How Daryl Davis Came to Convince KKK Members to Leave | Joe Rogan

I read your story. I saw a thing about you on NPR and it's crazy. You've converted how many people? 200 KKK members? You've got them to drop their robes? Right, some directly, some indirectly, yes. How did that all happen? Wow. You know, I keep running into these guys. I'm a musician by trade. Right. Blues musician, right? Rock and roll, blues, swing, jazz, my degree's in jazz, but hey, I'll play whatever you want me to play. You're paying, I'm playing. So, you know, everybody likes music. Even the KKK. So, use that to my advantage. I was playing in a bar one night in Frederick, Maryland, an all-white bar. And when I say all-white, I don't mean that blacks couldn't go in. What I mean is that blacks chose not to go in. They weren't welcome. And here I was in this bar with this country band, a friend of mine's band. I was the only black guy in the band, only black guy in the bar. And upon finishing the first set, this, I'm walking to the band table and somebody came up and put their arm around my shoulder. I turned around and see who it was. It was a white gentleman, maybe 15, 18 years older than me. And he says, yeah, yeah, I really enjoy your all's music. I said, thank you, as you just and. And he pointed at the stage and said, you know, I've seen this here band before, but I've never seen you before. Where'd you come from? And I explained, yeah, you know, they told me they played here before. But this is my first time in this place. I just joined the band and he said, well, man, I really like your piano playing. This is the first time I ever heard a black man play piano like Jerry Lee Lewis. And I wasn't, um, I wasn't offended, but I was rather surprised because, as I said, you know, this guy's like maybe 15 years older than me. And he didn't he did not know the black origin of Jerry Lee Lewis, the style of piano playing. I explained it to him. I got it from the same place Jerry Lee did from black blues and boogie-woogie piano players, where the guy was incredulous. Oh, no, no, no. Jerry Lee invented that. I never heard no black man play like that. So for you something, OK, well, this guy never heard of Little Richard or Fast Domino. And I said, look, man, I know Jerry Lee Lewis. He's a friend of mine. He's told me himself we learned how to play. The guy did not buy that. I need Jerry Lee. He didn't buy that Jerry Lee learned anything from black people. But he was so fascinated that he wanted to buy me a drink. I thought I got novelty to him. So when back to his table, I had a cranberry juice. And then he announces, this is the first time I ever sat down, had a drink with a black man. And now I'm I'm the one who's incredulous. Like, how can that be? You know, I've sat down with thousands of white people. Anybody else had a meal, a beverage, a conversation. How is it this guy had never done that? And in a suddenly I asked him, I said, why? He didn't answer me at first. He stared down at the tabletop and I asked him again. And his buddy sitting next to him elbowed him in the side and said, tell him, tell him, tell him. I said, tell me, I'm trying to figure out what is this mystery. He looks at me just as planned his day. And he says, I'm a member of the Ku Klux Klan. Well, I burst out laughing, you know, because it was getting weirder by the second half. Yeah. And I knew a lot about the Klan. I'd been studying racism since I was a 10 year old kid because of an incident that happened to me back then. And I bought both on black supremacy, white supremacy, the KKK, the Nazis, the neo-Nazis, tried to try to understand this mentality. And I knew a Klansman would not come up and just throw his arm around some black guy's shoulder and praises talent and want to hang out with him and buy him a drink. So this guy is jerking me around. So I'm laughing and he goes inside his pocket and pulls out his wallet and produces his Klan membership card. They have cards? Oh, yeah. Yeah. And he gave me his card. I looked at it and I recognized the Klan insignia, which is a red circle with a white cross and a red blood drop in the center of the cross. And I was, oh, man, this thing's for real. So I stopped laughing. It wasn't funny anymore. And I gave it back to him. And we chatted about the Klan and different things. But the dude gave me his phone number and wanted me to call him whenever I was to return to this bar so he could bring his friends, meaning Klansmen and Klanswomen, to see this black guy play like Jerry Lee. I'm not sure he called me a black guy to his friends, but I said, I'll call you. Wow. So I would call him every six weeks on a Wednesday or Thursday and say, hey, man, you know, we're down at the Silver Dollar Friday and Saturday coming out. He'd come out both nights. He'd bring Klansmen and Klanswomen and they'd come and gather around the bandstand and watch me play the piano or get out there and dance to our music. Now, you know, they didn't come in robes and hoods, right? They came in street clothes. And on the break, I would go to his table, say hello. Some of them were very curious. They'd hang out there and want to meet me and talk to me. Others would see me coming and get up and take off and go to stand some other part of the room where it's like, I just want to see you. I don't want to deal with you kind of thing. So that was fine. And I decided later on I would write a book because I'd been looking for an answer to a question that I had formed when I was 18. When I was age 10, my question was, how can you hate me when you don't even know me? And this was a result of having marched in a Cub Scout parade at the age of 10, being the only black scout in this parade. And while most people on the streets and sidewalks were cheering us, we were marching from Lexington to Concord, Massachusetts to commemorate the ride of Paul Revere. And people were waving flags and yelling and screaming, the British are coming and all of the time, except for one small pocket of people who were throwing rocks and bottles at me. And at age 10, my first thought was, oh, those people over there don't like the scouts. That's how naive I was. It wasn't until my den mother, my Cub master, my troop leader all came rushing over and huddled over me with their bodies. These were white people. And they escorted me out of the danger that I realized I was only target because nobody else was given this protection. And these were adults or these were other children? These were maybe about five people. I remember there'd be a couple of kids, maybe my age, a year older, and some adults. Adults were throwing rocks and bottles at a 10-year-old boy. That's correct. Yeah. Wow. And I kept saying to my scout leaders, I didn't do anything. I didn't do anything because now I'm trying to find out what did I do? Right. Why are they doing this to me? Right. And they kept shushing me, telling me to hurry up and move along. It'll be okay. So they never answered the