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The Silkroad Ensemble abides by the notion that “embracing difference leads to a more hopeful world,” according to its website.

Playing into Week Seven’s theme, “The Arts and Global Understanding,” members of the group will speak at 10:45 a.m. Monday, August 6, in the Amphitheater. The discussion will be moderated by Steven Seidel, Harvard University’s director of Arts in Education Program.

Jeffrey Beecher, co-artistic director of Silkroad Ensemble, said Seidel and the group “are intent on opening up this idea of listening across differences and what that means. … We can see those separations, whether it’s a different culture, or a different instrument or a person you’ve never met before, as dealbreakers, or as hurdles.”

“Or,” Beecher said, “you can take that difference and find a pathway to connect with that musician or a different culture.”

World-renowned cellist Yo-Yo Ma began assembling Silkroad Ensemble in 1998. The group’s name and purpose comes from the Silk Road, an ancient trading route between Asia, the Middle East and Europe.

Symbolically, Silkroad Ensemble hopes to do the same thing — bring worldwide cultures together and help them to understand one another.

“I founded the Silk Road Project because I believe we’re not as isolated as we think we are,” Ma told World Literature Today in a 2006 interview. “One of the ideas we talk about at the project is how important it is to know our neighbors, both our next-door neighbors and our halfway-around-the-world neighbors.”

The Silkroad Ensemble is made up of musicians from all over the world who are also, according to the group’s website, “teachers, producers and advocates.” Eleven of those artists are scheduled to perform at Chautauqua this week.

Silkroad Ensemble is a nonprofit organization and has released seven albums. Sing Me Home won a Grammy for Best World Music Album. Ma’s album Songs of Joy and Peace features Silkroad and won a Grammy for Best Classical Crossover Album.

The documentary “The Music of Strangers: Yo-Yo Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble” was first released abroad, then in the United States in 2016. The film, directed by Morgan Neville and chronicling the founding of the Silkroad Ensemble, has been met with largely positive reviews.

The Silkroad Ensemble will perform at 8:15 p.m. Wednesday, August 8, in the Amp, and again at 8:15 p.m. Friday, August 10, in the Amp with Ma.

“(Monday’s) lecture is both the welcome and a framing session for the whole week,” Beecher said, “giving context to who we are, where we come from, what instruments we play, but … how do you go about collaborating with someone when it doesn’t feel like you have a lot in common when you start out?”

Chautauquans will have many opportunities to see and hear the Silkroad Ensemble in full force this week, but only one opportunity to hear the group perform in smaller subdivisions.

At 4 p.m. Monday, August 6, in Elizabeth S. Lenna Hall, members of the Silkroad Ensemble will present a concert of duos and trios in the first installment of their residency at Chautauqua Institution. Chautauquans who want to see the concert must pick up a free ticket at the Main Gate.

Bassist and Co-Artistic Director of Silkroad Jeffrey Beecher said the performance is a great opportunity for the musicians of Silkroad to play in new combinations.

“These people have played together in the ensemble for a long time, but maybe never as a duo,” Beecher said. “Here, (they) have the opportunity to share things that maybe might not have worked in the larger ensemble setting.”

The smaller groups also allow for more intimacy in musical conversation, Beecher said, which allows the musicians to dig deeper into one another’s musical traditions. And this concert will feature many different traditions — Galician, Chinese and Vietnamese to name a few.

Silkroad is known for its combinations of various folk musical styles, both in its programming and in the makeup of the ensemble. Today’s concert features traditional Chinese music because ensemble members Shaw Pong Liu and Wu Man play traditional Chinese instruments, and it includes Galician music because member Cristina Pato is a gaita (Galician bagpipes) player.

“We bring things from our traditions, and then we learn things from other traditions,” Pato said. “ ‘Lamento’ (featured on today’s concert) is a composition that I wrote for solo gaita, and then we kind of ‘Silkroaded’ it by adding different layers and instruments.”

“Silkroading” a piece — essentially, taking an existing piece of music and arranging it for Silkroad’s unique and changing instrumentation — is one of the main ways the group creates music, Beecher said.

