Born in Chicago, Illinois, Davis was the son of a Department of StateForeign Service officer and moved around the world with his parents during most of his early childhood. Living in various foreign countries, including African nations, Davis grew accustomed to the casually integrated schools of foreign diplomats, where children of many nations, races, and cultures were schooled together. At the age of ten, he returned to the United States and joined what had previously been an all-white Cub Scout pack in Belmont, Massachusetts. During a local parade with his pack, he was carrying the flag when he was struck with rocks and bottles thrown from the crowd, prompting the pack leaders to form a protective ring around him. Davis did not understand the incident until he discussed it with his father. In this conversation, his father explained racism to him for the first time. The irrationality of the incident led to his curiosity about the origins and basis for racist attitudes, which would shape much of his future activity.[7][8]
Davis absorbed the style of blues musicians from the Mississippi Delta who had migrated north.[10] In 1980, he earned a bachelor of music degree from Howard University, where he was a member of the Howard University Choir and Jazz Vocal Ensemble. Davis "was mentored by legendary pianists Pinetop Perkins and Johnnie Johnson, who both claimed him as their godson and praised his ability to master a piano style that was popular long before he was born", according to his Kennedy Center profile.[3]
He was awarded "Best Traditional Blues/R&B Instrumentalist" at the 2009 Washington Area Music Awards. For several years, Davis served as artistic director of the Centrum Acoustic Blues Festival.[13]
"Davis' piano work impresses with his winning combination of technique and abandon, and his vocals are strong and assured", wrote a reviewer in Living Blues Magazine.[14]
Discography
American Roots (2000)
Alternate Routes (2008)
Greatest Hits (2011)
Activism
Davis holding up KKK robes at Blues and Rock for Humanity in November 2017
What I have come to find to be the greatest and most effective and successful weapon that we can use, known to man, to combat such adversaries as ignorance, racism, hatred, violence, is also the least expensive weapon, and the one that is the least used by Americans. That weapon is called communication.
Daryl Davis,"Klan We Talk?", TEDxCapeMay, 9 January 2018.
Davis has worked to improve race relations by seeking out, engaging in dialogue with, and befriending members of the Ku Klux Klan. In 1983, he was playing country western music in a "white" bar in Frederick, Maryland, when a patron came up to him and said it was the first time he had "heard a black man play as well as Jerry Lee Lewis". Davis explained to the man that "Jerry Lee learned to play from black blues and boogie-woogie piano players and he's a friend of mine". The white patron was skeptical and over a drink admitted he was a member of the KKK. The two became friends and eventually the man gave Davis contact information on KKK leaders.[15][16][17]
A few years later, Davis decided that he wanted to interview Klan members and write a book on the subject, to answer a "question in my head from the age of 10: 'Why do you hate me when you know nothing about me?' That question had never been answered from my youth".[18]
In meeting with the Imperial Wizard of the KKK in Maryland, Roger Kelly, Davis concealed his race before the interview.
My secretary called him, and I told her, 'do not tell Roger Kelly I'm black. Just tell him I am writing a book on the Klan'. I wanted her to call because she's white. I knew enough about the mentality of the Klan that they would never think a white woman would work for a black man. She called him and he didn't ask what color I was, so we arranged to meet at a motel.[18]
The meeting was tense. Kelly arrived at the motel with a bodyguard armed with a gun. Davis eventually became friends with Kelly[16][8] and was later invited to be Kelly's daughter's godfather.[8] When Kelly left the Klan, he gave his robe to Davis.[8]
Davis eventually went on to befriend over twenty members of the KKK,[16] and claims to have been directly responsible for between forty and sixty, and indirectly over two hundred people leaving the Klan.[19] Over the course of his activities, Davis found that Klansmen have many misconceptions about black people, stemming mostly from intense brainwashing in their youth. When they got to know him, Davis claims, it was more difficult to maintain their prejudices. He recounted his experiences in his 1998 book, Klan-destine Relationships: A Black Man's Odyssey in the Ku Klux Klan.
