For decades, Daryl Davis has had two jobs. He’s toured the world playing blues and rock and roll on the piano. But he’s also a self-proclaimed race-relations expert — he calls himself the Rock n’ Roll Race Reconciliator. Davis takes pride in doing what some would find unthinkable: sitting down for conversations with members of the Ku Klux Klan.
Davis, who is Black, says his talks with Klan members have led to dozens of them leaving the group. He travels the country giving talks about the experience of trying to make friends with people who’ve been taught to hate him, and he’ll be at ASU tomorrow.
Davis spoke with The Show and began with one of Davis’s earliest interactions with a Klan member. It happened at a club called the Silver Dollar, when a white man approached Davis after a show and said he’d never seen a Black man play boogie-woogie on the piano.
Full conversation
DARYL DAVIS: So I guess he was not familiar with Little Richard or Fats Domino, who plays the same boogie style. So I just figured he was a little bit naive. I wasn’t really thinking the Klan.
And so when he told me that he was a Klan member, I was a little shocked and surprised. But it didn’t freak me out to the point where I hopped up and ran away or hit him or anything like that.
He saw something he’d never seen before, and it made him curious.
SAM DINGMAN: Right. It seems like it made you curious also.
DAVIS: Absolutely, yes indeed.
DINGMAN: And curiosity about what exactly, about the potential of conversations like that?
DAVIS: No, I wasn’t thinking in terms of that at that time. When I first experienced racism, I was age 10. And some people threw rocks and bottles at me and soda pop cans during a Cub Scout parade in which I was the only Black scout.
And I did not understand that. I thought the people didn’t like the scouts or something. I had no experience with that. At that age of 10, I formed a question in my mind which was: How can you hate me when you don’t even know me?
So when I sat there with this Klansman, it didn’t dawn on me right in the moment that this is a person I need to talk to. It dawned on me a few years later: The answer to your question that’s been plaguing you since the age of 10 — “How can you hate me when you don’t even know me?” — it fell right into your lap. Get back in contact with that guy.
DINGMAN: Right. Well, and of course you did then go through that process of interviewing dozens of members of the Klan, and you did write a book called “Klandestine Relationships: A Black Man’s Odyssey in the Ku Klux Klan.”
What did those conversations teach you about how they came to a place in their lives where they wanted to be a part of an organization like that?
DAVIS: Some want to belong to something. They feel that they have nobody that they can relate to. Others, they’re automatically into it because “my grandfather was in the Klan. My daddy was in the Klan. I’m in the Klan. My kids are going to be in the Klan.” You know, that kind of thing.
Or they move to an area that is like a Klan stronghold. So if you want to do business in that area, you have to assimilate. You join the local country club, the local chamber of commerce and the local KKK.
Now, there’s another avenue that gets you in there as well. Take, for example, some depressed areas, coal mining areas. Traditionally, most of your coal miners have been white. And they go there right out of high school. And their families have been working in coal mines for generations and generations, right?
And these people are not racist. They’re happy people. They’re making good money. They’re keeping their family fed and a roof over their head, paying their bills. But then some of these companies that own the coal mines, they see all these immigrants coming into the country and they know that these people will work for less than half of what they’re paying their white workers. And now these white workers are out of work.
And so the Klan sees things like this, and they will go into one of those towns — whether it’s Scranton, Pennsylvania, or Bluefield, West Virginia — and they’ll say, “You know, the Blacks have the NAACP and the Jews have the ADL, and nobody stands up for the white man but the Ku Klux Klan. Your job is not gone, but you’re gone. And why does that” — you know, racial epithet towards a Hispanic person or something — “have your job?”
Well, the guy who was never racist to begin with, he’s thinking, “Well, you know, gee, what do I have to lose? Give me an application. Sign me up.” Because the Klan tells you they will get your job back for you.
DINGMAN: Right. Yeah. I thank you for laying that all out, Daryl. And I mean, I think of the Klan as an organization founded partly on fear, fear of people who look different than white people.
What you’re describing amongst the Klan members you spoke to is a different kind of fear. It’s a fear of not belonging, a fear of losing safety and economic viability for their family, and that the Klan as an organization knows how to deploy racism in service of keeping its numbers up.
DAVIS: You know, any kind of propaganda to make people come join this organization. And I talk to these people all the time.
DINGMAN: Right. Well, so do you have a prescribed way that you approach those conversations? Is there some rubric to it in your mind, or do you just kind of take it one person at a time and treat it as a conversation with an individual?
DAVIS: Well, I have a template. Like, for example, you would say, if I asked you “Do you think we need better education for kids?” You would say yes. “Do you think we need to get drugs off the street?” You would say yes.
Well, so does this Klansman. So now you’ve got something in common with somebody in the Klan.
DINGMAN: So those are questions you might ask a hypothetical member of the Klan, like, would you agree with me that we need to do this? Would you agree with me?
DAVIS: Yes, exactly. Exactly. And then you say, well, what can we do together?
DINGMAN: So this is fascinating to me, Daryl, because I can see how that unfolds in conversation. But you have also taken this to very interesting extremes. I mean, if I’m not mistaken, you once loaned your band’s tour bus to the leader of the Klan. What was behind that?
DAVIS: He was very friendly with me. He had invited me to several of his rallies, gave me a lot of information. I interviewed him. And he lives in another county, not my county here in Maryland.
And he says, “Hey, do you know any places down there in Montgomery County that rent buses?” I said, “Why? What’s going on?” And he said that the place that used to rent him buses does not want to rent to him anymore because he takes these buses to Klan rallies with Klan.
And I said, “Well, why don’t you just take my bus?” He says, “I don’t know what to say.” I said, “Just say yes, you’ll take it and you’ll have no problem.” He goes, “OK, well, how much do you want for it?” I said, “I don’t want anything for it. Just put some gas in there, and we’ll call it a day.” And so he said OK.
And after the march was over, I invited them all to come back to my house. I had about 15 of them here in my living room. You know, had a good time, sat around talking and stuff. But interestingly, the leader, that was one of the things that also, a little while later, also contributed to his decision to quit. Because he began to see the light.
DINGMAN: Right. And so am I right, Daryl, that your thought in moments like that is, the more I can, in these interactions, just present myself as — in this case, it sounds like something like a friend, you know?
DAVIS: Well, let’s look at it like this, OK? I don’t subscribe to Klan ideology, and I’m not bending over, kissing his rear end or anything like that.
DINGMAN: Sure.
DAVIS: But my doing that for him put a whole different perspective in his mind. You know, “This Black guy lent me a bus.” And that caused a cognitive dissonance with him.
DINGMAN: And do you ever get pushback about this approach? Because I know you must know this, there’s a lot of people who feel like the proper way to deal with hate groups and hateful people is to not engage, to fight fire with fire, so to speak.
DAVIS: You know, there are those who understand what I’m doing and support me, and there are those who, they don’t get it at all. I’m a sellout, I’m an Uncle Tom, I’m an Oreo, I’m this, that, and the other.
And again, that pushback is fear. Because listen, this behavior, you’re not born with this behavior. Nobody’s born hating somebody. That’s acquired, it’s learned. And so what can be learned can be unlearned.
DINGMAN: Well, I have been speaking with Daryl Davis, who is an internationally renowned touring musician and also a speaker on the issues we’ve been talking about today. He’s also the author of the new book, “The Klan Whisperer,” one of several books he’s written about this, and he will be at ASU on Thursday, March 19.
Daryl, thank you for this conversation.
DAVIS: Thank you, Sam.
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