The concert will feature several other examples of “Silkroaded” music; the final piece, for example, is an original work by Silkroad cellist Mike Block titled “Iniche Cosebe.” The piece can be seen on YouTube as a cello and violin duo and as a nine-piece cello ensemble, but Monday’s performance will be for Silkroad’s eclectic act.

For Beecher, collaborations like this are what make Silkroad so special.

“The best part of Silkroad is that you have a group of people who are really excited to witness other musicians’ skills, talents and how they’ve learned, and they want to understand more about how they might be able to take that into their own.”

Opera is a suspension of time, according to voice student Amanda Lynn Bottoms.

“In real life, we just say, ‘I love you.’ In opera, it’s a six-minute aria about ‘I love you’ so that we have time to process that very deep feeling,” said Bottoms, who is undertaking the titular role Carmen. “So we can sit there, and every time they repeat ‘I love you,’ it either empowers us or pains us, or burdens us (or) releases us. There are so many things with each reiteration.”

Bottoms and the other Chautauqua voice students will perform Georges Bizet’s Carmen at 8:15 p.m. Monday, August 6, in the Amphitheater with live orchestral music played by the Music School Festival Orchestra.

Bizet’s music, according to John Giampietro, director of the production, is “one of the greatest pieces of music in the history of Western classical music.”

And the MSFO has a significant role in creating the ambience for the storytelling, according to Timothy Muffitt, MSFO music director. In Carmen, Bizet often uses the orchestra to create a “sense of time and place,” Muffitt said.

“This opera is full of full-throated orchestral music where there’s no one even singing,” Muffitt said. “So the orchestra has a lot to do in terms of telling the story, especially on those purely orchestral interludes, where we, in a musical way, are setting the stage for the action to come.”

To create music that works well for opera, Muffitt said, the 80-plus instrumentalists in the orchestra pit need to be intensely aware of balance when working with singers.

“Opera, by the nature of the genre, is usually a very intimate kind of music making because we have one person singing,” Muffitt said. “But the forces in play are anything but intimate — we have a full symphony orchestra down there. And so, it calls upon the (MSFO) players to really connect with the people on stage and have an awareness of surrounding, unlike any other kinds of music making.”

Bottoms said there are things about Carmen she can relate to, and there are also things about the character that “drive her crazy,” like her narcissism.

“Her thirst for freedom is an amazing thing, but it’s always at the cost of others,” Bottoms said. “… She would never want to be free with a lover; she would want to be free to leave that lover. But she doesn’t want him to be free to come and go. It’s on her terms at all times.”

Carmen is a frequently performed opera, and Bottoms said many of its elements make it popular.

“We love the character so much. We love the songs, which are so close to French pop songs of the time,” Bottoms said. “There is just something so endearing about these people living this larger-than-life life. And loving without boundaries. There’s something so brave about that.”

But it is dangerous to only see the opera that way, according to Bottoms. She said despite the grandness and popularity of Carmen, there is “a very important narrative” happening within the piece.

“We often forget, ‘Oh, it ends in (Carmen) being stabbed and murdered at the end,’ ” Bottoms said.

Because Carmen refuses to leave her new lover to be with Don José, her old lover, he kills her.

“In the novella that (the opera) comes from, (Don José) kills her and says, ‘It’s the gypsy’s fault’ for the way you were raised, for what they taught you,” Bottoms said. “He doesn’t take any of the blame. … But at the end of (both the novella and the opera), the same untimely end happens to her.”

Bottoms said there is a lack of balance in regard to what each gender can do without facing certain consequences.

“And we have to come to terms with (that),” Bottoms said. “Do we say, ‘OK, Don José was justified?’ Do we say Carmen is a victim of circumstance, a victim of a world — (in which) if a man does that and a woman retaliates, she’s crazy? But if a woman does it, and a man would retaliate, (people would say), ‘Oh well, she’s a seductress, she’s a temptress, and she led him to do this.’ ”

Bottoms said Carmen is still relevant. Similar stories happen in real life, Bottoms said, like “when a woman rejects a man and he stabs her to death or shoots her because she wouldn’t want to (go on a) date with him.”

