as soon as they sat down.

Outside, a historic plaque marks the spot where nine Friendship Junior College students took an extraordinary stand on Jan. 31, 1961, choosing jail rather than bail after being arrested for ordering hamburgers and sodas. Convicted of trespassing and breach of peace, the students endured a month's hard labor in a chain gang rather than allow civil rights groups to pay $100 each for their release. The case of the "Friendship Nine" drew national headlines and soon the policy of "jail, no bail" was being emulated all over the South.

Today, the eight surviving members are hailed as celebrities every time they walk in the door. "They're our history," says a young white waitress one recent afternoon as she serves coffee to Massey and McCleod. She tells them it's on the house.

The men, now in their 60s, smile as they recall those heady days — how young and foolish they were, how filled with conviction and pride. They describe weeks of nonviolent training with the Congress of Racial Equality, a Gandhi-inspired civil rights organization that taught them not to respond when men like Wilson dumped soda on their heads, or stubbed lit cigarettes into their skin, or flung ammonia at the counter.

And they describe the swirl of emotions they feel, even now, when they return to this place. There is joy and sadness, says McCleod, who owns a plumbing and septic business. Joy at what they accomplished. Sadness that there was such hate.

Says Massey, a retired minister who works with special education students: "There is always a small part of me goes back to that day."

The men say they never thought about their tormentors as individuals with real lives and real names. They forgave them a long time ago.

So it has been strange and somewhat discomforting to suddenly be confronted by a real name, a real man, a white bigot who wants to repent.

An unease creeps into their conversation when it turns to the subject of apologies. There have been several in recent years — when Mayor Doug Echols officially apologized to Lewis during the congressman's January 2008 return to Rock Hill, when the York County Council apologized to the Friendship Nine at the dedication of the plaque. And now Elwin Wilson.

His apology, offered in the restaurant in January, was facilitated by the local newspaper, The Herald, which Wilson called after reading an article about the Friendship Nine.

Not all the men agreed to meet with him. Privately, some questioned his motives, his timing, his sincerity.

David Williamson, for one, had no qualms. He understands a man wanting to put his affairs in order before meeting his maker. "I think it is a testament to how the world has changed and how hearts have changed," Williamson says.

McCleod went too, saying it was not for him to judge another man's heart. Massey demurred, saying he couldn't take time off work.

It was at the January meeting that Wilson finally discovered that the student he had beaten at the bus station had gone on to become a congressman — a discovery that eventually led to his well-publicized apology to Lewis in Washington.

Mack Workman, another member of the Friendship Nine who now lives in New York, watched the apology on television, listened as the congressman praised Wilson's "raw courage." And yet Workman felt dissatisfied.

"In the back of my mind I just keep thinking, `Why now?'"

___

Wilson says he gave up drinking in 1976. He is less sure of when he gave up hating blacks.

"By the time I went to college I had dropped all that jumping on them," he says. "I still didn't want to marry one or anything like that."

That was in the 1970s when Wilson was in his late 30s. Over the years, he had drifted through different jobs — construction foreman, welder, millwright. He had joined the Air Force where, in Biloxi, Miss, he began associating with blacks as equals for the first time. And he had returned to Rock Hill, where he enrolled in the Friendship Junior College under the GI bill.

He saw no irony in the fact that the college was black. It was convenient, he says. And times had changed.

And yet there was a hardness in Wilson's heart that hadn't changed — a hate that boiled over frequently, especially when it came to race.

In the 1980s, when the local cemetery began burying blacks alongside whites, Wilson became so incensed he threatened to disinter the bodies of his parents. When a black family bought a house in the neighborhood around the same time, Wilson accosted the real estate agent and demanded that the sale be rescinded.

He yelled racial insults whenever his grandson, Christopher, whom he raised, talked on the phone to his black wrestling buddy. When a garden ornament — a stone statue of a black boy in straw hat — was vandalized in Wilson's front yard, he strung up a black doll with a noose around its neck, and threatened to use an AK-47 against a neighbor who complained.

As late as 1999, when his Baptist pastor began encouraging more black participation, Wilson got so upset he left the church.

