C. P. Ellis and Ann Atwater

It was 1971, in Durham, North Carolina.

The courts had just ordered the schools desegregated.

Claiborne Paul Ellis, known as C. P., was born in Durham in 1927. His father was a factory worker. He drank, and he belonged to the Ku Klux Klan.

C. P. had left school after eighth grade to help his family. He worked at a gas station. Men he met there invited him into the Klan. There he found the feeling of having a part in something. He became its local president.

Ann Atwater was born in 1935 in Hallsboro, in Columbus County. She lost her parents before she was nineteen. She came to Durham in 1953.

She cleaned houses. She raised her children alone, in a run-down house on an unpaved street, in the Hayti neighborhood.

Then she began to fight. With Operation Breakthrough, she worked against poverty and for decent housing. Sit-ins, pickets, boycotts.

Everything set them apart. They lived in separate neighborhoods, but in the same poverty.

An organizer, Bill Riddick, sent by the North Carolina AFL-CIO, proposed a "charrette": ten days of meetings where the whole city would come to talk about the schools. And he chose two co-chairs. Ann Atwater. And C. P. Ellis.

Ellis refused at first. Then he agreed, so that the supporters of segregation would be heard.

During the gospel singing, Ellis clapped his hands. Ann taught him to clap the rhythm.

They found they carried the same worries of poor people. They stopped seeing a side. They saw a person.

On the last night, about a thousand people filled the hall.

C. P. Ellis stood up. He held his Klan card in his hand. He held it up before the hall.

He renounced the Klan that night. He never went back.

The school board did not adopt the charrette's recommendations. The Klan threatened Ellis and refused to speak to him for thirty years.

Ellis began organizing unions, for Black and white workers alike. He became business manager of a union in Durham.

Ann and he remained friends. Together, they told their story across the country.

What they discovered echoes Ubuntu, without coming from that tradition: we become fully human by recognizing the other, even the one we took for an enemy.

C. P. Ellis died in Durham on November 3, 2005. It was Ann Atwater who gave his eulogy.

She died on June 20, 2016, at the age of eighty.

Their story became a book, The Best of Enemies, in 1996, then a film in 2019. In 2019, Durham honored them both, posthumously.

One image remains: two pairs of hands learning to keep the same beat.