Conflict Resolution Training: Any Conflict Can Be Resolved

Do you doubt the validity of the title? Think your conflicts are so difficult that there is no hope of resolution? If so, you need to hear the story of Clairborne Paul Ellis, known as C. P. Ellis. His story is told in the book “Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error’ by Kathryn Schulz.

C. P. Ellis operated a gas station in Durham, North Carolina and was the head of the Durham branch of the Ku Klux Klan.

He threw a party on April 4^th, 1968, the day Martin Luther King was killed.

In 1970, the Federal government gave North Carolina 75 million dollars to desegregate the state’s schools of which $80,000 was given to Durham for a series of workshops to persuade Durham’s citizens to cooperate.

Joe Becton, head of Durham’s Human Relations Commission, wanted the most important city leaders to participate in the workshops. Because he knew that many of the city’s anti integration citizens would resist unless they felt their views were represented in the workshops, he approached Ellis to participate. Ellis was appalled and resisted Becton’s entreaties. But persistence paid off and Ellis, who knew that desegregation was inevitable, decided to participate in order to do what he could to slow the process down.

Becton also approached Ann Atwater, a poor African American women who he thought could represent poor and disenfranchised Black citizens. Atwater had organized housing protests against dishonest landlords and worked with welfare recipients to educate them on their rights.

The man heading the workshops, Bill Riddick, saw that he had to bring these two antagonists together if the workshops were to be successful so he asked them to co-chair the workshops. Blacks were outraged as were whites. Why would a Black person even be in the same room as the head of the KKK? Why would a white person even consider sitting at the same table as a Black person?

As you can imagine, the first meeting was a disaster. Ellis refused to sit down, paced the room and wouldn’t even look at Atwater who sat glaring at Ellis.

One day, at the conclusion of one of these workshops, Ellis and Atwater found themselves alone in the auditorium where the meeting had taken place. They started talking and discovered that their differences were, literally, only skin deep.

Both Ellis and Atwater had grown up poor and uneducated in North Carolina. Ellis’s father was an abusive alcoholic. Ellis dropped out of school in the 8^th grade, married at 17 and had 3 children, one of whom was blind and developmentally disabled. He was barely able to support his children. One of the main reasons he had even considered participating in the workshops was for the sake of his children.

Atwater had dropped out of school in the 10^th grade, had her first child when she was 16 and married the father of her child who left her shortly afterwards. She worked as a nanny and housekeeper but was never able to earn enough money to bring herself and her child out or poverty. Like Ellis, she joined the workshops in the hope that it would make a difference for her child.

Listening to Atwater, to his astonishment, Ellis began to cry. Years later, he told the interviewer Studs Terkel that for the first time, “I looked at her and saw another human being. I began to love the girl, really.”

From 1970 when he left the Klan until 1994, Ellis worked as an organizer for the International Union of Operating Engineers. When asked about his greatest accomplishment, he said it was helping forty African American women secure the right to take MLK day off as a paid holiday, the first contract in the city of Durham to honor King’s memory.

Ellis died in 2005. Atwater is still alive.

So consider the possibility that any conflict can be resolved if you choose to. The lesson offered by Ellis and Atwater is that doing so is a choice and not doing so is also a choice. Believing anything else is a pretense.