According to Giampietro, Carmen is a complicated story with complicated issues, “especially through today’s lens of the #MeToo movement and discussions on equality of the sexes and privilege and patriarchy.”

Giampietro said some of the themes in masterpieces like Carmen need to be questioned and re-examined.

“I believe that Carmen is not a love story. It’s about the murder of a woman who simply wanted the same freedoms that were afforded (to) any male in society,” Giampietro said. “Because she wanted that, she lived for that kind of freedom, she was killed. And I think now, our society has been having a discussion about equality and the persistence of the patriarchy.”

Giampietro said tonight’s production of Carmen is going to re-examine that story because “we can’t romanitize these stories any more.”

“One of the main questions that we are asking in this production is ‘What is our responsibility for the society that creates a Carmen?’ and ‘What is our responsibility in her death?’ ” Giampietro said.

Giampietro’s approach in directing this production is acknowledging Carmen as a masterpiece while finding “a new interpretation that doesn’t dilute the original.”

By bypassing traditional design elements that set Carmen in romanticized Spain in order to illuminate the heart of the piece, Giampietro hopes to get rid of the distractions of “how beautiful, … hot and sunny Spain is,” in order to “strip everything down” to Carmen’s origin. This production will be “about people and the society that creates this culture and makes a Carmen necessary” and “our ultimate culpability in her death.”

According to Mikhaela Mahony, assistant director of Carmen, tonight’s production will be a little abstract and minimalist.

“The space is created through bodies and through how (people on stage) move gesturally… For example, there’s a scene (in which) one character is in a threatening landscape or a scary space. Rather than create that through a set, we create that through a series of humans on stage being menacing,” Mahony said. “It’s beautiful. It feels to me a very visually stunning production, using the simplest means.”

Bottoms said the chorus is on stage almost 95 percent of the time, and Voice Chair Marlena Malas said in the way Giampietro directs Carmen, every cast member is special. Bottoms said the chorus will go from being “part of the action to being an (on-stage) audience member.”

“It’s very jarring to be going from being an audience member, or a chorus member to being a member of the scene,” Bottoms said. “And I think the audience is going to be very moved to be sympathetic and empathetic to what (the characters) are experiencing, and therefore empathetic to what Carmen, Micaela or Don José, Escamillo — to anything that anyone on stage is experiencing.”

What’s the secret to happiness after 50? Arthur Brooks knows.

The 54-year-old economist, author and president of the American Enterprise Institute spoke to just that at his 10:45 a.m. morning lecture Friday, Aug. 3,  titled “Work, Life and Happiness After 50: How to go from Strength to Strength,” closing Week Six’s theme, “The Changing Nature of Work.”

Brooks’ quest to find the meaning of happiness after midlife began on a United Airlines flight from Los Angeles to Washington, D.C., when an older couple started animatedly arguing mid-flight. The conservation, which Brooks couldn’t help but overhear, went like this:

“Mumble, mumble, mumble,” from the husband, to which the wife replied, “Oh, don’t say that nobody cares about you, that you have nothing to add anymore.”

“Mumble, mumble, mumble,” uttered the husband; “Don’t say it would be better if you were dead,” the wife blurted.

Eventually, the conversation stopped. The plane descended, and while disembarking from the plane, Brooks caught a glimpse of the distraught man — he was a celebrity, an “American hero,” as Brooks described him. Brooks wondered how a man so revered could fall into such dismay. Brooks said he selfishly thought to himself, “How can I not end up like that? … How can I, after a life of some accomplishment, wind up happy and not disappointed?”

Statistically, happiness decreases steadily in the first half of life — hitting rock bottom at 53 years old.

Social psychologists contribute this to three factors, Brooks said: failed expectations, biology and, quaintly put, “family complications.”

“That’s secret code for ‘teenage kids,’” he said. “Now, everybody knows that kids bring meaning, kids bring purpose, but it’s hard and when they are adolescents, it’s even harder. I remember looking at this data, soulless and desiccated numbers on a spreadsheet, and I decided I wanted to give you the best data I have ever seen on the midlife slump … my son, Carlos.”

