Davidson — The Best of Enemies
Osha Gray Davidson, The Best of Enemies: Race and Redemption in the New South (1996). Adapted into a 2019 film.
The Story
In 1971, a federal court ordered Durham, North Carolina to desegregate its schools. The city convened a ten-day community charrette — a structured process for public deliberation — to decide how. The organizers made a provocative choice for co-chairs: Ann Atwater, a prominent Black civil rights activist, and C.P. Ellis, the Exalted Cyclops of the local Ku Klux Klan.
Davidson documents what happened over those ten days and in the years that followed. The charrette forced Ellis and Atwater into sustained, structured contact — not a one-hour panel, not a photo op, but ten days of shared labor on a real problem with real stakes. They didn’t start by liking each other. They started by having no choice but to cooperate.
What emerged was complicated. Ellis didn’t have a sudden moral epiphany. He had a slow, grinding confrontation with the fact that poor white families and poor Black families were being played against each other by the same economic interests — that the Klan’s racial ideology served the mill owners who underpaid him. His transformation was economic and structural before it was emotional. He eventually renounced the Klan, became a labor organizer, and maintained a relationship with Atwater until his death.
What It Teaches About Community Across Difference
The Ellis-Atwater story is sometimes told as heartwarming reconciliation — two enemies who became friends. Davidson is more honest than that. The transformation was:
Structural, not voluntary. Ellis didn’t choose to sit with Atwater. The charrette process required it. The structure created the conditions; the relationship emerged within those conditions. This is the desire path principle applied to racial reconciliation: you don’t ask people to be ready. You build the structure and let the contact do the work.
Economic before it was racial. Ellis’s break with the Klan came when he recognized that racial division was a tool of class exploitation — that the same employers who kept Black workers down also kept white workers down. The solidarity that replaced his racism was rooted in shared material interest, not in abstract moral growth. This has implications for how Wellspring thinks about integration: shared economic structure (cooperative ownership, frozen carrying costs, mutual maintenance) may be a more durable basis for cross-racial community than diversity programming.
Incomplete and ongoing. Ellis didn’t become a saint. He carried his history with him. The relationship with Atwater had real limits. Davidson doesn’t smooth over the parts that stayed rough. This is important for Wellspring: community across difference is not a destination you arrive at. It’s a practice you maintain, imperfectly, through structures that make continued contact inevitable.
Driven by a real task. The charrette worked because it had a concrete goal: produce a desegregation plan. The contact wasn’t therapeutic — it was practical. People cooperate better when they’re working on something together than when they’re processing feelings about each other. Wellspring’s shared maintenance obligations, cooperative governance, and communal projects serve this function: they provide the real task around which relationships form.
Durham Context
The book provides historical context for Durham’s racial geography that any housing project needs to engage with:
- Durham as a city of Black entrepreneurship and institution-building (the “Black Wall Street of the South” — Hayti, Parrish Street, North Carolina Mutual)
- The destruction of Hayti by freeway construction in the 1960s — a local instance of the national pattern Rothstein documents
- The ongoing tension between Durham’s progressive self-image and its actual patterns of segregation, displacement, and gentrification
- The role of organized labor, churches, and civic institutions in mediating (or failing to mediate) racial conflict
Wellspring doesn’t need to replicate the charrette process. But it needs to know this history, because the land it builds on and the neighbors it lives among carry this legacy. Presenting a community development project in Durham without this context is presenting without credibility.
The Charrette Model
The charrette structure itself is worth studying as governance design:
- Forced proximity. Participants had to be in the room together for extended periods. Not a one-hour meeting — ten days.
- Shared task. The goal was concrete and external: produce a plan. The contact was instrumental, not therapeutic.
- Mixed composition. The room included people who would never have chosen each other’s company. The structure overrode self-selection.
- Graduated stakes. Early sessions built familiarity. Later sessions required commitment. Trust was built incrementally, not demanded up front.
These features map onto Relational Accountability and the Goldilocks problem: enough structure to produce contact, not so much that it produces performance. The charrette didn’t ask participants to be ready for reconciliation. It asked them to be in the room. The room did the rest.