TULSA, OKLA. ? Ku Klux Klan leader Johnny Lee Clary patted his white sheet as he waited in the radio station for his debate opponent, a civil rights activist.

Clary expected the Rev. Wade Watts to hate whites as much as Clary hated blacks. But then Watts stunned Clary. He walked into the broadcast booth, smiled and told the then-Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan that he loved him.

Johnny Lee Clary holds a Bible while standing in front of a poster of Martin Luther King Jr. at his home in Tulsa, Okla. Clary rose to the ranks of Imperial Wizard in the Ku Klux Klan before quitting in 1989. Clary now operates an international ministry against racism called Operation Colorblind Inc.

Clary was stunned. He had set a fire that damaged Watts’ McAlester church a crime for which he was never prosecuted. Still, he couldn’t help but shake the reverend’s extended hand, despite the KKK rule against touching blacks.

That night in 1979, Clary first began to doubt his racist convictions. In another decade, he left the Klan as Imperial Wizard and a couple of years after that he began his itinerant ministry against racism.

He now draws crowds around the world who come to hear his story of failure and redemption, of overcoming racism in one of its ugliest forms.

Clary credits much of his transformation to Watts, who marched with Martin Luther King Jr. and led the Oklahoma NAACP for 16 years. The men became close friends before Watts’ death in 1998.

“He taught me what it was like to be black, what black people feel about the things they’ve been through,” Clary said recently at his small Tulsa apartment, a poster of King behind him. “I became a man who looked at himself in the mirror and decided it was time to change that man.”

A need to belong

Clary, who turns 43 this month, spent his early childhood in Oklahoma. But when he was 11, his father committed suicide shooting himself in the head with a handgun in front of his son and the boy was sent to Los Angeles to live with his sister.

Living in a gang-ridden neighborhood, mostly among kids from other races, Clary didn’t fit in. Racism he had learned in Oklahoma became ingrained as Clary was shunted aside.

“Nobody seemed to care about this 14-year-old kid,” Clary said. “I was about ready to give up when I turned on the TV and saw David Duke talking about the KKK.”

The white supremacist’s speech reminded Clary of talks his father had had with his uncle, a Klansman from Georgia. Clary wrote Duke, who sent a man to his Los Angeles door.

“You’ve been through a horrible life,” Clary remembered the man telling him. “What you need is a family, and the words ‘Ku Klux Klan’ comes form the Greek word ‘kuklux’ which means circle and ‘Klan’ from Scotland, which means family.”

Clary joined the Klan youth corps, becoming an adult member at 17 and quickly rising through the ranks. Returning to Oklahoma, he became the Grand Dragon there and later the Imperial Wizard, a rank similar to national spokesman.

But after meeting with Watts, Clary began to question his devotion to the Klan.

“When I heard the Klan and the skinheads say they wanted to kill all the blacks, I used to think of Rev. Watts, and think, ‘Do you really want to see this man hurt?”‘ Clary said. “He was such a good man that I started doubting all these things I was supposed to teach.”

Preaching against racism

In 1989, Clary called the Klan’s Grand Council and told them he was quitting.

A couple of years later, Clary said he felt God was calling on him to preach. He soon called Watts and asked forgiveness. The reverend, in turn, asked him to deliver a sermon to his all-black church, the one that Clary had set ablaze.

Watts, the uncle of Rep. J.C. Watts, R-Okla., had warned his faithful the week before that the former KKK leader was coming. Many stayed home.

The worshippers in the worn wooden pews crossed their arms and stared at Clary with lowered brows, he said. He got no “Hallelujahs” or “Amens” when he told the congregation about his reformation.

Finally, he asked if anyone would like to know Jesus as their savior, and a teen-age girl cried and ran to the pulpit to hug Clary. The ice was broken.

Soon afterward, Clary and Watts traveled across the South together preaching against racism and protesting at Klan rallies.

Clary estimates his ministry, which he calls Operation Colorblind Inc., has helped thousands avoid or escape a life of racism. In May, the former Klansmen spent about a week in Canada, and has a series of appearances in Australia this month and next.