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Roger kelly builder11/6/2023 While arranging the meeting, Davis decided not to tell Kelly that he was black he thought divulging that little detail could dissuade the Grand Dragon from meeting with him.ĭavis arrived in the designated hotel room before Kelly. The Grand Dragon in Maryland was a man named Roger Kelly. Not one to aim low, Davis set up a meeting with the Grand Dragon, the highest-ranking Klansman in the state. He was living in Maryland, and decided to try to speak with a member of one of the state’s kkk chapters, the Invincible Empire Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. Davis knew these would be dangerous meetings for a black man to take part in, but he was determined to forge ahead. He read every book he could get his hands on about the Ku Klux Klan, a white supremacist group with a long history of using physical assault, terrorism and murder against black people and other minorities.ĭaryl also read all he could about the racism of Nazis during World War ii, about American neo-Nazi groups, and about black-supremacist groups.Īs the years went by, he learned an immense amount, but he realized that to fully answer the question, he would need to have firsthand discussions with white supremacists. Each one intensified his desire to comprehend what fueled the blind hatred. That experience planted a question in Davis’s mind that he was determined to answer: How can a person hate another person who they don’t even know?ĭuring his teenage years, Daryl suffered a few other racially motivated affronts. “It was very hard, at the age of 10, to understand why some people who didn’t even know me would inflict pain upon me for no other reasons than the color of my skin,” he wrote. His parents explained to him later that the people attacking him were racists, whose only problem with him was that he was black. But when his Cub master ran over to shield him from the stones, Daryl suddenly realized that he was the only Scout being targeted. Young Daryl was oblivious to the fact that he was the only black Cub Scout in the parade, and he initially thought those spectators must have had a problem with the Scouts. ( Listen to The Sun Also Rises episode about this inspiring story) “I turned, and to my surprise, saw they came from some of the spectators, even children, along the parade route.” Davis writes in his book, Klan-destine Relationships. As they approached a certain cluster of spectators, 10-year-old Davis suddenly felt the sting of a rock striking his arm. With over three decades of experiences, Davis has written a book “Klan-destine Relationships” as well as was the focus of “Accidental Courtesy” documentary.When Daryl Davis was a Cub Scout in 1968, his troop was marching from Lexington, Massachusetts, to Concord to commemorate the Ride of Paul Revere. He keeps the robes as trophies and proofs that race discrimination can be beaten. Upon leaving the clan, Roger Kelly handed his robe to Davis. Kelly became close friends with Davis, even inviting him to become his daughter’s godfather. One of them was Roger Kelly, who was the Grand Dragon of the KKK in Maryland. Through 30 years Davis managed to talk 200 people into leaving the KKK, as they would listen to his performances and speak with him often. But books couldn’t provide the answer, so when he grew up, he decided to go and ask the people of the Ku Klux Klan. “How can you hate me when you don’t even know me?” was the question that Davis kept in his mind through the years as he studied various books on racial discrimination. That was the first time Davis encountered such violent systematic racism, and when his parents explained to him it was because of his skin color, Daryl only had one question - why? “It was inconceivable to me that someone who had never laid eyes on me, never spoken to me, knew absolutely nothing about me would want to inflict pain upon me for no other reason than the color of my skin” he explained. His quest began when he was only ten years old, at a scout parade, when a group of white people started throwing bottles and shouting racial slurs at the only black boy in scouts group.
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