How Do You Talk a Klansman out of the Klan? Ask Daryl Davis.

Conversations with Coleman

Daryl Davis, a blues musician and author of 'Clandestine Relationships,' shares his decades-long journey of engaging with Ku Klux Klan members and white

Key takeaways

• Empathy and personal connection are more effective than argumentation in changing deeply held beliefs.
• Racism often stems from ignorance and fear rather than inherent malice, making dialogue possible even with extremists.

Main topics

• Personal experiences with racism in childhood
• The effectiveness of friendship over debate in de-radicalization

Notable quotes

"I didn't know why people were throwing things. I thought they didn't like the scouts."

Conclusion

Daryl Davis demonstrates that even in the face of extreme hatred, genuine

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) Welcome to another episode of Conversations with Coleman. My guest today is Daryl Davis. Daryl is a professional blues musician who has performed with many legends, including Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis, and B.B. King. He is more known, however, for spending decades engaging and deprogramming members of the Ku Klux Klan, work he recounts in his book, Clandestine Relationships, and the documentary, Accidental Courtesy. Ultimately, Daryl has gotten over 200 avowed white supremacists to renounce their membership in hate groups. In this episode, I ask Daryl how he got into befriending Klan members. We talk about how to have difficult conversations with people you disagree with, and who better to ask than a guy who talks to KKK members. We talk about what we should teach our children about racism, and much more. So without further ado, Daryl Davis. Speaker 1 (1:01) This episode is brought to you by What Could Go Right, a podcast that pushes back on the doom and gloom in the news to ask a simple question. What if we're actually making more progress than we think? Each episode, host Zachary Karabell sits down with leading thinkers, policymakers, scientists, and cultural voices to dig into the biggest issues of our time. Episodes cover conversations like, can we achieve super abundance without AI doom? or why AI and drones won't bring the apocalypse. Listen to What Could Go Right on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes drop every Wednesday. Speaker 3 (1:39) Okay, Darrell Davis, thanks so much for coming on my show. Thank you, Coleman. Appreciate it. Good to see you again. Speaker 1 (1:44) Yeah, it's been a couple of years since we did that event with Cornell West in New York City, which was really fun. And I recently had Cornell on my podcast. Now I got you on. You're one of my most requested guests of all time for good reason. You're one of the most inspiring individuals that I have heard of and have been lucky enough to meet. Speaker 1 (2:08) We'll get into all the reasons why my guests or my audience is constantly requesting you. But one is just to say that you're a paragon of how to have conversations with people you disagree with. You're the ultimate case study in how to do that. And that is probably the number one question and concern I get from people in my audience is how do I have people, how do I have conversations? with people in my life who I disagree with strongly. This is the million dollar question. Many people just can't seem to figure it out. And you've done much more than that in your life. You've done the hardest version of that, and we'll get there. But first, I want to know a little bit about your background. I mean, you've told the story of growing up in Chicago and then moving to New England and being a Boy Scout and your first experience with racism. But it's such a compelling story. I think everyone should hear it, even if they've heard it before. So can you tell me that story and how it... how it framed your kind of second career after being a musician? Sure, I'd be glad Speaker 3 (3:30) to. Well, it wasn't quite a direct move from Chicago to New England, but I was born in Chicago. My father, my parents are from Virginia, and my father became one of the first Black Secret Service agents in this country. He wanted to be an FBI agent, but J. Edgar Hoover, who was the head of the FBI, was a racist, a chauvinist, and many other things. And he had no Blacks and no women in the FBI and did not want any. So my father went to the Secret Service. And Harry Anslinger was the head of the Secret Service at the time. He also had no Black people. But he hired five Black guys on the same day. And my dad was one of those. So his first assignment was in Chicago. And that's where I was conceived and born. And we were there just for a few years. And then my dad... Speaker 3 (4:21) transferred from the Secret Service to the Foreign Service, U.S. State Department. And we began traveling. I began traveling around the world at the age of three. And how it works is you get assigned to a country for two years, and then you return home here to the States. You're here for perhaps a few months in the summer, or if you requested, a year. And then you're back overseas to another foreign country for two years. So back and forth, back and forth were the formative years of my life. I was born in 1958, and we began traveling in 1961 at my age of three. So my first introduction