Specifically, his son Carlos’ YouTube channel, and a video where Carlos attempts to get a job but forgets to put contact information on his resume. Brooks reminisced on when his son was 8 years old, and it was unimaginable that he would move out — 10 years later, it’s an “emergency.”

The good news is that after 53, happiness surges, Brooks said. This spike continues through the 60s, but at 70, the data splits; half experience rising life satisfaction, the other half see the opposite.

So how does one stay on the rise, not the decline? Brooks referenced the man he overheard on his crosscountry flight: high-achieving “American heroes,” seemingly dissatisfied with their lives — that’s who tend to trend on the lower half, Brooks said, because of the burden of the high achievers.

He said those who are successful, career-oriented people are statistically unhappy after their careers end. Brooks used Charles Darwin as an example. Darwin was a rich, famous, world-renowned naturalist, geologist and biologist whose research made him a European hero, Brooks said. But when Gregor Johann Mendel started his work on genetics, Darwin’s contributions became obsolete.

“Charles Darwin fell in adeep depression that lasted the rest of his life because decline happened to (him),” Brooks said. “High achievers suffer the most, why? Because they have the farthest to fall. It makes sense, doesn’t it? If you don’t do anything, you don’t have anything to come down from. But there’s the physics of success: what goes up, must come down.”

Brooks himself knows decline. At 19, he dropped out (or was kicked out, but that’s splitting hairs, he said) of college to pursue his passion — the French horn. At 22, he hit a wall; melodies that  were once easy to play became difficult, and difficult pieces became impossible.

At 24, he played in Carnegie Hall, which should have been the height of his professional career. Instead, he fell into the audience while walking to the front of the stage. It was time he literally, metaphorically and physically faced the music.

From there, Brooks got his bachelor’s degree, his Ph.D. and fell in love with his work, which he attributes to a line from poet Dylan Thomas, “rage, rage against the dying of the light.” If he had not stopped “raging against the dying of the light,” he would still be a frustrated French horn player who wouldn’t be speaking for the second time on the Amphitheater stage, Brooks said.

“You’ve got to stop raging,” he said. “Here’s the life lesson: to rage against change delays progress to new phases in life. Ask yourself this: Am I raging? Am I clinging to something in the past? Here’s another question: How can we deal with our change in abilities in a constructive way?”

Intelligence comes in waves during life, Brooks said.The first wave is fluid intelligence, i.e. complex problem solving, working memory and creativity. Fluid intelligence drops off in young adulthood as crystallized intelligence — characterized by accumulated knowledge, experience and wisdom — grows. It continues to grow until death, moving from the “innovation phase” to the “instruction phase” of life.

The instruction phase is when people become teachers, historians and mentors, Brooks said, to share their knowledge with younger generations who are expanding their fluid intelligence, “crowding their brains” and stocking up for the transition to crystallized intelligence.

“Life lesson: Early on, rely on fluid intelligence. … Later, rely on your crystallized intelligence, your wisdom,” he said. “Become a teacher and ask yourself, ‘What am I doing to share my wisdom?’”

Moving away from the stark, abstract theories of psychology and brain science, Brooks looked east.

In the East, he said, art removes what doesn’t enhance its essence, like a jade sculpture carved in stone; its beauty isn’t from extraneous material, rather its absence. This is a metaphor for life, Brooks said — “take away the parts of you that are not you.”

“The whole first part of your life, your success, your happiness, is all about adding stuff,” he said. “More work, more family, more experiences, more relationships, more possessions, but you get to the point where that doesn’t cut it anymore. And the reason for frustration over the second half of life has been that adding a boat doesn’t get you anything. Adding another house gets you nothing.”

To be happy in the later part of life, he said, requires chipping away at unhealthy relationships, kinships and materialism to find one’s true self — “forget your bucket list. Your bucket list should be things you’re going to take out of your bucket.”

But the journey to happiness after 50 is not a solo mission, Brooks said.
“Life lesson: Your true self is not the sum of your achievements — that’s an illusion. It’s the magnitude of the love of the people in your life,” he said. “… That is the essence of being truly alive.”

