Together Hub Community Notes: The Man Who Sat Across the Table

We often imagine that the people who change our lives will be the people we already know, but sometimes a meaningful story begins with a complete stranger and an unexpected conversation. This is Together Hub Community Notes.

One night in 1983, Daryl Davis was playing piano with a country band at a truck-stop lounge.

He was the only Black person in the room.

During a break between sets, a white man approached him and told him that he enjoyed the music. He had never heard a Black man play piano like Jerry Lee Lewis, the man said.

Davis thanked him and explained that Jerry Lee Lewis had learned from Black blues and boogie-woogie musicians.

The man disagreed. But the conversation continued, and soon the two were talking about music, drinking and eventually something far less comfortable. The man was a member of the Ku Klux Klan.

Davis was surprised. He had grown up around different cultures because his father was a U.S. diplomat, and he had already developed a curiosity about people whose experiences were different from his own. So rather than ending the conversation, he asked him a question.

"Why?"

That question would eventually take Davis somewhere very few people would willingly go. He began seeking out members of the Klan and other white supremacist groups. Not from a distance, and not through newspaper articles or television interviews, but face to face.

He wanted to understand what made someone hate a person they had never met. The first Klan member he met formally was Roger Kelly, then a leader of the Maryland Klan.

In 1990, Davis arranged an interview with him. The meeting was truly tense from the beginning. Kelly arrived with a bodyguard, known as a grand nighthawk. Davis offered his hand. Kelly shook it. They sat down and began talking.

They discussed race, the Klan, what Kelly believed, and whether people of different races could ever live together.

Over the years, Davis would have many more of these conversations. He met Klan leaders, white supremacists and people who openly held views directed against people like him.

He was not always welcomed.

Sometimes people insulted him. Sometimes they questioned his motives. Some Black people also criticized him for sitting down with people who hated him. But Davis kept going.

He listened. He asked questions. He talked about music, family, history and race. Sometimes the conversations were heated. Sometimes they became friendships. And occasionally, something changed.

Roger Kelly eventually became an Imperial Wizard of the Klan. In 1999, after roughly two decades in the organization, Kelly told Davis that he was leaving. He apologized for having been part of it. He also gave Davis his Klan robe and hood. They eventually became friends.

Kelly was not the only one. Over the years, other former Klansmen and Klanswomen gave Davis their robes and other Klan belongings. Davis kept many of them. He has said that the garments became physical reminders of conversations that had taken an unexpected turn.

But there is an important detail in Davis's story that is easy to miss.

He never claimed that sitting down with someone automatically changed them. Some people did not change. Some remained committed to their beliefs. Some conversations ended without resolution. And even among those who left the Klan, the reasons were not always simple. People changed for different reasons, and Davis was only one part of those stories.

That makes the collection of robes in his home rather unusual. They are not simply souvenirs. Each one belonged to somebody who once believed something strongly enough to wear it publicly. At some point, that person decided to take it off.

Davis's story has been debated over the years. Some have praised his approach, while others have questioned whether engaging closely with extremists gives them too much legitimacy. Davis himself has continued to argue that conversation is valuable because it creates a space in which people who would otherwise remain enemies can at least encounter one another as human beings.

There is no neat ending to the story. Hatred did not disappear because one musician started asking questions. The world did not suddenly become less complicated. But somewhere along the way, a man who was curious about why someone hated him decided that the better place to begin was not with an argument.

It was with a conversation.

And then, remarkably, he kept showing up.