Conflict Management Tips: Finding Common Ground

Finding common ground is a very useful and important skill in working with conflict. While sometimes our tendency is to think that we have nothing in common with people we are in conflict with. We tend to focus on what divides us rather than on what unites us. The following story from the 1960’s Civil Rights Movement reminds us that the power of finding common ground is possible to access in most any situation. 

In Nashville in the 60’s, college students did sit-ins and peaceful marches at lunch counters as a strategy to end segregation. Jim Lawson, an African American Christian minister and disciple of Gandhi’s was training students in non-violent resistance. 

This story is about one of the first marches in which students are walking to a lunch counter and a few young white toughs came to the end of the line and attacked Solomon Gore by knocking him down and kicking him. Another student, Bernard Lafayette, came over and tried to cover Solomon with his body.

While they were getting beat up, Lafayette recalled, Jim Lawson came over – “He didn’t rush over, as to an accident or as if to stop a beating, he walked over very calmly, as if to a long-standing appointment. Lawson’s arrival shifted the attention of the toughs from the fall Gore and Lafayette to Lawson. The thing about Jim, is that he was so self-assured, so confident, as if he were accustomed to toughs beating up fallen demonstrators every day of his life.

“The leader of the young white toughs was sporting . . . a motorcycle jacket and slick back hair, and when he saw Lawson come over, he was so enraged by his coolness that he spat at him. Lawson looked at him and asked him for a handkerchief. The man was really stunned, and he reached in his pocket and handed Lawson a handkerchief. And Lawson wiped the spit off himself as calmly as he could. Then he looked at the man’s jacket and started talking to him. Did he have a motorcycle or a hot rod car? A motorcycle was the answer. Jim asked a technical question or two and the young man started explaining what he had done to customize his bike. 

“Amazingly, these two men were now talking about the levels of horsepower in motorcycles. A few seconds earlier they had seemed like sworn enemies. By this time both Gore and Lafayette were back on their feet, the line was moving again, and Jim and the other man were still talking about the man’s motorcycle. 

“In that brief frightening moment, Jim had managed to find a subject, which they both shared and had used it in a way that made both of them more human in the eyes of the other. As they walked away, Jim waved to the man and the man remained still. Neither accepting the friendship, nor for that matter, rejecting it.”

Found in The Children, by David Halberstan