To close his lecture, Brooks played what he called the greatest artistic ending of all time — Symphony No. 9 In D Minor, the final symphony by Ludwig van Beethoven. Brooks played a clip of the ending, stopping the video before a pivotal crescendo in the music, which might be naively mistaken as the ending.

Instead, Brooks said, the score has six of these “false endings” and continues for another 12 minutes because Beethoven, like many people, didn’t know how to stop. Brooks then played the grand finale, equipped with a cacophony of instruments and vocalists.

“Not bad,” he said. “My symphony may or may not look like that, but it can still be great, and so can yours. But I need you to remember four things: don’t rage against your change, teach others, take things away that aren’t the real you and surround yourself with love. … I truly hope you find the happiness you deserve.”

After the conclusion of his lecture, Institution President Michael E. Hill opened the Q-and-A by asking, “You’ve given us a prescription for the beginning, you’ve given us a prescription for the end, what
do you do in the middle?”

“Hold on,” Brooks joked. “Try to find Carlos a job. My talk next year will be on the middle.”

For their final performances, Chautauqua Opera Company Young Artists will explore the Week Six theme, “The Changing Nature of Work.”

The Opera Pops Concert at 8:15 p.m. Saturday, August 4, in the Amphitheater will feature songs from music theater repertoire; songs that showcase a multitude of professions, including factory workers, an immigrant worker and a waitress. The Chautauqua Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Stuart Chafetz, will provide the music for the eight Apprentice Artists.

The program features some well-known titles such as “Getting to Know You” from The King and I, “The Company War” from How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying and “Anything You Can Do” from Annie Get Your Gun. There will also be a mashup of “Heigh-ho!” and “Whistle While You Work” from “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.”

Some selections might be new to the audience, including “He Plays the Violin” from 1776, “Ooh! My Feet!” from The Most Happy Fella and “Children of the Wind” from Rags.

The Young Artists prepared this repertoire earlier in the week with teachers Andy Gale, Shane Schag and Teddy Kern. The program is centered around music well-known in America, which should be enjoyable for the audience, Schag said.

“Maybe they’ll sing along, which is fabulous,” Schag said.

Though the pieces being performed will be familiar to most people in the audience, the majority of opera singers do not get the opportunity to learn songs from musical theater, said Carol Rausch, music administrator and chorus master for Chautauqua Opera.

“Some of this repertoire, even though (the songs are) classics, our young singers may have never done it before, so they’re getting to do it,” Rausch said. “But the audience will absolutely love it. I think they’ll really enjoy it.”

Musical theater works, in particular, put the text before the voice, Gale said. Teaching the Young Artists how to connect with the text will help them connect better with opera roles as well.

Gale said performing with an orchestra adds to the experience of listening to these American staples. Most people might know the piano versions of some of these songs, but being exposed to the full orchestration enhances the lyricism of the work. Chautauqua Opera’s Young Artist Program is unlike any other because it provides the opportunity to perform with an orchestra, Gale said.

“Who wouldn’t have the dream to sing a wonderful song with an orchestra? It’s sublime,” Gale said. “I get chills just thinking about it.”

“Some of this repertoire, even though (the songs are) classics, our young singers may have never done it before, so they’re getting to do it,” Rausch said. “But the audience will absolutely love it. I think they’ll really enjoy it.”

Musical theater works, in particular, put the text before the voice, Gale said. Teaching the Young Artists how to connect with the text will help them connect better with opera roles, as well.

Gale said performing with an orchestra adds to the experience of listening to these American staples. Most people might know the piano versions of some of these songs, but being exposed to the full orchestration enhances the lyricism of the work. Chautauqua Opera’s Young Artist Program is unlike any other because it provides the opportunity to perform with an orchestra, Gale said.

“Who wouldn’t have the dream to sing a wonderful song with an orchestra? It’s sublime,” Gale said. “I get chills just thinking about it.”

So far, the Chautauqua Symphony Orchestra’s season has been a tour of Europe, with scenes from Shostakovich in western Russia, Beethoven in Vienna and, most recently, Elgar in England. There’s been a notable absence: Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel’s French Impressionism.