Klan members have often invited Davis to meetings, and they have given him their robes and hoods.[16] In 2016, Davis estimated having collected 25 or 26 robes.[20]:1h18m According to The Washington Post, among the "Knights of the Ku Klux Klan" he interviewed were Grand Klaliff Chester Doles, Grand Giant Tony LaRicci, and Grand Giant Bob White. One Klan member supposedly gave Davis a medallion stamped with the words "KKK—Member in good standing".[21]
Davis claims to be responsible for helping to dismantle the KKK in Maryland because things "fell apart" after he began making inroads with its members there.[16][22] However, since then, the KKK was rebuilt in Maryland[23] under Richard Preston, leader of the Confederate White Knights, who was arrested for firing his gun at counterprotesters at the 2017 Unite the Right rally.[24] Davis offered to post Preston's bail.[25] He later took Preston to the National Museum of African American History. Shortly thereafter, he was asked to give away the bride at Preston's wedding.[26]
"The lesson learned is: ignorance breeds fear", says Davis. "If you don't keep that fear in check, that fear will breed hatred. If you don't keep hatred in check, it will breed destruction".[21]
Chester Doles, a member of the Klan, was convinced that Davis was a spy for the Anti-Defamation League or some other Klan-buster, and some of Davis's friends have found his fascination with the Klan to be odd. "He's attracted to controversy", says Adolph Wright, an old friend and fellow musician who believes Davis is a bit eccentric. "When the crowd goes right, he goes left", Wright told the Post.[21]
Davis's father, retired senior Foreign Service officer William B. Davis, believed that his son engaged with the Klan because he needed to make sense of their hatred, to seek common ground. He remarked to The Washington Post that his son "has done something that I don't know any other black American, or white American, has done".[21]
Daryl Davis is an official advisor to the decentralized social network Minds.[28][29] He uses the platform to educate people on how to conduct civil discourse to find common ground and build tolerance.[29]
In an interview with Forbes, Davis said "…here [at Minds] you have an open forum where people are welcomed to bring their diverse ideas, even their beliefs, which people may not find popular and have civil discourse…the art of conversing with one another has been lost… This forum will allow people to come on there and be able to be transparent, to have conversation unlike some of the other platforms on the internet".[30]
Davis believes education is the best remedy for curing hate: "[If] you fix the ignorance, there's nothing to fear. If there's nothing to fear, there's nothing to hate. If there's nothing to hate, there's nothing or no one to destroy".[31]
In November 2019, Minds and Davis launched the Deradicalization Initiative to combat online extremism.[32][28] In addition to workshops, meetups, and other live events, the initiative offers educational resources and ideas for promoting tolerance.[33]
Changing Minds podcast
As part of the Deradicalization Initiative, Davis runs a podcast called Changing Minds. The show covers a wide range of topics, including politics, music, and race. Guests are equally diverse and have included notable figures such as:
The Ku Klux Klan, commonly shortened to the KKK or the Klan, is the name of several historical and current American white supremacist, far-right terrorist organizations and hate groups. Various commentators, including Fergus Bordewich, have characterized the Klan as America's first terrorist group. Their primary targets, at various times and places, have been African Americans, Jews, and Catholics.
Eldon Lee Edwards was an American Ku Klux Klan leader.
This is a partial list of notable historical figures in U.S. national politics who were members of the Ku Klux Klan before taking office. Membership of the Klan is secret. Political opponents sometimes allege that a person was a member of the Klan, or was supported at the polls by Klan members.
Thomas Robb is an American white supremacist, Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard and Christian Identity pastor. He is the National Director of the Knights Party, also known as the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, taking control of the organization since the year 1989.
Johnny Lee Clary was an American former professional wrestler, white supremacist, and later preacher. Clary served as a Ku Klux Klan leader before he became a Pentecostal Christian, traveling around the world preaching the gospel and teaching against racism and hate groups such as the Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazis, and the Aryan Nations. Clary, under the stage name Johnny Angel, also wrestled in the National Wrestling Federation (NWF) during the 1980s.
The national leader of the Ku Klux Klan is called either a Grand Wizard or an Imperial Wizard, depending on which KKK organization is being described.
