In a way I can relate with Johnny, also experienced my old life of racial hatred, until Jesus came in and made me color blind. Racial issues don’t necessary have to do with skin color, I too was condemed just because of my South African herritage.
Johnny Lee Clary (June 18, 1959 – October 21, 2014) was a former Ku Klux Klan leader who became a Pentecostal Christian and traveled around the globe preaching the gospel and teaching against racism and hate groups such as the Ku Klux Klan, Neo Nazis, and the Aryan Nations.
Clary was known also as the wrestler Johnny Angel who had success in the 1980s in the National Wrestling Federation. Johnny Lee Clary was born on June 18, 1959 in Martinez, California and reportedly raised in a racist home, where his father encouraged racist language and abusive treatment of blacks, and saw to it that Clary attended an all-white church. Although Clary’s father, a Catholic, was not a Klansman, Clary claimed that his paternal uncle, Harold, was a member and that Harold boasted to Clary’s father of shooting an African-American man. Johnny’s father sent his son on the Sunday school bus every week to the First Baptist Church. According to interviews Clary had given, his youth was marred by a violent and tragic family life and also by a lack of stability. At the age of 11 he watched his father kill himself and was subsequently shunted from one family member’s home to another’s.
Eventually he found himself alone in East L.A. where he became involved in gangs, and joined the Ku Klux Klan by the time he was 14. In 1983, Johnny became a professional wrestler. Terry began his career under the name Sugar Boy. Terry continued to wrestle, changing his name to Buddy “Bad Man” Savage. While wrestling, Clary continued his involvement in the KKK. According to his interviews with several media outlets, Clary became the Grand Dragon of the Oklahoma arm of the White Knights Of The Ku Klux Klan. Clary claims to have become increasingly disillusioned with the KKK even as he rose through its ranks. He mentions a first brush with evangelical Christianity in the mid-to-late 1980s but, he claims, he was scared into returning to the KKK and went on to become the Imperial Wizard of the whole White Knights organization in 1989.
During his leadership the White Knights did not garner much media attention for their activities, but Clary was an active spokesperson for the Klan, defending racism and violence against non-whites. In this role he appeared on syndicated talk shows including those hosted by Oprah Winfrey and Morton Downey, Jr. In interviews Clary asserts that he left the KKK for good in 1990 and joined an evangelical church.
This time he stayed with the church and in 1991 he began preaching. He teamed up with Wade Watts, a preacher and former leader of the Oklahoma chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) with whom he had previously sparred on numerous occasions during his time in the KKK.
The story of Clary’s conversion from a Klansman to an anti-racism preacher has drawn the attention of numerous Christian media outlets and several national Australian talk shows. He appeared on talk shows such as “Donahue”, and “Geraldo”, discussing racial issues in the USA. Johnny Lee Clary was an ordained minister under World Evangelism Fellowship and Church Of God In Christ and lived in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
In 2009, he joined Jimmy Swaggart Ministries’ Family Worship Center, where his wife is employed and began to preach and teach part-time there. He had been an active member there appearing on their Christian Network Sonlife Broadcasting Network on occasion. Clary died suddenly at his home in Baton Rouge, Louisiana of a massive heart attack on October 21, 2014.