Kelly meets Daryl Davis, a noted musician who is even more widely known for his extraordinary journey seeking out conversations with members of the Ku Klux Klan – a feat made more astonishing when you learn that Daryl is a black man. In this conversation, we learn why Daryl has made this work his life pursuit. 

I can only imagine the reaction you got from family and friends when you told them you were going to meet with members of the Ku Klux Klan. 

“When I told people I’m going to, you know, go look up some Klan people and sit down and talk with them and go to their rallies, you can imagine the reactions I got from both black and white people and anybody else I talked to. I mean, even close personal friends who thought highly of me – some of them even shunned me – 30 years ago, like ‘Daryl’s falling off his rocker or something.’ But now, 30 years later, they’re calling me, ‘Darrell, you know these people, what’s going on with them? Tell me what is going on with them?’ And I say, if you had listened to me 30 years ago, you’d know what’s going on with them.” 

A theme that comes up in the book is how many of these Klan members are fine shaking your hand, but you contrast this with something you saw in South Africa as a kid where your dad was stationed. 

“We had a party at our home, and I was just a little kid, seven years old. And some of the American embassy people had come and then this guy was new. He had just arrived in the country not too long ago and he was there and some Ethiopian dignitaries were there. And I was just sitting around like I normally do, just observing people. And I saw him shake hands with his colleagues and all that. And when an Ethiopian gentleman put his hand out to shake his hand, he was a little hesitant. But he shook the hand and then he looked around and when nobody was looking, except he didn’t notice me, because I’m just some little kid sitting in the corner, he took his hand and he wiped it on the back of his pants. And I didn’t think anything of it in terms of black and white. I just thought, this is odd because we played that game in school as kids. We called it cooties.” 

I wondered, as a musician, does your work within a band ever reflect the anti-racism work that you are doing in reaching out to members of a hate group? 

“When I’m playing with somebody else, I’m a side man. I do whatever their band leader needs me to do. In my band, or if somebody hires me to lead their band, I’m the band leader. And my job is to foster harmony on my stage between all the voices, whether they’re the vocal voices or the instrumental voices, piano, bass, drums, guitar, saxophone, know, whatever’s on stage. I want harmony. The only time I want dissonance is when I intentionally inject it into the music for effect, right? Because if dissonance happens randomly, you know, in a piece, that’s not music, that’s noise. Somebody hit a bad note, went out of tune, you know, whatever. So, you know, you want control dissonance for effect. So naturally, when I step off the stage and the gig is over and the curtain goes down and now I’m walking around in society, I want harmony around me. I don’t want dissonance. So, I’m trying to foster harmony both on the stage in my professional life and off the stage in my social life. That’s all. Simple as that.” 

Photo Credit: Michael Colella