Women of the Ku Klux Klan (WKKK), also known as Women's Ku Klux Klan, and Ladies of the Invisible Empire, held to many of the same political and social ideas of the KKK but functioned as a separate branch of the national organization with their own actions and ideas. While most women focused on the moral, civic, and educational agendas of the Klan, they also had considerable involvement in issues of race, class, ethnicity, gender, and religion. The women of the WKKK fought for educational and social reforms like other Progressive reformers but with extreme racism and intolerance.
The White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan is a Ku Klux Klan (KKK) organization which is active in the United States. It originated in Mississippi and Louisiana in the early 1960s under the leadership of Samuel Bowers, its first Imperial Wizard. The White Knights of Mississippi were formed in December 1963, when they separated from the Original Knights of Mississippi after the resignation of Imperial Wizard Roy Davis. Roughly 200 members of the Original Knights of Louisiana also joined the White Knights. Within a year, their membership was up to around six thousand, and they had Klaverns in over half of the counties in Mississippi. By 1967, the number of active members had declined to around four hundred. Similar to the United Klans of America (UKA), the White Knights are very secretive about their group.
Klansmen: Guardians of Liberty was a book published by the Pillar of Fire Church in 1926 by Bishop Alma Bridwell White and illustrated by Branford Clarke. She claims that the Founding Fathers of the United States were members of the Ku Klux Klan, and that Paul Revere made his legendary ride in Klan hood and robes. She said: "Jews are everywhere a separate and distinct people, living apart from the great Gentile masses ... they are not home builders or tillers of the soil." Her book, which contains many anti-Catholic themes, became popular during the United States presidential election of 1928 when Al Smith was the first Catholic presidential candidate from a major party.
The Ku Klux Klan has had a history in the U.S. state of New Jersey since the early part of the 1920s. The Klan was active in the areas of Trenton and Camden and it also had a presence in several of the state's northern counties in the 1920s. It had the most members in Monmouth County, and operated a resort in Wall Township.
Jeffery Lynn Berry was the leader of the American Knights of the Ku Klux Klan in Newville, Indiana. He was sentenced to seven years in prison on December 4, 2001, for conspiracy to commit criminal confinement with a deadly weapon. The charges stemmed from a 1999 incident in which Berry refused to allow a local reporter and a photographer to leave his home following an interview.
The Redneck Shop was a white nationalist and neo-Nazi clothing store and meeting hub in Laurens, South Carolina, which sold T-shirts, bumper stickers, and Ku Klux Klan robes, among other things.
The Canadian branch of the Ku Klux Klan was an expansion of the second Ku Klux Klan established in the United States in 1915. It operated as a fraternity, with chapters established in parts of Canada throughout the 1920s and early 1930s. The first registered provincial chapter was registered in Toronto in 1925 by two Americans and a Canadian. The organization was most successful in Saskatchewan, where it briefly influenced political activity and whose membership included a member of Parliament, Walter Davy Cowan.
Minds is an open-source and distributed social network. Users can earn cryptocurrency for using Minds, and tokens can be used to boost their posts or crowdfund other users. Minds has been described as more privacy-focused than mainstream social media networks.
The Loyal White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan is a group styled after the original Ku Klux Klan (KKK). Formed around 2012, it aims to "restore America to a White, Christian nation founded on God's word".
Accidental Courtesy: Daryl Davis, Race & America is a 2016 American documentary film directed and produced by Matthew Ornstein.
Ron Stallworth is an American retired police officer who infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan in Colorado Springs, Colorado, in the late 1970s. He was the first African-American detective in the Colorado Springs Police Department.
"Riot" is a song by American rapper and singer XXXTentacion. It was originally released on SoundCloud in May 2015, before being re-released posthumously for streaming services on June 1, 2020, amid the George Floyd protests. The re-released version is slightly shorter than the original, cutting a large portion of a speech from former Ku Klux Klan leader Jeff Berry, which was used to point out the rising danger of racism, homophobia, and antisemitism in the United States.
↑ Davis, Daryl, speaking in PBS TV Independent Lens documentary film Accidental Courtesy: Daryl Davis, Race & America, aired on PBS television network February 13, 2017, and subsequently; viewed February 18, 2017
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