"You can't do enough to me to make me hate you. I'm gonna love you and I will pray for you whether you like it or not." And I didn't know how to deal with that. I had never had that happen to me before.
"A few years later you did burn down his church, didn't you?"
Johnny - "Set fire to his church."
That came so fucking unexpected it made me laugh. So he tells this story in a way that we expect the nice encounter had already changed his mind. Then, BOOM, set fire to his church anyway and continued the harassment. What a bizarre interview.
Johnny Lee Clary did a TedX where he reveals that they became best friends later in life and he spoke at the very black church he burned down, held the reverends hand at his time of death, and did the Eulogy at his funeral where he kissed his head as he closed the casket on his best friend as he had promised to do whatever the reverend did to the chicken. For that time and place the story is pretty remarkable.As an aside he tells his life story which was incredibly fucked up and I would imagine most of their members are victims of abuse and had fucked up childhoods. This was directly what led him to join the clan as his father killed himself and mother disowned him and was a drug addict, the Klan approached him and offered to be the only family he had. Its comforting to think that people who end up in these cults have predictable upbringings and if we can figure out how to intervene early enough these issues will become part of history and not of present.Edit: Since this has blown up here is the TedX talk I referenced:
I should point out that he also dated an FBI operative for years where she got intelligence out of him including KKK weapons stashes, plans, names, numbers, etc. He was not just "some kkk member" he was really high up there. Then she rolled him and worked partly with the FBI until his death. So his only real girlfriend up until that point ended up being a fed. It's really cool that he came out of this disaster life a pretty good dude.