to school, Coleman, was overseas. And I did kindergarten, first grade, third grade, fifth grade, seventh grade, all in different schools in different countries. And the unique thing about that, consider this. you know, I'm talking about like elementary school, grade school at the time, you know, kindergarten through seventh grade. These were... were classes overseas in the 1960s. And my classes, my classmates were from all over the world because anybody who had their embassy stationed where we had our U.S. embassy, all of their kids went to the same school. So this little girl sitting right here might have been from Czechoslovakia, this kid from Japan, that kid in front of me from Nigeria, kid behind me from Russia. That was my norm. That Speaker 1 (5:48) was my Speaker 3 (5:48) baseline for what school was supposed to be. But Every time I'd come home back here in my own country after my dad's assignment, I would be in either all black schools or black and white schools, meaning the still segregated or the newly integrated. And despite the fact that desegregation was passed by our U.S. Supreme Court in 1954, which is four years before I was born, schools did not integrate overnight. It took years. in some cases, decades. And in some cases, even today, in 2026, in some parts of our country, we're still struggling with integration. So one of the times I came home was 1968. I was age 10 in the fourth grade. And we landed in a town called Belmont, Massachusetts. We first started in Boston. And the schools there were so bad that my dad said, no, no, no, we can't have Daryl in school here. You know, we got to put him in a better school. So we went out to the suburb of Boston, about eight miles outside of Belmont, about eight miles outside of Boston. The school that I attended was newly integrated. That was their first year of having integration. There were two black kids in the entire school, myself in fourth grade and a little girl in second grade. So consequently, all of my friends were white, you know, fourth and fifth graders. I wasn't really playing with second graders when I was in fourth grade. Speaker 3 (7:16) My male friends, several of them were members of the Cub Scouts, and they invited me to join, which I did. I was the only Black Scout anywhere in the area. We had a parade right next door from Lexington to Concord, Massachusetts, to commemorate the ride of Paul Revere. and I'm the only Black participant. People are waving and cheering and smiling and yelling, the British are coming, and all that kind of thing, until we reached a certain point in the parade route when suddenly, pow, I'm getting hit with soda pop bottles, small rocks, soda pop cans, small debris from the street by just a small group of spectators, perhaps four or five people. It was coming from my right side. I turned to see what was happening, and I saw, What I remember, a couple of kids, maybe a year or two older than me, I didn't know them, you know, I was not from that area, and a couple of adults who were throwing things. My first inclination, having never experienced anything like that, was, oh, these people over here, they don't like the scouts. That's how naive I was, because I'd never experienced anything like that. It wasn't until my den mother, my cub master, my troop leader all came running, and these were all white people, and covered me with their bodies and quickly escorted me out of the danger that I realized no other scout was getting this special protection. Now I'm wondering, what had I done? You know, why was I the target of this? And I kept asking them, and they kept shushing me and rushing me along, telling me to keep moving, keep moving, everything would be okay. I kept moving. Fortunately, the people doing this did not follow us. But by the end of the parade, I had no answers, and I still didn't know. You know, and I was creating answers in my mind. Maybe it's because I'm the new kid on the block. I don't live around here. You know, all kinds of stuff. Everything but the right reason. Because I had no precedent for this behavior. So when I went home at the end of the parade, my mom and dad, who were not in attendance, were asking me, you know, how did you fall down and get all scraped up? And they're putting Band-Aids on me and cleaning me up. And I told them what happened. I told them I didn't fall down. I told them exactly what happened. And for the first time in my life, my mom and dad. sat me down and explained to me what racism was. Believe it or not, at the age of 10, I had never heard the word racism. It was not something in my vocabulary. It was not something in my world. I grew up in a United Nations of little kids because that's what my classrooms looked like, except when I came back home. Either they were all Black kids or now Black and white kids. Speaker 3 (10:05) My 10-year-old brain could not process the idea that my parents were telling me that somebody who had never laid eyes on me, never spoken to me, knew nothing about me, would want to inflict pain upon me for no other reason than this, the color of my skin. That made no sense. My parents were 100 % wrong. They assured me that they were right. To prove to them that they were wrong and I was right, I pointed out the fact that my friends at school. Looked just like the people on the