Do you think that it is possible to reason with every person? Do you think that if someone simply sat down with every Jim Crow Southerner and explained nicely that black people deserve rights that would have solved the civil rights issues of the 60s?
> His efforts to improve race relations, in which as an African-American he engaged with members of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK), convinced Klansmen to leave and denounce the KKK.
Absolutely, many people can be convinced and reasoned with, I don't dispute that. What I'm saying is that there are people who are prejudiced to such an extent that there is no reasoning with them. You have never addressed how we deal with that problem. There are people like this in society at large and there are people like this in positions of power in government and in the private sector. Both problems need to be addressed in some way, because the people in government and the private sector derive power from the people in society who support them and we can't tolerate this in a civil society. I don't know what order to solve them in and perhaps solving one would solve the other, but it's a problem that prevents us from working together in a more fundamental way as a society. Ignoring it is not an option.
I actually talked to him once, his strategy isnt to approach kkk members to convince them to leave, but to let members who are questioning approach him.
He also told me its just as important to disrupt their organizing and recruiting efforts to stop new people from joining
