Not many people have ever made the journey
that Johnny Lee Clary
has. He grew up in a home in Oklahoma filled with hate. When he
was just 11 he watched
his alcoholic father blow his brains out with a .45 caliber
pistol. His mother abandoned him. Like many teens from
dysfunctional families he drifted until he could find something
to be a part of. He found that something one day when he saw
David Duke on television. He became enthralled with Duke's
twisted political philosophy that minorities were the cause of
all problems. At 14 he joined up and became a part of Duke's
organization and he loved it. He worked his way up over the years
to become Duke's personal bodyguard and then became a power in
his own right after being elected Imperial Wizard of the White
Knights of the Ku Klux Klan one of the most militant and violent
hate groups in the United States. Like Duke, he took his message
of hate to television appearing on Oprah Winfrey, Morton Downey,
Jr. and other talk shows.
In 1979 he was paired one day on a national radio program with a
black minister named Rev. Wade Watts who had marched with Martin
Luther King, Jr. in Selma. The radio debate upset Clary because
he could not get Watts to respond with anger. After the program
Watts even tried to introduce him to his adopted racially mixed
daughter and Clary turned away. He decided he would target Watts,
uncle of former Congressman J.C. Watts (R-OK), for harassment. He
took Klan members to Watt's house and dumped garbage in the yard.
One one of their visits, Watts even came out on the porch and
said " 'Isn't Halloween four months away? I don't have
any trick or treats for you"
Years later, Clary's life began to fall apart. The FBI was after
him. His wife left him, his girlfriend became an informant for
the FBI, he lost custody of his daughter. He quit the Klan but he
could not find a job, not many places wanted to hire someone who
had appeared on television as the national leader of a hate
group. He started to drink heavily, he ran out of money, and he
was about to lose his home. He decided it was all over. He would
just blow his brains out like his father did but something
stopped him. He later called it a religious conversion. In the
last seconds before pulling the trigger, he found God or God
found him.
Later he had the thought one day to seek out Rev. Watts the man
he had harassed so many times. Watts talked to him and invited
him to his predominatly black church and asked him to speak. He
was loudly booed at first but made his way through it. He became
friends with Watts. The black man he had once harassed became a
father figure to him. Johnny Lee Clary began a journey that would
lead him to convince others that hate was not the answer. He
began to tour the country with Rev. Watts and again he appeared
on talk shows but this time with a different message. Since Watts
died in 1998, Clary has taken his mission to schools, churches,
prisons, and any other groups all over the world to any who would
listen to the message that hate is wrong.
Watts said in a television interview before he died, "I
always wanted to leave this old world, knowing that I left it a
better place then I found it; but to have been a help in
converting Johnny Lee Clary over to Christianity, the right kind
of Christianity, not the Ku Klux Klan type, but the RIGHT kind of
Christianity, well, that's one of the best jobs I ever done in my
life."
Rob is the
founder and editor of the progressive news site robwire.com and is a
frequent contributor to rob.dailykos.com