At 8:15 p.m. Thursday, Aug. 2, in the Amphitheater, Music Director Rossen Milanov and the CSO will pay the Frenchmen their due with an all-French program, featuring Bizet’s L’arlésienne Suite No. 1, Debussy’s Prélude à l’après midi d’un faune (Afternoon of a Faun) and Ravel’s Shéhérazade and Daphnis et Chloé Suite No. 2.

French music from this period, according to Milanov, constitutes a unique contribution to the Western classical music canon. These composers, he said —  especially Debussy — shattered dominant compositional practices and forged a new musical language.

“Normally, composers would fill in shapes or bottles that we call musical forms with whatever musical liquid that they had created,” Milanov said. “But here, it seems like Debussy was not really concerned with sticking to any particular form; he just allowed the music to breathe and to shape itself in a very natural way that was never really heard up to that point.”

For Milanov, this concert will be one of the highlights of the season.

“I have always had a very strong affinity to musical color and virtuosic orchestration.Certainly in the case of Ravel and Debussy, we have two of the perfect examples of orchestration. They really showcase the orchestra in a completely different light.”

-Rossen Milanov, Music director, Chautauqua Symphony Orchestra

This concert will be a distinct contrast to the sounds of the Beethoven Festival that concluded Week Five, according to Milanov.

German music, he said, could be represented visually by primary colors that would not mix with one another too much —  distinct ideas and sections, without much blurring of the lines. But in French music, Milanov said, the combinations of musical instruments and timbres tend to be more colorful, shimmering and fluid.

The Grammy Award-winning mezzo-soprano Sasha Cooke will join the CSO for a performance of Ravel’s song cycle Shéhérazade. This will not be her first time with French songs in the Amphitheater; in her 2015 Chautauqua debut, when she sang Chausson’s Poème de l’amour et de la mer, op. 19, she was praised by critic Donald Rosenberg for her “lustrous, vividly focused voice” and “nuanced shading and facial expressions.”

Milanov said that this piece is fairly popular in Europe, but is rarely performed in the United States. He programmed the piece for its “delicious orchestration” and “beautiful text,” originally a poem by Tristan Klingsor (printed in full in the Symphony Notes).

“The way the song line is interwoven with the accompaniment is something which you normally don’t see done with that level of sophistication in a song cycle for voice and orchestra,” Milanov said. “It’s incredibly sensuous and very suggestive, but at the same time both beautiful and inspiring.”

Due to rapid advancements in technology, Maggie Jackson knows the art of asking for directions is dying. However, she still believes it is worth asking because the benefits of face-to-face interaction — even with those who disagree — are endless.

At 2 p.m. Tuesday, July 31, in the Hall of Philosophy, Jackson, a journalist and author of Distracted, gave her lecture, “Outside the Walls of Our Perspective: How Tolerance Sets Us Free,” as part of Week Six’s interfaith theme, “A Spirituality of Work.”

“The moment when I am asking (for directions), I am placing myself in the hands of a stranger, I am trusting their take on the world, and they too gain by offering the gift of their knowledge and by interacting with someone who, for a little while, sees the world with very fresh eyes,” Jackson said. “You might say that what is really going on here is the gift of a second chance. New connections are made, new perspectives are constructed before two people head off in new directions.”

According to Jackson, only a quarter of Americans talk regularly to people with opposing political views, and social circles are shrinking. She said that applies to both core networks: the intimates or family and friends we talk about important matters with, and larger networks or one’s “weaker ties.”

“We are essentially talking to the mirror,” she said. “After all, it is easier, quicker, smoother to keep behind the walls of our perspective and affirm the rightness of our tribe. As a result, common ground shrinks, science tells us, and differences in perspectives widen.”

Jackson said staying behind these walls leads to “clashing realities” among different groups of people.

“Interactions with others, when they do occur, seem to be chances to do battle with an online comment, a dinner party rebuttal or a street confrontation and then retreat, retreat, retreat,” she said.

Jackson paraphrased the novelist Richard Wright and said, “We are hugging the easy way of damning all we do not understand.” She posed three questions to the audience: How can we? How can we start getting along together? How can we rediscover the humanity of those most different from us?

