He doesn’t serve blacks at his gas station, and he sure as shootin’ (perhaps literally) isn’t going to allow any colored kids sitting next to his in school. He leads the charge against “communists, n-ers and Jews” in town. He cried tears of joy when he got his KKK card, and he considers its members to be family. Ellis, head of the city’s branch of the Ku Klux Klan, is the first to raise his fist. But many of city’s white citizens have four words for the ACLU: Over our dead bodies.Ĭ.P. Legally, that’s what they should’ve done already, as the American Civil Liberties Union insisted in a recent lawsuit. The natural solution: Send them where the white kids go. Desegregated schools? Don’t make 1971 Durham laugh.īut when a fire devastates the city’s black elementary school, the city’s faced with a potentially explosive question: Where should we send these black boys and girls to school? Blacks and whites go to different restaurants, stores and gas stations. Groups campaign to protect white privilege at every turn. When a black citizen speaks at a city council meeting, one councilman turns his back-as if the speaker is beneath his notice. But in communities like Durham, North Carolina, segregation and racism are still alive and all too well. It’s 1971, and the issue of civil rights has faded from the front pages. But now Riddick faces a challenge unlike any other. But through patience and conversation and sometimes painful give and take, Riddick guides them through the process where votes are taken, decisions are made and shopping centers are built. Sometimes they’d rather spit in each other’s faces as shake their hands. Often these stakeholders often don’t trust each other much.
THE BEST OF ENEMIES TRUE STORY SERIES
The community brings in Riddick to lead what he calls a charrette-a series of meetings with the community’s biggest stakeholders. Say, for instance, a developer wants to build a shopping center in a neighborhood, but the neighbors don’t want it. Riddick travels across the country to build understanding and, hopefully, consensus. You could say he makes bridges, but of a more metaphorical sort. He doesn’t hammer together houses or pave roads.
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