Photo: Jonathan Timmes
Growing up in 1960s Chicago, Daryl Davis didn't understand why white children threw rocks at him, a black child they didn't know, during a Cub Scouts parade. The struggle to understand why they did that helped shape his life as a blues pianist. In 1983, after a performance, a man - who belonged to the Ku Klux Klan - told him he had never seen a Black man who could play like Jerry Lee Lewis. Over the next 30 years, Davis met with white supremacists, tackling prejudices head-on, and believes he persuaded more than 200 KKK members and others to disavow their allegiances. Many became friends, including Scott Shepherd, a former Grand Dragon of the KKK in Tennessee, and they regularly travel together to address racism through dialogue and education. Davis' work is the focus of a documentary and a book. "What Davis showed me is that yelling at someone never in history changes someone's mind," says T.M. Garret.
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