Answering Wright’s questions is where Jackson said many people tend to “give up the fight.”

“Here is where some might say ‘get real,’ ” she said. “Democracy is under threat; this is an age of anxiety and anger. Sixty percent of Americas call this the lowest point in U.S. history in memory, across generations. Some might say we need to ‘take our country back’ and that ‘the time for compromise has passed.’ ”

Jackson referred back to a moment in history when a metaphorical “green shoot of hope sprouted in a desert of hate.”

Durham, North Carolina, was one of the last towns in the country to formally desegregate its schools in 1970. When a federal court-ordered ultimatum came down that the schools must be integrated, school administration set up a 10-day series of town hall meetings to prepare for the changes to come.

Two co-chairs were named: Ann Atwater and C.P. Ellis. Along with being co-chairs, the two also happened to be mortal enemies.

Atwater was an eighth-grade drop out, a sharecropper’s daughter and a tireless advocate for Durham’s poor, black population. Ellis was a gas station owner and the local chief of the KKK in Durham, the most active Klan chapter in the country, Jackson said.

“Atwater and Ellis knew one another well,” Jackson said. “They had met on many battlegrounds such as marches, boycotts and city council meetings.”

In the lead up to the town meetings to discuss desegregation, Atwater and Ellis refused to speak to or even look at one another, Jackson said. However, after the first meeting, Ellis called Atwater and proposed that they set aside their differences for the sake of their children.

After finding common ground stemming from their shared roles as parents, Jackson said the effect of Ellis’ call on the second meeting changed their relationship entirely.

“Both (of their) kids had been taunted and bullied at their schools for what their parents were doing,” Jackson said.

Although their rivalry could have ended there, Jackson said Ellis continued to retreat to the “comfort of his assumptions” and still pushed back on Atwater’s principles of belief.

In planning for one of the last nights of the meetings, Atwater invited a celebratory gospel choir, and Ellis retaliated by demanding he be able to set up a exhibit to display KKK, Nazi and white supremacist paraphernalia.

To everyone’s surprise, Atwater stood up for him, Jackson said.

That night of the final meeting as he sat in the classroom with his exhibit, a group of angry black teenagers headed his way.

“The city was tense; the time was right for a riot,” Jackson said. “They headed to the classroom, and Ann Atwater stood and blocked their way. She said ‘If you want to know where a person is coming from, you have got to see what makes him think what he thinks. Step closer. Take a look. What is on the other side of the divide? What are we failing to see?’ ”

According to Jackson, Atwater countered Ellis’ gesture of contempt with “the gift of deep regard.”

“She answered his retreat by stepping forward and standing up for her enemy, calling on all around her to see the world from his point of view,” Jackson said. “This perspective-taking was a folk wisdom that is now being understood scientifically as one of the most powerful antidotes to prejudice that we have. Perspective-taking is the cognitive side to empathy. It is reaching out for fuller understanding of another. By taking one another’s perspective, we begin to flesh out the stereotype. We look past the labels.”

Jackson said by taking a new perspective, Atwater and Ellis called on the people around them to probe opposing views, not to condone or destroy them and to cultivate something Jackson called miraculous: the gift of another chance.

“In one masterful moment in 1971, Ann Atwater gave both herself and C.P. Ellis a new beginning that neither opposed,” she said.

After the meetings, Ellis left the KKK and was labeled a pariah in his KKK chapter. He went on to help lead a mostly black union at Duke University. Although Atwater was accused by some in her community of “selling out” by working with Ellis, she became one of the city’s greatest activists.

“Each learned how to stand up for what they believed was right, while adjusting what right might be,” Jackson said. “Step closer, imagine (a different) point of view and this thoughtful regard sets people up for mutual discovery. This is how tolerance can be freeing.”

Jackson believes the hope for tolerance displayed through this unlikely friendship represents the importance of both the “science of prejudice and the lessons the past can teach us.”

“Division breeds hatred, quickly and easily,” Jackson said. “While seeing the other up close, taking on another’s perspective, engaging with others despite inevitable discourse, all of this opens and then changes minds.”