sidewalk who were doing this my fellow scouts looked just like those people My parents assured me that not everybody Who may look similar? Behaved similar and I still could not process it. Well on April 4th of that year Martin Luther King was assassinated 1968 I remembered very well every major city including nearby Boston to where we lived in Burned to the ground with violence and destruction all in the name of this new word I had just learned called racism. So now I accepted. My parents had told me the truth. It's something I never knew about. So I accepted that this phenomenon existed, but I didn't know why. And I formed a question in my mind at that age, which was, how can you hate me when you don't even know me? And for the rest of my life, I have been looking for the answer to that question. And that's how the journey began. So now, fast forward, we went back overseas to another country in the fall after completing fourth grade. But every time I'd come home, I would have an incident. One time I'm home, I'm age 15, I'm in the 10th grade. And we had a class called the POTC, which stood for Problems of the 20th Century. Had a great teacher. He would bring in controversial speakers. This is 1974. You could never do this today. I wish we could do this today. But unfortunately, political correctness, which I don't agree with, has taken over. Anyway, he would bring in people to talk about abortion or different controversial topics. And one day he brought in the head of the American Nazi Party. The American Nazi Party was formed about 35 minutes from where I'm sitting right now. I'm in Silver Spring, Maryland. It was formed in a town called Arlington, Virginia, which is a suburb of Washington, D.C. I'm 15 minutes from D.C., right across the Potomac River. It was formed by a fellow named George Lincoln Rockwell. And Rockwell was murdered by one of his own Nazi members. And his right-hand guy, a guy named Matt Cole, took over the organization. So on this day in 1974, Matt Cole came to my class. And he stood at the top of the class espousing the views of white supremacy. I was 15. And I'm just sitting there looking at this guy like, what on earth is this man talking about? I'd never heard an adult talk like that. And there was another Black kid in the class. There were more Black kids in the school, but another one in my class. Matt Cole pointed at me and pointed at the other Black student and said, we're going to ship you back to Africa. And then he went like this, and all you Jews out there are going back to Israel. And as I said, I just sat there looking at the guy. And one of my classmates piped up and said, well, they live here. What if they don't want to go? And Matt Cole said, oh, they have no choice. If they do not leave voluntarily, they will be exterminated in the upcoming race war. That was the first time I heard the term race war. And I thought, what is this man talking about? Later that day, I was standing by my locker and I was the only one in the hallway. Matt Cole and his right hand guy, Martin Kerr, were leaving and they had to come down the hall past me. They paused in front of me. They didn't say anything to me, but they glared and sneered at me and then started laughing and then continued on down the hall towards the front of the building where I assumed they were leaving. Anyway, that prompted me on a trajectory to find out more about this phenomenon of white supremacy. So I graduated in 1976 from high school. I went to college. I got my degree in music, my bachelor's degree in music from Howard University in D.C. So music became, you know, I graduated in 1980 from there. Music became my profession. But trying to find out more about race and how to improve race relations became my obsession. So I sought out Matt Cole. I wanted to find him and talk to him because I had not confronted him in the classroom. You know, my generation, we were taught to have respect for your elders, even if you don't agree with them. You still show them respect, whether it's the mailman, the police officer, the librarian, whoever's older than you is your elder. All right. So I did not confront him in the classroom. But now, because the dynamic was child to adult. All right. So in 1982, I was now 24 years old. So, yes, Matt Cole was still older than me, but the dynamic had changed. It was adult to adult. I felt the need to respond to him. And so I went looking for him. And I found him. And I had a good conversation. Well, good meaning time-wise. I had a good conversation with him, maybe 45 minutes, maybe almost an hour, not quite an hour. And he told me he remembered me from eight years prior when he told me he was going to ship me back to Africa. Speaker 3 (15:49) He told me a lot of lies, but he told me one thing that was true, and I've been following that ever since. In 1982, eight years after I met him in 74, he told me what white supremacists were fearing. He'd been monitoring it for a long time. They are fearing the year 2042. And he was telling me in 1982 that they were fearing the year 2042. Because it's something that's not changed and this is not stopped that in the year 2042 it was going to be 50-50 50 % white 50 % non-white between 2045 and 2050 it was going to flip and whites would become the minority Now at the time when he told me this, you