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Former Klan Leader Ordained To Preach The Gospel

Posted: Dec 29th 2009 By: CMBurnham

A former Tulsan who once was imperial wizard of the Ku Klux Klan is now an ordained minister in the largest black denomination in America.

Johnny Lee Clary, now living in Miami, Okla., was ordained in San Diego recently by Bishop George D. McKinney, on the 12-man ruling board of the 6-million member Church of God in Christ.

McKinney said Clary has been authorized to conduct evangelism campaigns and to engage in the ministry of racial reconciliation.

He said the denomination has a few white ministers, "but it;'s not every day that we get a former klansman."

Clary called racism a cancer on the human race.

"I've learned that good friends come in all colors. I believe I have something to contribute in the area of racial reconciliation. I'm going to spend the rest of my life building bridges and bringing people together," he said.

Clary learned to hate blacks early.

He saw his first black man when he was 5 years old, waling down a street in Del City.

"I said, 'Look Daddy, a chocolate-covered man.'"

"Son, that's a n-----," his father said.

When Clary was 11, he watched his father commit suicide.

His alcoholic mother sent him to live with her drug-dealer sister in Los Angeles.

He went from the suburbs to the ghetto.

"It was a nightmare. I was beaten up, chased by gangs all the time," he said.

He found protection from the gangs, and sense of family, by joining the KKK Youth Corps.

Clary returned to Del City during high school, where he recruited others to the Klan, and eventually became the youngest leader of the Oklahoma Klan with the title grand dragon.

He moved to Tulsa in the mid-1980s. He was a professional wrestler named Johnny Angel, and continued to advance in the Klan and other white supremacist groups, eventually becoming the imperial wizard, or national spokesman, for the White Knights of the KKK.

He traveled the nation speaking widely, appearing on Oprah, Morton Downey, Jr., and other TV shows.

Clary said things turned bad for him in the late 1980s when he fell in love with a woman and later learned she was an undercover FBI agent assigned to him.

"Word was going out to white supremacist groups that maybe I was FBI, " he said.

Then living in Tulsa, he was involved with white supremacist Dennis Mahon, who was indicted this year in an 2004 Arizona bombing.

Clary said he began to realize his association with klansmen could be dangerous.

"I had to ask myself, 'Do I want to spend the rest of my life in prison because of my involvement with these people?'"

He quit the Klan in December 1989, turning his national position over to Mahon.

"I became a target for everyone. Blacks hated me. Jews hated me. The KKK started calling me a race traitor."

Unable to keep a job because of his Klan history, depressed and broke, he decided to commit suicide, he said.

"I put one bullet in my gun. I saw a Bible sitting there, and thought maybe I could get forgiveness before I killed myself."

He began to read the Bible, and before the night was over, made a decision to follow Christ, he said.

"Klanspeople think they're Christians," he said. "Their philosophy is Christian identity. They believe the white race is true people of God."

Clary began to attend Victory Christian Center, where he a first was shocked to see the mix of races in the congregation.

Eventually, he became an evangelist, traveling to Europe, Australia and around the United States.

He became involved with the Church of God in Christ when he and Bishop McKinney preached together at a Promise Keepers event. They became close friends and remain so today.

Clary's ordination into the black denomination is reminiscent of the early days of U. S. Pentecostalism, McKinney said,

The 1906 Azusa Street revival in Los Angeles that launched the modern Pentecostal movement was racially mixed, he said.

"Whites, blacks and browns worshiped together...they said the color line was washed away in the blood of Jesus."

When the movement spread to the South, due to laws banning black/white worship, the movement split into the then-white Assemblies of God and the black Church of God in Christ, McKinney said.