question as to why this was happening. When I got home that day after this parade, my mother and father, who were not there, were putting the cure chrome and band-aids on me and asking me, how did I fall down? How did I fall down and get all scraped up? I told them I didn't fall down. I told them exactly what had happened. And for the first time in my life, my mom and dad sat me down and explained to me what racism was. At the age of 10, I had never heard the term racism. Now- What year was this? 1968. Okay. I'll tell you why. Because my dad was a U.S. foreign service. So we spent a lot of time overseas. Every two years, you go to a country, you're there for two years, come back home for a few months, and then you get reassigned to another country. So when I was overseas in elementary school, my classes were filled with kids from all over the world. Anybody who had an embassy in those countries, all those embassy kids went to the same school. My class was full of kids from Nigeria, Italy, France, Germany, Japan, Russia, you name it. If you were to open the door to my classroom and stick your head in, you would say, this looks like the United Nations of little kids. Because that's exactly what it was. And we all got along. Then I would come home after that two-year assignment, and I would be in either all black schools or all white schools. I'm sorry, all black schools or all black and white schools, meaning the still segregated or the newly integrated schools. And there was not the amount of diversity in my classroom that I had overseas. Today you walk into a classroom, you know, you can't tell where people are from all over. So literally, between 1961 and like 1968, 1970, I was living about 12 years into the future when I was living overseas. Because that multicultural scene had yet to come to this country. And when it did, of course, I was already prepared. Unfortunately, many of my peers were not. So I didn't experience racism. Had I lived here, you know, my whole life, I might have had a different perspective and not taken this path. So I was very curious about it and fascinated with it, like, how can somebody hate you when they don't even know you? It was just beyond my comprehension. And I knew something was wrong because the people who did this to me did not look any different than my little French friends, my Swedish friends, or my fellow Americans from the embassy, or for that matter, my fellow Americans right there, you know, at the school where I went, where we did the march. So I knew it wasn't a color thing. In fact, when my parents told me this, I did not believe my parents. I thought for some reason my parents are lying to me because my 10 year old brain could not process the idea that someone who had never seen me had never spoken to me knew nothing about me would want to inflict pain upon me for no other reason than the color of my skin. So I did not believe them. Well, a month and a half later, that same year in 1968, on April the 4th, Martin Luther King was assassinated. And I remember it very well. We were in Massachusetts, same place, and nearby Boston, Washington, D.C., my hometown, Chicago, Illinois, Philadelphia, Detroit, Baltimore, Richmond, L.A., all burned to the ground with violence and destruction, all in the name of this new word that I had learned called racism. And so then I realized my parents had told me the truth. This phenomenon called racism does exist. But why? I didn't understand why. Okay, so it's here, but why? And so that's when I formed that question. How can you hate me? We don't even know me. And so I've been looking for the answer to that question now for 51 years. I'm 61 years old. So after I met this Klansman show, maybe, I don't know, three or four months later, I quit that band and went back to playing rock and roll and blues and R&B. And then it dawned on me, Darryl, you know, the answer that you've been seeking since age 10 fell right into your lap. Who better to ask that question of how can you hate me when you don't even know me than to ask it of somebody who would go so far as to join an organization whose whole premise has been hating people who do not look like them and who do not believe as they believe. And this organization has been around for over 100 years. Somebody who would go that far to join the KKK should damn sure have an answer to your question. So get back in contact with that guy. And why don't you write a book? Because I had every book I still do every book written on the Klan. And they all were written by white authors, obviously, because a white author would have less fear of ramifications talking to a Klansman or interviewing them who have easier access or could join the Klan undercover. Get the story. Get out and write about it. So my book became the first book ever written by a black author on the Ku Klux Klan from the perspective of sitting down face to face. I decided I would go around the country interview Klan leaders there in Maryland, where I live, up north, down south, Midwest and west. And I said I would start right there in Maryland. So I got ahold of that guy. And I wanted him to introduce me to the Klan leader from Maryland. What was his reaction? Do you mind grabbing the microphone and just pull it a little closer to you? Okay. Perfect. What was his reaction when you called him up and said, hey, I want to know what makes you guys tick? Like, why are you doing this? Well, actually, it's a little funnier than that. I found the guy's number from the bar from the Silver Dollar Lounge. And I called it. This is like months later. And it had been disconnected. So I had to track him down. It turned out he had moved. He didn't have a phone. But I was able to get an address. And so I had no way of letting him know I'm going to come over and talk to you. So I showed up at his apartment one evening and knocked on the door. And I hadn't seen the guy in a while, right? He opens the door and sees me and goes, Daryl, what are you doing here? And he steps out into the hallway and lifts up and down the hallway to see if I brought anybody with me. And when he stepped out of his apartment, I stepped in. So he turned around. He comes back in. He goes, what's going on? Are you still playing? What's going on? I said, yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm playing. But I need to talk to you about the Klan. He says, the Klan? I said, yeah, you remember, right? He goes, well, I was. But I quit. And he went into this long dissertation as to why he quit the Klan. So long story short, I said, I want to meet the Klan leader. Did he quit the Klan because of his interaction with you? No. Actually, he lied to me. Yes, he was no longer in the Klan. But what happened was he said he quit because he didn't like their ideology. I later found out in my research that, and I got this from the guy who banished him, the leader of that particular Klan group. Banished? Yeah, yeah, that's their term. They banish you. OK.