know based on all the other lies He was telling me that I knew you know, we're not true I had my doubts about this, but I've been following it and yes, he was correct about that The other things were indeed lies. And this is why we are seeing an increase in lone wolves. Because, you know, when I first started this work, I've been doing this now for almost 47 years. When I first started this work, there were just basically three groups of white supremacists. The KKK, Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazi groups, and what we call white power skinheads. Today, you got... The Klan, the Nazis, the white power skinheads, the Patriot Front, the Oath Keepers, the Proud Boys, the Vanguard, on and on and on and on. And they're all saying, come join us, come join us. We're going to take back our country. And people who are fearing their erasure are running and joining these groups. And, you know, I know a lot of these people. And what they tell me is, Daryl, I don't want my grandkids to be brown. They call it the browning of America. white genocide through miscegenation. And so they run and join these groups. When the group does not fulfill their promise of taking the country back in a timely manner, because they truly feel that they're patriots. We discovered this country, we built this country, we wrote the Constitution, and now there are people here who don't look like us taking away our country. So we're going to take it back. When the group does not act in a timely manner, or at least not fast enough for them, some of these people get antsy. And they say, you know what, if the Klan can't do it or so-and-so can't do it, I'll do it myself. And that's when they walk into a Black church like in Charleston, South Carolina, and shoot and murder nine Black people doing Bible study. Or the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh and murder 11 Jewish people. The Buffalo grocery store. The Walmart in El Paso, murder 23 Hispanic people. The Sikh Indian temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, murder seven Sikh Indians conducting their religious services. These are called lone wolves. And as we get closer and closer to 2042, we're going to see more and more of those lone wolves because they are becoming unhinged. And there's a lot of propaganda and promotion that. If this imbalance is because they consider this to be balanced, but this is an imbalance, is allowed to happen, that Black people are going to uprise and punish them for slavery and all the ills of racism and white supremacy if they become the minority. So that's what they are propagating amongst their core people. And Speaker 1 (19:15) that's what we're seeing. So you did a great job laying out what white supremacists believe and why they believe it. But you've also managed to deprogram many white supremacists. You've gotten Klan members to leave the KKK. You've gotten neo-Nazis to renounce Nazism. You've befriended these people by the hundreds. And so when you deprogram them... Do you try to rebut and refute the arguments that they're making, the fears that they have? Do you explain to them, well, here's why you don't have to fear 2042 when white people become a minority? Or does the path towards deprogramming take a different route? No, absolutely. I definitely Speaker 3 (20:10) read, but they, you know, they, they understand I'm not in agreement with their ideology, but here's what I've, what I've learned, Coleman, between traveling with my parents as a child. you know, across the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans and living in different countries and now traveling as an adult, as a musician, entertaining people in foreign countries or around or giving lectures or around this country. I have been to 65 countries on six continents. I have performed in all 50 states. So what does that mean? Other than I have a lot of frequent flyer miles, right? And hotel points. What it means is. I have been exposed to a wide variety of people. And one thing I can tell you for a fact is this. No matter how far I've gone from our country, the United States, whether it's right next door to Canada or right next door to Mexico or halfway around the globe. Everybody I've met, regardless of whether or not they look like me or speak my language or worship as I do or perhaps don't worship at all, I've always concluded that every single person I've met on this planet is a human being. And some things that we have in common, everybody wants these five core values. Everyone wants to be loved. Everyone wants to be respected. We all want to be heard. We all want to be treated fairly and truthfully. And we all want the same things for our family as anybody else would want for their family. And if we can learn to apply those five core values or any of those five values when we find ourselves in an adversarial situation or a society or culture in which we're unfamiliar or uncomfortable, I'll guarantee you that your navigation of that situation, that culture, that society. will be much more smooth, much more positive, much more productive. So I was in 1983. Speaker 3 (22:17) I was, I'd just come out of college three years earlier with my degree in music, and now I'm playing full-time. I was playing in a country band, and country music had made a resurgence. There'd been