After having his secretary set up a meeting with Kelly under the pretense of including him in a book about the KKK, Davis knew he was entering new territory. One of Davis’s first and most fabled encounters was with Grand Dragon Robert Kelly, who eventually became the Imperial Wizard of Maryland. I was curious about racism ever since, but even still, nobody can seem to answer the question.” What does ‘just like that’ mean? Where does that come from? You’re not born ‘just like that. “The answer was always, ‘there’s some people who are just like that,’” Davis adds. I didn’t understand why people would do that and I formed a question: ‘How can you hate me when you don’t even know me?’” “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,” Davis recalls with conviction, his voice sonorous and unwavering. So why would a successful musician like Davis willingly meet with high-ranking KKK members in his spare time? The journey to that answer begins long before his Silver Dollar Klan encounter in 1983. “Our ideology needs to catch up to our technology,” Davis said recently as a guest on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast. In 2018, 153 years later, a record high of more than 1,000 hate groups – including the KKK – were documented as active in the United States by the Southern Poverty Law Center civil rights group. Having seen several iterations, what remains consistent across all chapters of the group is its hate toward people of color, sometimes resulting in assault and murder.
The Ku Klux Klan was formed in 1865 by a group of Confederate soldiers at the end of the American civil war in an attempt to keep newly emancipated slaves suppressed. Over the past 30 years, Davis has become well-versed in the organization’s ethos and hierarchy which led to him to becoming the first black man to write a book about the KKK entitled Klan-destine Relationships: A Black Man’s Odyssey in the Ku Klux Klan, which was published in 1998.
While some say Davis converted these men, he prefers to say that they converted themselves, and that he merely provided the impetus for them to do so. In many cases, these civil dialogues led them to quitting the organization because they no longer believed in its tenets.ĭaryl Davis and a KKK member. Some of these Klansmen became close friends of Davis’s – the aforementioned Silver Dollar patron included – their long conversations untangling a knot of hate that had coiled for decades. As his music career continued to flourish, Davis also became enmeshed in quite arguably the world’s strangest side hustle – meeting with KKK members of various ranks and attending so-called cross lighting rallies. What began as a hobby gradually transformed into a calling. It is an important anecdote as it marks a catalytic moment in which Davis’s trajectory pivoted from working musician to race relations crusader. This is a story Davis shares on lecture stages and in classrooms – both nationally and globally. He didn’t answer at first but eventually admitted that he was a member of the Ku Klux Klan.” Then he said, ‘You know, this is the first time I ever sat down and had a drink with a black person.’ I was instantly curious and thought, ‘What’s going on here?’ So I asked him why. “I don’t drink so I had a glass of cranberry juice and then he took his glass and cheered me. “So he asks me to join him for a drink,” he continues. Then I told him that Jerry Lewis is a good friend of mine and well, he didn’t believe that either, but he was fascinated.”
“I explained to this older white guy that Jerry Lee Lewis was influenced by the same black boogie-woogie and blues piano players as I was,” Davis says with a chuckle. More curious than offended, Davis used this encounter as an opportunity for friendly discourse rather than outrage.
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