The Story Behind The Best of Enemies Almost Seems Too Unlikely to Be True

Ann Atwater (played by Taraji P. Henson, above) was a notable civil rights activist long before her involvement in the story depicted in The Best of Enemies. Born to a sharecropping family, Atwater grew up understanding the intersection of race and poverty firsthand. She moved to Durham, NC, in 1953 after getting married at the age of 14, but her husband soon left her to raise their children alone.

After receiving help from local housing advocates to keep her home after falling behind on rent, Atwater became involved in housing advocacy herself. In the mid-1960s, she was approached by activist Dr. Howard Fuller to join Operation Breakthrough, an organization devoted to addressing poverty and inequality, both racial and economic. Atwater worked to address the discrepancies in how whites and blacks were treated by community aid organizations and became an expert on housing policy.

Atwater served on several other committees and commissions on inequality, often focused on issues of poverty and housing. Her political activity led her to be elected as the vice president of the local Democratic Party, and she also became a church leader and the first female deacon in her church.

In 1971, she was asked to cochair a special initiative to resolve issues related to desegregation in schools, which is the focus of the film.

Claiborne Paul Ellis (played by Sam Rockwell, above) grew up in poverty, like Atwater. Unlike Atwater, however, he was white, and was influenced by his father and community to blame poor blacks for his troubles. As his obituary in The Guardian in 2005 stated, he couldn't understand why he worked hard and never got ahead.

This disillusionment led Ellis straight into the arms of the local Ku Klux Klan, who encouraged his beliefs that black Americans, Jewish people, liberals, and Catholics were the enemy and the root of all his problems. His obituary in the Los Angeles Times describes how Ellis would show up at city council meetings armed and scream racist rants through the meetings. He also began a youth group to indoctrinate children with white supremacist views.

Ellis rose into leadership roles in the KKK, and he was soon elected the "Grand Cyclops," or local leader, of the Durham, NC, chapter. In 1971, he was elected as a cochair to a committee on desegregating local schools. His cochair was Atwater, but this was not the first time they'd met: at one of the council meetings where Ellis spewed racist invective, Atwater lunged at him and tried to stab him, only failing because her friends held her back.

Following the official Supreme Court ruling that schools had to be desegregated, Southern communities such as Durham struggled with how to obey the court mandate in a community that heavily resisted. The local labor union received a grant to work through the problem, and a 10-day committee meeting was called. Leaders asked Atwater and Ellis to bring their viewpoints and chair the meeting.

The pair were, obviously, at odds. As The Hollywood Reporter describes, however, they discovered that they were more similar than they thought, especially given their impoverished upbringings and their mutual concern for the education of local children. Ellis came to realize that civil rights and desegregation could benefit everyone, and that poor black communities were not at fault for white communities in poverty; instead, they should be allies.

According to Davidson's book (on which the movie is based), their two-week meeting ended with Atwater and Ellis presenting a list of balanced recommendations to the board, focusing on creating mechanisms to hear students' voices and improve curriculum. More significantly, Ellis renounced his membership in the KKK by publicly tearing up his membership card, leading to death threats and shunning by many members of his own community.

Atwater and Ellis had become real friends, and remained so for decades. Atwater continued her civil rights work, while Ellis became prominent in labor and union organizations. Ellis died in 2005, and Atwater in 2016.