![]() In time, the man’s views began to soften. That first meeting must have been as tense as two cats in a wet sack. Kelly arrived with an armed bodyguard, himself armed and wearing military-style fatigues. What he saw didn’t make sense to him either. Roger Kelly himself was a man, capable of looking through that keyhole. “And if slaves seem good soldiers, then our whole theory of slavery is wrong.” And if slaves seem good soldiers, then our whole theory of slavery is wrong.” ![]() The day you make a soldier of them is the beginning of the end of the Revolution. When Confederate Major General Patrick Cleburne, the “Stonewall of the West” made the “Monstrous proposal” of arming slaves in the waning days of the Civil War, General and former Georgia Governor Howell Cobb gave us the faintest glimpse through that keyhole: “ You cannot make soldiers of slaves, or slaves of soldiers. Others are capable of the most gut-wrenching honesty, of challenging even the most deeply held beliefs in the face of new information. Some among us are impervious to new information. The possessors of such organs are themselves, strange and impenetrable beings. There are roughly a quadrillion such synapses in any given brain, meaning any given thought could wend its way through more pathways than there are molecules in the known universe. Chemical signals transmit data over minute gaps between neurons called synapses, about 1/25,000th to 1/50,000th the thickness of a sheet of paper. Weighing in at about 3-pounds, the organ is comprised of some 86 billion neurons, each made of a stoma or cell body, an axon to take information away from the cell, and anywhere between a handful and a hundred thousand dendrites bringing information in. The human brain is an awesome thing, the mind a strange and impenetrable place. She called him and he didn’t ask what color I was, so we arranged to meet at a motel”. I knew enough about the mentality of the Klan that they would never think a white woman would work for a black man. Just tell him I am writing a book on the Klan.’ I wanted her to call because she’s white. “My secretary called him, and I told her, ‘do not tell Roger Kelly I’m black. Years later, Davis decided to write a book, answering the question that had dogged him, all those years: ‘ Why do you hate me when you know nothing about me?’ That question had never been answered from my youth.” To satisfy his own curiosity, Davis reached out to Roger Kelly, Imperial Wizard of the KKK in Maryland. Eventually, the pair became friends, a relationship which would guide Daryl to leaders of the KKK. Davis explained “ Jerry Lee learned to play from black blues and boogie woogie piano players and he’s a friend of mine.” The patron was skeptical and, over drinks, admitted to being a member of the Ku Klux Klan. Davis was playing Country & Western music when a white man commented, he’d never “ heard a black man play as well as Jerry Lee Lewis“. How can they Hate me, when the don’t even Know me.ĭavis’ career as an activist began in a “white” bar in Frederick, Maryland, in 1983. The conversation led to a lifelong impression in Davis’ mind, that it made no sense. At ten years old, Daryl Davis understood as much and asked his father about the cub scout incident. “The Soiling of Old Glory is a Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph taken by Stanley Forman during the Boston busing crisis in 1976” – H/T WikipediaĪny fool can mistrust and even dislike those unlike himself. Lest anyone object to my characterizing the “Liberal” bastion of Massachusetts as “racially backward”, the affront to common decency below was photographed in Boston in 1976, nineteen years after President Dwight Eisenhower sent Federal troops into Little Rock, Arkansas. This was a world of easy integration, not so the world he entered on returning to the United states, at age ten.Īs a member of an all-white Cub Scout troop in the racially backward Boston suburb of Belmont Massachusetts (you thought I was going to say “Selma”), Davis speaks of being struck with rocks and bottles thrown by the crowd, until encircled by members of the troop. ![]() His first ten years were spent in the world of foreign diplomats where children of every race and nationality were schooled together. Oh…Did I mention, he’s black?ĭaryl Davis was born this day in 1958, the son of a State Department foreign service officer. He’s a Christian, a writer, an activist and lecturer, who’s spent the last thirty years befriending members of the Ku Klux Klan and. – /musician-biography/ĭavis has acted on stage, film and television. “Both Pinetop Perkins and Johnnie Johnson, considered to be the greatest Blues & Boogie Woogie and Blues and Rock’n’Roll pianists respectively, both have claimed DARYL as their godson”. The man can sing too, well enough to perform with the likes of Chuck Berry, Muddy Waters, Jerry Lee Lewis and BB King. Daryl Davis is an American R & B musician, a master of Delta & Chicago Blues and the boogie-woogie style, on piano. ![]()
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