Oprah wants Elwin Wilson.

"And I guess Oprah will get me," said Wilson on Tuesday, sitting in a recliner in his home. He had just hung up the telephone after talking with someone from the "The Oprah Winfrey Show" - arguably the most-watched talk show on Earth.

"I gotta go on the show," Wilson said. "If just one person hears what an apology for hating people can do, I should do it. Nobody likes to say I am sorry, and I am no different than anybody else. Who likes to be mean and wrong their whole life?

"But maybe there's somebody else out there who is waiting for a chance to apologize for hating black people, because he knows in his heart that it is wrong to hate black people."

It is an apology - for beating up a civil rights protester as part of a lifetime of bigotry, and an apology accepted by the gracious blacks themselves - that in America, only Elwin Wilson has ever said.

And he said it here, two years ago in The Herald, first.

Yes, the call Tuesday came to Wilson's home from people who work for Oprah Winfrey - the television icon in the last season of her top-rated show. It is watched by millions.

The show has invited Rock Hill's Elwin Wilson to Chicago to talk about his apology for beating the living daylights out of a skinny, short black civil rights protester in the Rock Hill Greyhound bus station almost 50 years ago.

That black guy, just 21 on May 9, 1961, is a man who became a civil rights icon and, eventually, a congressman, U.S. Rep. John Lewis, the Democrat from Georgia.

Yet in 1961, Lewis was just another black man among countless numbers across the South, beaten up by angry whites hell-bent on keeping blacks in their place.

Lewis, by telephone Tuesday, also confirmed that he will be taping the show Thursday in Chicago. Other Freedom Riders from 1961 are also scheduled to be there, Lewis said.

A spokesperson for the show said late Tuesday the episode is scheduled to air May 4.

"And I will be proud, to have my friend, Mr. Elwin Wilson, there by my side with me," Lewis said Tuesday. "He remains, to my knowledge, the only person who beat me, or any of us on the Freedom Rides, to apologize.

"He is a special man."

Wilson, right there in his recliner a couple of hours later Tuesday, put it this way:

"No finer honor than to be on TV with my friend John Lewis. We sure have become close after what I did to him all those years ago, when I hated black people for no good reason at all.

"He is all that is good about America. He forgave me for all that wrong I did. And I sure did wrong to him."

Yet for 48 years, until January 2009, nobody ever admitted to being the guy who beat Lewis into a bloody pulp.

After President Barack Obama was inaugurated as the nation's first black president, former Ku Klux Klansman Wilson called me here at The Herald.

Wilson told me that he wanted to apologize for a lifetime of hating blacks. Wilson then apologized to local civil rights protesters and admitted he was the one man who beat up Lewis that day in 1961.

The Freedom Rides set out from Washington, D.C., with the intent of destroying segregation. The riders stopped in Rock Hill because of the Friendship Nine's "Jail, No Bail" civil rights sit-in and month in prison.

That was when Friendship Junior College students chose the chain gang over bail to prove a point that segregation was wrong.

Wilson's 2009 apology soon became heard around the world.

Lewis told me exclusively over the telephone, three days after Wilson's public apology in this newspaper, that he accepted Wilson's apology and bore him no ill will.

"I have no ill feelings, no malice," Lewis said that night in 2009. "This shows the distance we have come. It shows grace on his part. It shows courage."

Lewis said he would like to meet Wilson. A few days later, Wilson met Lewis at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, where the two men embraced, and cried, and the apology was said yet again on national television.

Soon after, national media took Wilson and his apology onto an international stage.

Lewis and Wilson stayed in touch, and in October 2009 they received the prestigious Common Ground peace awards in Washington.

Elwin Wilson - who hated blacks for so long and hung a black doll in a noose in a tree in his yard once years ago, who chased blacks with tire irons and left churches because blacks arrived and participated in Klan rallies and worse - was now in the same company as international peace figures Jimmy Carter and Muhammad Ali and, yes, John Lewis.

The men spoke together in the last couple of years at events in California, Georgia and, earlier this year, Maryland.

Then Tuesday, Oprah's people called Wilson where he sat in the living room with his wife.

"I have watched Oprah Winfrey for so many years right in this room," said Wilson's wife of 50 years, Judy. "And now Elwin will be on with her."

In the telephone interview Tuesday, Lewis recalled what happened May 9, 1961 - as if it had happened just the past weekend.

"We climbed down from the bus," he said. "I was with a white Freedom Rider named Al Bigelow - as fine a man as there ever was - and I reached for the door to the 'White' waiting room.

"The signs were there. White waiting room. Colored waiting room. We were there to get rid of those separate places. There was a group of men, a mob, and they said, 'You can't go in there.' I moved to go in, and that's when I took a beating."

Lewis remembers the bloody lip and bruised face and Wilson sure does, because Wilson administered the beating.

"My daddy had a service station up a block and we knew the protesters were coming on the bus," Wilson recalled. "A bunch of us went down there. Two of them got off the bus - a black and a white - and the black grabbed the handle of the 'White" door for the waiting room. I hollered out, 'Where you think you're goin?'

"The black fella - he was a lot smaller than me - said, 'Into this waiting room.' And I said, 'The hell you are!' and I hit him with a right hand, then a left hand."

Wilson beat Lewis while the other whites at the bus station who arrived with Wilson to cause trouble beat up the white protester Al Bigelow.

Lewis recalled that a police officer witnessed the whole thing and asked if either he or Bigelow wanted to press charges.

"We said no, our fight is against segregation, not with any man," Lewis remembered. "I didn't hate the man who beat me up that day, and I never hated him."

Then, in 2009, Wilson apologized first in The Herald, and then before the world.

And now, just two weeks before the 50th anniversary of that beating in Rock Hill, and two years after the apology, Lewis and Wilson are preparing to tape an historic television show.

"The easy thing for Mr. Wilson to do would have been nothing, to never apologize," Lewis said Tuesday. "But he did say he was sorry and I believe that he meant it. And he still does.

"He had raw courage, amazing strength, to apologize like he did."

Elwin Wilson went from retired metalworker to active champion for equality with one apology. Nobody ever got more mileage, or said an apology was worth more, than Rock Hill's Elwin Wilson.

Wilson, now 74, has only a few occasions the last couple of years heard bigots tell him that he shouldn't have apologized.

He has received stacks of mail from countries as far away as Saudi Arabia, with people saying that his apology after almost 50 years for a lifetime of hate changed their lives.

"I had one man just a month ago say I never should apologize for hating blacks," Wilson said. "I told him that I was apologizing to God, too."

And now, Wilson will get a chance to sit on that famous set in Chicago and tell the most famous, richest black woman on the face of the Earth:

"I was wrong for beating up John Lewis, and I was wrong for hating black people when they were just people like me. And I sure am not ashamed to tell anybody that I was wrong."

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