Tonight at 7 p.m., the Ames Public Library will host a community discussion entitled “Reconciliations: The Self and Others.” This will be the sixth discussion in the ongoing series, “Divided Selves, United States,” sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities.

“In this particular program coming up, our emphasis is on the human capacity to transcend the conflicts of diversity,” said Nancy Bevin, NEH program director and humanities consultant at Ames Public Library.

Tonight’s program covers two themes. The first theme is reconciliation. “It is at this point that we wanted to inject hope, because sometimes looking at the issues related to pluralism and identity can become demoralizing, and you see all of the conflicts, and sometimes those conflicts seem overwhelming,” Bevin said.

The first two speakers of the evening will be Michael and Julie Weisser. The Weissers had never experienced anti-Semitism as directly as when they moved to Lincoln, Neb., in 1991. In Lincoln they were threatened and harassed by the Ku Klux Klan Grand Dragon, Larry Trapp. The Weissers were terrified.

“They had children at home, and part of the terror was knowing that this man was on their property, on their porch, sending things in the mail in envelopes that they had no way of knowing whether these envelopes would explode,” Bevin said, “And they were getting on top of this phone calls any time — day or night.”

“Michael was able to engage him in conversation, and did as he and Julie had planned — that was to offer a kindness,” Bevin said.

As the Weissers tried to reach out to Trapp, it came out that he was confined to a wheelchair. The Weissers decided to try to make a positive, loving contribution to Trapp’s life. They began to answer his threatening phone calls by leaving caring messages on Trapp’s answering machine.

Eventually, Trapp picked up his phone when they called. Weisser told Trapp that he knew he was confined to a wheelchair and offered to bring him groceries. This was the opportunity that the Weissers had been waiting for.

“That act of kindness, in relation to this man’s personal situation, was what opened the door,” Bevin said. “They ended up bringing Larry Trapp into their home. It turned out that he was terminally ill.

“[They] cared for him in the last year of his life and shortly before his death he converted to Judaism, he renounced his racism publicly and made public apologies to persons that he had wounded with hate speech and threats,” Bevin said. Trapp also became a member of the NAACP before his death.

“So it is a remarkable story of persons being able to transcend conflict based on cultural and ethnic,” Bevin said.

The story of Trapp’s conversion is documented in the book, Not by the Sword, by Kathryn Watterson. A film version of this book is to be released soon.

The second theme of the evening will be hate speech issues in the context of first amendment rights. This part of the evening’s discussion will be given by Cryss Farley, director of the Iowa Civil Liberties Union.

The panel will be held in the Ames Public Library Auditorium, located at 515 Douglas Ave.

Admission to the discussion is free, and everyone is welcome.

For more information, call 233-4500.