How Daryl Davis Converts KKK Members

Daryl Davis is a blues musician, author, and speaker whose mission is unique and motivating. During his travels across the United States over the past three and a half decades, he has sought out members of the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacist groups and convinced them to change their ways.

According to Davis, he does not intend to convert these individuals, but rather to befriend them. Then, according to Davis, they convert themselves.

Davis claims that he has influenced approximately 200 individuals to abandon the KKK. And he begins each interaction with a straightforward query: “How can you hate me when you don’t even know me?”

This is the extraordinary story of Daryl Davis.

The Encounter That Transformed Daryl Davis's Life

Born in Chicago, Illinois on March 26, 1958, Daryl Davis became completely aware of racism at an early age.

“In 1968, when I was 10, I had a racist incident,” he explained. “I was in the Cub Scouts, and we were in a parade when people started throwing rocks and things at me.”

At first, Davis thought that the people had a problem with the Boy Scouts — not with him. He couldn’t believe that people would attack him like that without knowing him. He wondered how they could be filled with so much hate.

He carried that question with him all his life. And in 1983, at the Silver Dollar Lounge in Frederick, Maryland, Davis found himself face-to-face with racism again.

After the show, an older white man approached Davis and complimented him on his music. They got to talking and decided to share a drink.

But a couple of things about the encounter struck Davis as odd. Though the man compared Davis to Jerry Lee Lewis, he seemed dubious that Lewis had been molded by black musicians. Even more strangely, the man said that he’d never shared a drink with a black man before.

Davis asked why not and the man demurred. 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.”

As Davis remembers it, his first reaction was incredulity. “I just burst out laughing because I really did not believe him,” he said. “[Then he] produced his Klan card and handed it to me. Immediately, I stopped laughing.”

But Davis kept talking to the man. “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.

Then and there, Davis began pondering a dangerous idea. He wanted to go meet other Klansmen.

Daryl Davis did exactly that in the years that followed, an experience he later chronicled in his 1998 book Klan-destine Relationships: A Black Man's Odyssey in the Ku Klux Klan.

How A Black Man Changed Klansmen

Daryl Davis set out to meet Klansmen after his incident at the Silver Dollar Lounge. He asked the man he met at the pub — who later quit the KKK — to assist him in arranging a meeting with the Grand Dragon, Roger Kelly.

"Do not visit Roger Kelly's residence," the man said. "Roger Kelly will end your life."

Davis was adamant. Although his encounter with Kelly was uncomfortable, it marked the beginning of a lengthy discussion. Kelly eventually quit the KKK, shut down his branch, and donated his old robes to Davis, becoming the first of many Klansmen to do so.

How did Daryl Davis accomplish this? Simply put, he was attentive. And at the appropriate time, he asked soft questions.

Davis stated, "Allow people to express that viewpoint, regardless of how extreme it may be." You are challenging them. But you do not confront them in a disrespectful or violent manner. You execute it with grace and intelligence."

When one Klansman claimed that all Black people had a violence gene — and suggested Davis’s was merely “latent” — Davis wondered aloud about all the white serial killers like Ted Bundy and Jeffrey Dahmer. Could there be a “white” serial killer gene?

The man didn’t have a response. He left the KKK five months later and gave Davis his robe.

Some people, especially Black people, disagree with Davis’s methods. He acknowledges that he’s been called an “Uncle Tom” and an “oreo.” But Davis believes he’s doing important work — work with real, tangible results.

“When two enemies are talking, they’re not fighting,” Daryl Davis explained. In his words, the conversation gives him an opening to ask probing questions, to hammer at the “cement” of hateful ideas.

“I didn’t convert anybody,” he added, of the hundreds of people who hung up their Klansmen robes after talking to him. “They saw the light and converted themselves.”