Ann Atwater

Ann George Atwater (July 1, 1935 – June 20, 2016) was an American civil rights activist in Durham, North Carolina.

Throughout her career she helped improve the quality of life in Durham through programs such as Operation Breakthrough (Durham, North Carolina), a community organization dedicated to fight the War on Poverty.

She became an effective activist and leader when advocating for black rights, such as better private housing.

Atwater promoted unity of the working-class African Americans through grassroots organizations.

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.

In the documentary An Unlikely Friendship, Atwater recalled that while working on a white owner's farm, she was given food only through the back door and after the white workers had eaten.

She was taught that White people were better and that their needs came before hers.

She learned to take second place.

After marrying at the age of thirteen to French Wilson, Ann moved with him from the countryside to Durham in hopes of better job opportunities, as the city had large tobacco and textile industries.

At the time, Durham had a fairly large black population, with a considerable portion of educated, middle-class Black people, in addition to white residents and poor Black people.

Poverty was still a problem in the segregated society; in 1950 28% of families lived below the designated poverty line of $3000.

The poor Black people of Durham had to fight both racial and class divisions: one against the White people who claimed superiority and another against the wealthier Black people who did not want to associate themselves with the lower class.

Such struggles helped shape Atwater as an activist.

Durham's prosperous black business sector made the city a beacon of hope for African Americans seeking to rise through self-help.

But Atwater's husband struggled financially, and became alcoholic and abusive.

Eventually Atwater divorced him and raised their two daughters on her own as a single mother.

She survived on $57 a month from a welfare check, and struggled to pay rent, as she gained only occasional domestic work in white homes.

She made dresses out of flour and rice bags for her daughters to wear.

The only foods she could afford for her children were rice, cabbage, and fatback.

The faucets in the bathroom were faulty, shooting out water so intensely that her kids nicknamed it “Niagara Falls”.

The roof of her house was full of holes, the bathtub had fallen through the floor, and “the house was so poorly wired that when the man cut off [her] lights for nonpayment, [she] could stomp on the floor and the lights would come on and [she’d] stomp on the floor and they’d go off”.

She joked in a later interview that the house didn't need windows because she could see everyone on the streets through the cracks in the wall.

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.

It helped participants gain confidence that they could achieve change and escape poverty.

People worked at job-training, took after-school tutoring, or became educated as to their rights.

It was funded by the North Carolina Fund, a statewide program to improve education.

Fuller met with each resident enrolled in Operation Breakthrough, getting to know them personally and helping identify issues to be fixed.

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.

She showed him her house and he invited her to his program.

The next day Atwater and Fuller went to Atwater's landlord to demand repairs for her house and, to Atwater's surprise, her landlord agreed to fix some of the problems.

To her knowledge, making demands from a landlord was unheard of and she had no idea that she had the right to do so.

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.

That first meeting marked the start of her involvement in helping the poor black community fight poverty.

Gradually Atwater became a leader among the participants in Operation Breakthrough meetings.

She began to represent poor people with housing problems, and would go door-to-door telling others of her own previous housing problems and how she was able to resolve them.

She is best known as one of the co-chairs of a charrette in 1971 to reduce school violence and ensure peaceful school desegregation.

It met for ten sessions.

She showed that it was possible for White and Black people, even with conflicting views, to negotiate and collaborate by establishing some common ground.