ST. LOUIS — Although pianist Daryl Davis lives in Washington DC, he has a close connection to St. Louis’ most famous rock and roll pioneers, Chuck Berry and Johnnie Johnson, both in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
“On my 18th birthday, I received a telegram from him and it said ‘Happy birthday, best wishes -- Chuck Berry.’ And I was overly enthused,” Davis said. “Chuck Berry inspired me to become a musician.”
Davis estimates he performed as Berry’s piano player more than 100 times, in part because he was mentored by the original Chuck Berry piano man Johnnie Johnson.
“'If I can figure how to play piano like that, maybe one day I could get a job playing with Chuck Berry,'” Davis recalled thinking. “And so I tracked down who his piano player was. And that was Johnnie Johnson. There was no other piano player in the world who could back up Chuck Berry the way Johnny did. It was just instinctual.”
When Johnson died in 2005, one of the pallbearers at Jefferson Barracks National Cemetery was his pupil and friend Daryl Davis.
But there is much more to Davis than being a musician. For decades, he has been obsessed with race in America, as he explained in a Ted Talk presentation.
“My parents sat me down at the age of 10 and explained racism to me,” Davis said during his Ted Talk.
“I didn't understand why people had issue with skin color,” Davis went onto explain, “but I realized that some people did. So I formed a question in my mind at that age. And that question was, 'how can you hate when you don't even know me?’ And for the next 51 years, I've been looking for the answer to that question.”
It’s where Davis looked for the answer to that racial rhetorical question that has received international attention. All over the country, he sought out members of the Ku Klux Klan.
“I would go up north, down south, midwest, and west and interview various Klan leaders and members and get the answer to my question, ‘how could you hate me? You don't even know me.’ So that's how the whole thing started.”
Davis wrote about his social experiment in the book “Klan-Destine Relationships,” and he was the subject of the PBS documentary “Accidental Courtesy: Daryl Davis, Race, and America.” At Davis’ home are numerous framed newspaper articles documenting his unconventional journey to cure racism.
Even more unconventional are his racism trophies: KKK robes from former Klan members who renounced their racism and gifted the robes to Davis.
“If somebody is willing to sit down and speak with you, regardless of how extreme their views may be from yours, there is the opportunity to plant a seed. And that's what I've been doing,” said Davis. “And as a result, a little over 200 have left the white supremacy ideology.”
Davis' plan is to eventually create a museum that documents America’s complicated history of race and white supremacy. Some of his KKK artifacts are currently on loan to the Holocaust Center in Orlando, Florida.
“People have called it a social experiment, people have called it a hobby, people have called it crazy,” said Davis. “I call it my life.”
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