Unlikely Friendship

In 1967, Ann Atwater, a black civil rights advocate and community organizer, arrived for an appointment with a white school board member in Durham, N.C.

As Atwater was making demands for improvements to the local schools, the white school board member made one very serious mistake. He got up in the middle of their conversation, ignoring Atwater and the crowd of black parents behind her.

“So what I did, when he went to get up, I hit him over the head with the receiver of the telephone,”  Atwater recalled in a 2010 interview. “And then he sat down and I snatched the phone out the wall, and we sat down and we had a meeting.” Atwater was fearless.

“The Best of Enemies” is set in Durham, North Carolina, in 1971, a time when that city’s schools were still segregated. It stars Taraji P. Henson as Ann Atwater, a black resident of Durham and a community organizer who helps other black residents on issues of housing discrimination, and Sam Rockwell as C. P. Ellis, a white Durham resident who is the leader of a Ku Klux Klan chapter in the town. After an elementary school for black children is damaged by a fire, local officials—all white, all male—refuse to let these circumstances hasten school integration. 

According to C.P. Ellis, Ann Atwater's voice was deep and powerful, and she had the ability to energize her audience. She became an effective leader. She was not afraid to voice her opinions loudly and proudly. She was also not afraid to tell anyone to “go to hell” if she felt like it. She concluded that the most effective method of getting people to listen to her was to “holler at them.” When she called a meeting, she meant business.

It’s in the course of the subsequent reckoning, a rigorous, stressful, highly publicized ten-day affair, that Ann and C. P. are compelled to spend time together. C. P., in acknowledging his growing friendly feelings for Ann, must overcome a lifelong and deep-rooted hatred for black people, leading to his ultimate, and public, renunciation of his Klan membership and repudiation of white supremacy and segregation. Ellis and Atwater became friends as he came to believe that whites, especially poor whites, could prosper more from the civil rights movement than from segregation. Atwater and Ellis came to know each other as individuals instead of as stereotypes. They came to see how they, as poor people, were both oppressed and that their children faced many of the same issues. It was during this time that they cried together.

Ann and C.P. toured the country to speak at universities and forums about their experience together.

Ellis became a labor union organizer for the AFL-CIO in Durham. He died in 2005.

Ann delivered the eulogy at his funeral.

Mutual respect and love can turn this world around.