From Hate to Love: Ku Klux Klan chief to disciple of Christ
You aren’t born with hate; someone teaches it to you,” says Johnny Lee Clary, who says he learned prejudice and hatred from his father and a Ku Klux Klan uncle while growing up in Oklahoma, USA. So, after his father suicided, leaving him floundering, the Klan easily recruited him.
He soon became the clan chief, David Duke’s bodyguard, from where he rose to the Grand Dragon of Oklahoma. Feeding his mind on racist literature, he became a zealous recruiter and fiery speaker, “filled with Satan and with hate. I started thinking I was a big shot,” he recalls.
He was set up to debate Reverend Wade Watts of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s (NAACP) on a Tulsa, Oklahoma, radio program. “‘We’re making history here,’ they said. ‘Never has a black civil rights leader debated a member of the KKK.’
“Prejudice means to pre-judge people without knowing the facts. I thought all black people were the same,” Clary explains. “I expected Watts to come boppin’ in off the street with military boots on, [wearing] an African dashiki, with a button on that says, ‘I hate honkeys; kill the white man,’ and then pull a switchblade on me.
“Imagine my shock when a gentleman in a suit with a Bible in one hand reached out his other to shake mine before the show began! I refused.
“‘Hello-oo, Mr Clary’ he said. ‘I’m Reverend Watts! Before we go in, I just want you to know that I love you . . . and Jesus loves you too!’ As I took in his kind face and dignified manner, he shook my hand anyway. As I jerked my hand away—I’d just broken a Klan rule—I looked at it.
“‘Don’t worry, Johnny,’ he laughed. ‘It don’t come off!’
“‘Why, you no-good Communist agitator, you . . .’ I said, to which Wade responded, ‘God bless you!’”
The debate ricocheted around the studio and across the nation, unveiling KKK ignorance and bigotry. It climaxed when Clary made the claim that God didn’t want blacks and whites to mix. Watts responded by referring to God’s judgment of leprosy on Miriam for speaking against Moses’ marriage to Zipporah, a black. It was too much for Clary, who stormed out.
Watts followed, holding a coloured baby.
“Mr Clary, just tell me—how can you hate this child?” (Watts had adopted the unwanted child as his own daughter, calling her Tia.)
“It had never been put like that to me before,” Clary says. Then, as he looked at Tia, she smiled at him.
Defeated, he turned and almost ran as Watts called after him: “No matter what you do to me, you can’t do enough to make me hate you. Right now, I love you like a brother, and I’m going to love you and pray for you—whether you like it or not.”
He didn’t like it. It became Clary’s burning ambition to make Watts hate him, so he turned the KKK on Watts in a “campaign of terror.” They marched around his house, threatened his family and burned effigies of him. They broke his windows, ordered him not to speak and burned his church to the ground.
When the KKK appeared on his front lawn in hoods, Watts called out, “Boys, you’re early; Halloween’s four months away! I haven’t got any tricks or treats!” When they burned a cross outside his house, Watts called to them: “Boys, would you all like any hotdogs or marshmellows to go with that barbecue?” As they dumped rubbish in his yard, he said, “That looks like awful hard work. Would you like some iced tea?”
Watts thought his time might have been up when he was surrounded by 30 KKK members in a rural cafe. Clary snarled, “We’re going to do to you whatever you do to that chicken on your plate.”
Calmly Watts looked at them and, in a moment of inspiration, picked up the chicken and kissed it! Their promise unkept and confounded, they left. But the encounters began to open cracks of doubt in Clary’s hate-filled belief system.
He threw himself into solidifying his position in the Klan. In 1989, at the age of 30, he became the KKK’s Imperial Wizard. His planned to clean up the KKK’s image and bring the Klan back into mainstream thinking.
But success as a Klansman didn’t reflect a successful personal life. After two marriage breakdowns and the loss of his baby daughter, Clary plunged into unifying all hate groups under the Klan, but when a “unity meeting” erupted in violence, he felt repulsed by the hate and, in disgust, resigned. Because of the publicity, he lost his job.
Bereft of power, women, friends and money—“knocked off my high horse”—Clary put a gun to his head: Daddy I’m following you—there’s no other way to go.
But he hadn’t accounted for Watts, who hadn’t stopped praying for him. He was about to pull the trigger when he saw sunlight break onto his bookshelf—onto a Bible. “Maybe there is another way, I thought. So I put down the gun and picked up the Bible. It fell open to Luke 15—the parable of the prodigal son. I read the story three times, then fell on my knees and cried. I knew what God was saying to me.”
Quietly he joined a multiracial church, where he began to study the Bible. After two years, he picked up the phone to make the most important call of his life:
“Reverend Watts?”
“Why, praise the Lord!” Watts shouted upon hearing Clary’s story. “I never stopped praying for you! Do me the favour of speaking at my church.”
In the church he’d once set ablaze, Clary spoke to a congregation of black faces. “I love you; I’ve changed!” he confessed.
