![]() But you don’t challenge them rudely or violently. “Allow them to air that point of view, regardless of how extreme it may be,” Davis said. And when the time was right, he asked gentle questions. How did Daryl Davis do it? Simply put, he listened. Matt McClain/The Washington Post via Getty Images Daryl Davis with the robe of a former KKK member in 2017. In the years that followed, Daryl Davis did exactly that, an experience he later detailed in his 1998 book Klan-destine Relationships: A Black Man’s Odyssey in the Ku Klux Klan. ![]() Then and there, Davis began pondering a dangerous idea. “The fact that a Klansman and black person could sit down at the same table and enjoy the same music, that was a seed planted,” Davis recalled. Immediately, I stopped laughing.”īut Davis kept talking to the man. “ produced his Klan card and handed it to me. “I just burst out laughing because I really did not believe him,” he said. But after the man’s friend insisted, the stranger looked Davis in the face and said, “I’m a member of the Ku Klux Klan.”Īs Davis remembers it, his first reaction was incredulity. Even more strangely, the man said that he’d never shared a drink with a Black man before.ĭavis asked why not and the man demurred. Though the man compared Davis to Jerry Lee Lewis, he seem dubious that Lewis had been molded by Black musicians. They got to talking and decided to share a drink.īut a couple of things about the encounter struck Davis as odd. Wikimedia Commons In addition to his work befriending KKK members, Daryl Davis is a talented blues musician.Īfter the show, an older white man approached Davis and complimented him on his music. “I was in the Cub Scouts and we were in a parade when people started throwing rocks and things at me.” ![]() “In 1968, when I was the age of 10, I had a racist incident,” he explained. The Encounter That Changed Daryl Davis’s Lifeīorn on March 26, 1958, in Chicago, Illinois, Daryl Davis became keenly aware of racism starting at a young age. This is the incredible story of Daryl Davis. And he starts each encounter with a simple question: “How can you hate me when you don’t even know me?” To date, Davis says that he’s convinced some 200 people to leave the KKK. Then, Davis says, they convert themselves. While traveling throughout the United States over the course of the last three-plus decades, he’s sought out members of the Ku Klux Klan as well as other white supremacist organizations - and gotten them to change their ways.īut as Davis tells it, he doesn’t set out to convert these people, but instead to befriend them. Daryl Davis For more than three decades, Daryl Davis has dedicated much of his life to converting members of the Ku Klux Klan.ĭaryl Davis is a blues musician, author, and lecturer with an unusual and inspiring mission. ![]()
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