Wilson says now he is ashamed of his behavior. He has since apologized to his grandson and to the neighbor he threatened. And he has been surprised by how liberated the apologies have made him feel. People don't understand the burden of carrying all that hate, he says.

The burden only grew as Wilson got older and began to put his affairs in order, buying burial plots for himself and Judy, dolefully pondering the afterlife.

"I'm going to hell," he told Clarence Bradley one day in January, when, feeling poorly after yet another doctor visit, he stopped by his friend's auto paint and body shop on Eastview Road. The two have long shared an interest in antiques and cars.

Slumped on the sofa, surrounded by mementoes from the 1950s — a vintage soda machine with bottles of Coca Cola and Orange Crush, dusty photographs of old cars and old times — Bradley had never seen his friend so sick or so low.

Bradley is a solidly built man of 62 with a serious manner and firm opinions about the urgent need for more people to invite the Lord into their lives.

"If you truly ask forgiveness and you mean it in your heart, you can be saved," he told Wilson. "You just have to let the Lord guide you."

They talked about it some more. Another friend, a part-time preacher, walked in. For the next five minutes the three men bowed their heads in prayer.

"Only God and Elwin know what's in his heart," Bradley says. "But I can tell you something in that man changed that day."

Wilson says he felt it too, a profound sense of peace, a feeling he was no longer doomed.

"It's not like I stopped cussing or anything," he says. "But I didn't feel the same hate."

A week later, Wilson spent the day watching the inauguration of the nation's first black president. He saw the local newspaper article about the Friendship Nine as they watched too. He knew exactly what to do.

___

Wilson's two-car garage is an ode to another era, stacked with old soda and pinball machines, vintage phones, an old gas pump, trophies from his drag-racing victories, photos of his father's gas stations in the 1950s.

Nailed to one wall is the "colored" sign that once hung over the restroom in the bus station. For years Wilson thought about selling it, or even donating it to a museum. Lately, he decided he must keep it. He needs to look at it now and then, he says, "to remind me what I did wrong."

In his living room is another reminder, a framed newspaper photograph from 1961. It shows a stylishly dressed black man wiping egg off his hat, surrounded by a bunch of sneering white youths. The muscular young man who threw the egg smirks for the camera.

"That was me," Wilson says, staring intently at the 48-year-old image, trying to remember the specifics of the day. He can't. There were so many like it.

"I am a different man now," he says.

He leafs through some of the recent letters that have poured into his mailbox and starts reading them aloud.

"When I read about your courageous apology, I was moved to tears," wrote a woman from North Carolina. "Your action in seeking forgiveness and the others in forgiving you is now a blessing for others."

"I am African-American and I just want to tell you how grateful I am to hear your story and to know that there are heroes like you in the world," wrote a woman from California. "Your apology touched my heart."

Not everyone was so moved. Wilson says he received one threatening phone call from a man accusing him of betraying the KKK. Another accused him of being a liar. His son, who accompanied Wilson to Washington, still receives racist text messages.

"It hasn't been easy," Wilson says with a sigh.

On this chilly Wednesday evening Wilson had been scheduled to speak at a local black church. But he has been feeling ill all day, so he calls the pastor at the last minute to say he can't make it. His health has to come first, he explains.

Putting down the phone, Wilson complains about being worn out by all the demands. He never thought one man's apology could trigger so much interest, so many invitations and calls. He has been asked to attend several events with Lewis, including one in Selma, Ala., but he is not sure if he will go. He has to consider his safety.

Wilson finishes his liver and okra and turns on his flat-screen television. He says he's tired of talking about the past. He just wants to watch his favorite true-crime show, "Nancy Grace," and catch the latest on the Florida toddler whose mother has been charged with her murder.

His wife says he is obsessed with the case. He follows each twist and turn, every day.

Wilson says he feels like crying when he thinks about the little girl and her terrible fate. "There's just so much bad in the world," he says, shaking his head. "Makes you wonder where it all comes from."

It's 8 p.m. Outside, Wilson's German shepherd, Heidi, barks into the night. Inside, a hundred clocks note the hour, chiming and clanging and vibrating through the house, drowning out the television as they mark the passing of time.

By HELEN O'NEILL, AP Special Correspondent Helen O'neill, Ap Special Correspondent