Stony faced and with folded arms, they glared back.
“Umm . . .”
He began to sweat, as it dawned that they might not believe him. Suddenly, remembering the words of Christ—“If I be lifted up from the earth, I will draw all men unto me”—he says he switched from preaching “me” to “Thee.”
The congregation’s doubting “uh-huh!” became, “Yeah, that’s right!” then, “Preach it, Brother!” Finally, irrevocably committing himself, he made an alter call. A coloured teenage girl, her arms open, ran down the aisle toward him.
“It’s Tia, my baby,” whispered Watts, weeping.
“What I needed was a real family,” Clary says. For seven years Watts was Clary’s best friend, mentor and father figure. They travelled together, spoke against racism, protested at Klan rallies, appeared on most US TV talk shows and preached the gospel. On his deathbed, Watts bequeathed to the former KKK Wizard the legacy of keeping alive Dr Martin Luther King’s dream for Afro-Americans.
God commanded that we love our enemies, bless those who curse us, and do good to those who hate us (Matthew 5:44), which is what Reverend Watts preached and practised. It proved to be an irresistible message to Johnny Lee Clary, who finally found true love and fulfillment in Him.
*Beneath the Sheets—The Ku Klux Klan Exposed
Other sources: The Rights of Humanity, W A Colcord; Johnny Lee Clary: From Klan to Christ; www.toptags.com/aama/voices/speeches
breaking chains of hopelessness
Barely a trigger-pull from suicide, the God of hope broke through Johnny Lee Clary’s despair, revealing a better way. Putting down the gun, he picked up the Bible, God’s Word. Now Clary works to combat suicidal thinking. He’s qualified to say: “Suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem. Life will change.”
“Suicidality is essentially a crisis of meaning. Many factors link suicide to the upheaval, loss or confusion over relationships and identity.”
Statistics reveal low rates of spiritual activity in suicide victims. In June 2003 a Suicide Prevention Australia (SPA) conference dealt with the topic: “Finding meaning to sustain life.” Dr Michael Dudley, SPA chairman, said research highlights religion and spirituality as major factors contributing to the prevention of suicide. Lifeline’s Lifeforce Suicide Prevention Program says that 90 per cent of suicidal people don’t want to die; they simply want to end their intense emotional pain.
God is the source of good communication, relationships, life and love. His “love letter” is full of plans to give us “hope and a future” (Jeremiah 29:11). It brought meaning and purpose to Clary’s existence. It moved him away from fear, hate and isolation into a loving, connected friendship with God and others. It gave him guidance for happy relationships—teaching love, trust and forgiveness—and how to get the bad out and let good in. He learned that he could trust his emotional pain with God. “I will heal [you]” (Jeremiah 33:6), He promises.
God gave Clary a new identity (see 2 Corinthians 5:17). Although invisible, His presence of love, peace and joy was real to him. God’s gifts and promises are far greater than our need; greater, even, than what we would ever ask or even think (see 2 Peter 1:4; Ephesians 3:20).”Call to me,” He invites, “and I will answer you ” (Jeremiah 33:3).
DR KING’S LEGACY
Weeks before the recent 40th anniversary of Dr Martin Luther King Jr’s famous “I have a dream” speech, Johnny Lee Clary shared the legacy bequeathed him by Reverend Watts. Watts was taught by his father not to return hate when abused. “Hate is a sickness and you wouldn't want to hurt a sick person, would you?”
Watts’s humour and dignity won many friends and positions of influence. When told at a restaurant, “We don’t serve negroes here,” he responded, “Ma’am, I don’t eat negroes anyway; just give me some ham and some eggs!” Turning to the senator accompanying him, he expressed his wish to meet with the leader of the Ku Klux Klan.
King told America: “An injustice to anyone is injustice to everyone.” “The negro is still not free,” he said on August 28, 1963, 100 years after Abraham Lincoln decreed the Emancipation proclamation. Protesting black segregation and discrimination, he came to cash the cheque of equal rights promised in the US Constitution. At the Washington Lincoln Memorial, he proclaimed: “I have a dream—that one day this nation will live out the truth of the meaning of its creed—we hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal.” Five years later he was shot dead.
Watts, a friend of King’s, believed King’s statement that people hate one another because they fear one another, because they do not know one another, because they are separated. Even as Clary’s campaign of terror was raging against him, Watts later told his tormentor, “I just called Dr Jesus . . . I knew He’d fix you up!”
“Watts was a winner, he never let hate get the better of him. He walked consistently in love,” recalls Johnny.
“The best way to deal with an enemy is to make a friend out of him,” said Watts. “Quick to claim our own rights and freedoms, we often forget what we claim for ourselves we should freely extend to others. The golden rule—’Love your neighbour as you love yourself’—is the antidote for intolerance, prejudice, bigotry and racism. It’s the source of peace—whatever you want others to do to you, do to them.”
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