“They’ve reached the point where they feel like their views are accepted by a lot of people in this country.” Daryl Davis and Sam Shepard visit the White House. “It’s more of a dangerous thing now than it was when it was just the Klansmen in the robes and hoods,” Shepherd said. Shepherd, who also worked as an organizer for David Duke’s National Association for the Advancement of White People, said he was “blown away” when he saw people marching in the streets unmasked and carrying tiki torches. “And they chose to march through the University of Virginia campus with their tiki torches, and down the streets of Charlottesville shouting anti-Semitic and anti-Black epithets.” “Instead they excluded them,” Davis said. If the march was actually about the statue and Confederate heritage, Davis said, they would have also invited Black and Jewish descendants of Confederate soldiers who also support preserving the statue of Robert E. “So, they put down that they are the descendants of their great, great, great ancestors, who fought in the Confederacy, and they want to preserve the heritage of the Confederacy, and they want to protest the removal of the Robert E. … You cannot go to the city and put down on the application, ‘I want to start a race war,’” Davis said. “Anytime you’re going to have a gathering on public property - especially if it’s a protest, march or a rally, or maybe you’re going to sell lemonade and hot dogs - you must have a permit. Protesting the removal of Confederate statues gave them perfect cover, Davis said. “They’ve always been here, but now with the new administration in power they feel a little more emboldened to show themselves more.” “What you’re seeing are people coming out from under the rock, from under the carpet,” Davis said. In his work, Davis sheds light on White supremacist organizations and those who join them.ĭespite their efforts, Davis and Shepherd say White supremacist groups are using the rhetoric of President Donald Trump and his administration as a foothold to further their agenda, all while trying to legitimize racism in the public eye. He has spent nearly 30 years befriending members of the Ku Klux Klan, and convincing them to turn their backs on an organization the Southern Poverty Law Center calls “the most infamous - and oldest - of American hate groups.”ĭavis, who said about 40 to 60 members have left the group directly because of the friendship they developed with him, also works with Scott Shepherd, a reformed former grand dragon for the Invisible Empire: Knights of the Ku Klux Klan in Tennessee. “They were there to incite the first steps of a race war.”ĭavis is an expert on White supremacists, specifically because he knows so many of them. “They were there for one reason and one reason only,” Davis said. Lee, which supposedly spurred the protests, “had nothing to do with why they were there.” He said the removal of a statue of Confederate Gen. Daryl Davis wasn’t surprised when he saw White nationalists carrying tiki torches through the streets of Charlottesville, Virginia.ĭavis, a Black musician and author, personally knew some of the people who were marching.
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