I wanted to visit India because I have always wanted to explore the country. More than that, I have always found the caste system in India identical to the racism in the United States.

I decided to go around the country and sit down with Klan leaders and Klan members to find out: How can you hate me when you don't even know me?

You're not going to beat the meanness out of a mean dog. You start beating a mean dog, it's gonna become more mean. You start beating racists, they're gonna become more racist.

Racism is a cancer. You cannot ignore it and it'll go away. If you ignore cancer, it simply metastasizes and consumes the whole body.

Every racist that I know - and I know a lot of racists - every racist that I know voted for Donald Trump.

I knew as much about the Klan, if not more than many of the Klan people that I interviewed. When they see that you know about their organization, their belief system, they respect you.

My father was the first black Secret Service agent. He wanted to get into the FBI but J. Edgar Hoover, who was the head of the FBI, was a racist and he said we don't want any black people.

The most important thing I learned is that when you are actively learning about someone else you are passively teaching them about yourself.

The Ku Klux Klan is as American as baseball, apple pie and Chevrolet.

When you seek to destroy somebody, all you do is empower them, because they feel like, 'you see? They don't want us to have our rights to feel the way we want to feel.' And they get more and more emboldened and more and more empowered.

It's very important that we learn how to communicate... and learn to respect each other.

A Klan member is not stamped from a standard cookie cutter. They come from all walks of life and various education levels and environmental situations which have led to their decision to join the Klan. The one common denominator that all share is lack of exposure to others who may not look like them or believe as they do.

It was incomprehensible to me that someone who had never seen me before, someone who knew absolutely nothing about me, would want to inflict pain upon me for no other reason than the color of my skin.

Invite your enemies to sit down and join you. One small thing you say might give them food for though, and you will learn.

I never set out to convert anyone in the Klan. I just set out to get an answer to my question: 'How can you hate me when you don't even know me.'

We've simply been putting Band-Aids on the wounds of racism. We haven't drilled down to the bone to get to its source.

Always keep the lines of communication open with your adversaries.

Knowledge, information, wit, and the way you disseminate these attributes can often prove to be a more disarming weapon against an enemy or some with whom your ideology is in conflict, than violence or lethal weapons.

I didn't vote for Trump, but I do believe his coming to power has done its own bit of good. People are coming out to protest against issues they so far didn't talk about - sexual abuse, gun control, racism - because a bunch of crazies are out propagating them.

Our society can only become one of two things, it can be become what we let it become or it can become what we make it, and I choose the latter.

We would not have rock and roll without Chuck Berry, and when I first heard Chuck Berry, I fell in love with that music, and when I saw him, I changed my whole career trajectory that I was on as a kid.

There are many controversial topics out there - abortion, nuclear weapons, the 2nd Amendment, guns, whatever, the war in Iraq. You're going to be on one side, somebody's going to be on the other side. Invite those people to the table. Sit down and talk.

Believe it or not, the best way to put somebody at ease or bring them to a level of trust is to know as much if not more about them than they know about themselves or the organization to which they belong.

I try to bring out the humanity in people.

When I experienced racism here in my own country, I was not prepared for it. I had never heard the word racism.

They've changed the name from white supremacy to white separatists, to white nationalists, to alt-right. It's the same thing. A rose by any other name is still a rose.

Over the past 30 years, I have come to know hundreds of white supremacists, from KKK members, neo-Nazis and white nationalists to those who call themselves alt-right. Some were good people with wrong beliefs, and others were bad people hellbent on violence and the destruction of those who were non-Aryan.

The most powerful tools you can have are information and knowledge.

I'd had a racist experience as a child at age 10, where people had thrown rocks at me and bottles. I didn't understand. And all it was, was because of the color of my skin, nothing I had done, nothing I had said.

Some black people who have not heard me interviewed or read my book jump to conclusions and prejudge me... I've been called Uncle Tom. I've been called an Oreo.

A lot of the media says, 'oh, black musician converts X-number of Klansmen.' I never converted one. But over 200 have left that, the white supremacy movements, because I have been the impetus for that.

I have a former Baltimore City police officer's uniform and his robe and hood. He was the grand dragon, which means state leader. His day job, what paid his bills, he was a Baltimore City police officer, not an undercover officer in the Klan gathering intelligence, but a bona fide Klansmen on the Baltimore City police force.

I've dealt with a lot of black supremacists as well as white supremacists, and supremacy of any kind is wrong, and I address both black and I address both white.

I was no stranger to racism. Having grown up a black person in the '60s and '70s, I knew that prejudice was common.

Music absolutely played a massive role in bridging many gaps in the racial divides I would encounter.

There have been some incidents in which I was threatened and a couple of instances where I had to physically fight. Fortunately, I won in both instances.

I have just about every book written on the Klan and I've read them all.

There has always been a great deal of racism in the U.S. before and after Obama.

I don't consider myself to be a racist, but to me there's not much difference between a black racist or a white racist.

Am I going to vote for Trump? Absolutely not. I do not believe in his platform.

I deal with Klansmen and white supremacists all the time.

Chuck Berry had a very profound impact on me. The man was a genius.

Back in the day, prior to rock and roll, music halls, concert venues were segregated if they allowed black people in at all. You know, there were ropes that went around the sitting sections with signs hanging that would say, 'Sitting for white patrons only,' or 'Colored sitting only.'

My parents were U.S. Foreign Service, so I spent a lot of time you know, overseas in various countries around the world, you know, I was an American Embassy brat and today, as a professional musician, I travel all over this country and around the world.

There are plenty of people, including good friends of mine, who are not racist, and who voted for Trump. A lot of people wanted a change from what they were accustom to for the last decades... they wanted a change of the status quo, a changing of the guard. And they were willing to overlook his misogyny, his racist or bigoted comments.

You can legislate behavior but you cannot legislate belief. Patience is what it takes. But patience doesn't mean sitting around on your butt waiting for something to happen.

1983 - Country music had made a resurgence in this country so I joined a country band. I was the only black guy in the band and consequently, usually the only black guy in many of the places where we played.

Music is my profession but learning more about racism on all sides of the tracks was my obsession.

If you have an adversary, an opponent with an opposing point of view, give that person a platform, regardless of how extreme it may be.

When something bothers me, I try to learn about it.