July 5, 2023 • 19 mins
The Moore's Ford lynchings, or the 1946 Georgia lynching, refer to the brutal murders of four young African Americans by a mob of white men on July 25, 1946.
The incident occurred near Moore's Ford Bridge in Walton and Oconee counties, Georgia. The victims were two married couples: George W. and Mae Murray Dorsey, and Roger and Dorothy Malcolm. The case attracted national attention, prompting large protests in Washington, D.C., and New York City. President Harry Truman created the President's Committee on Civil Rights and introduced anti-lynching legislation in Congress, but it was blocked by the Southern Democratic bloc.
The FBI investigated the case in 1946 but could not find sufficient evidence to charge anyone. The cold case was reopened in the 1990s, but the state of Georgia and the FBI closed their cases in December 2017 without any prosecution.
In this episode of Zone 7, Crime Scene Investigator, Sheryl McCollum narrates the story of the meeting with ex-KKK imperial wizard, Johnny Lee Clary. Through a surprising connection with Reverend Watts, a local NAACP leader, Clary experiences a profound transformation, revealing the strength of compassion and resilience in the face of prejudice.
Also shared is the story of a student, Pho, grappling with the reality of law enforcement. Highlighting real-life instances of personal change and the power of love
Show Notes:
- [0:00] Welcome back to Zone 7 with Crime Scene Investigator, Sheryl McCollum.
- [0:16] Recap of the investigation into the Morse Ford Bridge cold case involving a civil rights crime
- [1:10] In a bold move, Sheryl arranges a meeting with ex-KKK imperial wizard, Johnny Lee Clary, to gather information about the cold case
- [2:00] Sheryl introduces Pho, her student who will be joining in a meeting with Johnny Lee Clary
- [4:10] Unpacking the realities of law enforcement work, where allegiance is to justice rather than personal preferences
- [7:21] At age 14, Johnny Lee Clary joined the clan
- [7:55] Introduction to Reverend Wade Watts via Johnny's story
- [8:24] Sheryl narrates the surprising story of Johnny Lee’s interaction with Reverend Watts, a tale of confrontation met with unexpected kindness
- [11:24] The memorable first meeting of Johnny Lee and Reverend Watts in 1979 which played a vital role in Johnny’s transformation is recollected
- [12:40] A change of heart for Johnny
- [16:51] Drawing from personal experiences, Sheryl underscores the power of love and goodness in overcoming preconceived notions
- [18:00] An uplifting update about Pho’s journey from student to successful bail enforcement officer in Georgia
- [18:55] “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.” -Reverend Wade Watts
- Thanks for listening to another episode! If you’re loving the show and want to help grow the show, please head over to Itunes and leave a rating and review! How to Leave an Apple Podcast Review: First, Open the podcast app on your iPhone, Mac, or iPad. Then, hit the “Search” tab at the bottom right-hand corner of the page and search for Zone 7. Select the podcast, scroll down to find the subheading “Ratings & Reviews”. and select “Write a Review.” Next, select the number of stars you’d like to leave. Please choose 5 stars! Using the text box which says “Title,” write a title for your review. Then in the text box, write the review itself. The review can be up to 300 words long, but doesn’t need to be much more than: “Love the show! Thanks!” or Once you’re done select “Send” in the upper right-hand corner.
---
Sheryl “Mac” McCollum is an Emmy Award winning CSI, a writer for CrimeOnLine, Forensic and Crime Scene Expert for Crime Stories with Nancy Grace, and a CSI for a metro Atlanta Police Department. She is the co-author of the textbook., Cold Case: Pathways to Justice. Sheryl is also the founder and director of the Cold Case Investigative Research Institute, a collaboration between universities and colleges that brings researchers, practitioners, students and the criminal justice community together to advance techniques in solving cold cases and assist families and law enforcement with solvability factors for unsolved homicides, missing persons, and kidnapping cases.
You can connect and learn more about Sheryl’s work by visiting the CCIRI website https://coldcasecrimes.org
Social Links:
- Email: cold
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
This episode Tonight does not have an antidote, because the
whole thing is an antidote. It was Tuesday, August the eighteenth,
two thousand and nine, at high noon at the Microtel
(00:22):
Hotel in Lawrenceville, Georgia. Me, several students and a few
experts were about to meet with the ex Imperial Wizard
of the Ku Klux Klan. Now let me give you
a little backstory. While investigating the moors Ford Bridge cold
case civil rights case, we could find zero evidence that
the Klan had orchestrated or called for a hit on
(00:46):
the Malcolms and the Dorseys, meaning their murder had to
come from either another state or a leader outside or
inside Monroe, Georgia. To make certain that we had looked
everywhere and left no stone unturned, I contacted the KKK
at their eight hundred number. I asked if anyone would
(01:09):
be willing to speak to me about the moor's Ford
Bridge Lyncheon. I never got a call back, so I
reached out to Johnny Lee Claric. Johnny Lee had joined
the Klan as a young boy and rose up to
the ranks to the Imperial Wizard. He said that he
would meet with me He said that he would keep
(01:29):
it a small group only he wouldn't meet with more
than ten of us. He said he had gotten several
death threats, credible death threats. The FBI confirmed they were
credible death threats, so he said that he would only
give me the location the morning that we were going
to meet. At the time, I had several students that
(01:51):
were going into law enforcement in some capacity, and I
also had a couple of students that had a very
similar background to him, and I thought it would be
imperative that they meet and hear his story. I knew
that hearing from him and his intel into the klu
klutz Klan would be invaluable as future investigators, but I
(02:15):
had no idea what was fixing to happen in that room.
I had one student we called her Foe because she
would jokingly say, I'm your enemy, I'm everybody's enemy. I'm
a foe, So that's what we called her now. Her
background and Johnny Lee were similar in this regard. They
(02:35):
both lost a father to violence, both of them were
thrown out of their house by their mother, both had
gang affiliations, and both had joined a gang, not because
they wanted to necessarily be in that gang, but it
was for survival. When I sat down with my students
and told them the opportunity they were fixing to have
(03:00):
right at me, and she says, Matt, what do you mean,
ex Imperial Wizard? She was mad. She wasn't happy at all.
She thought you had finally crossed the line. You have
taken me, you know, out in the middle of nowhere.
You've had me cutting down trees. You've had me processing
(03:21):
scenes with hogs that you brought from somewhere and a
cow head that you brought from somewhere. You made me
get involved with some elements of these cases where the
black market was involved, and you made me take care
of a baby tiger. But in her estimation, I had
finally snapped if I thought that she was fixing to
(03:42):
go meet with the Klan in some secret location that
only he was going to tell us about. We had
a real honest conversation, and I told her that she
had a great career ahead of her, and that in
this business you do not get to pick and choose
who you work for. You don't get to pick and
choose who you advocate for, who you protect. When those
(04:05):
nine one one calls come in, you go, and if
that person happens to hate you, you protect them anyway.
You care about what happens to them anyway. So begrudgingly
she went. We loaded up the bus, we waited for
the call, and it came and we headed to the hotel.
We all sat down. Everybody was a little nervous, including
(04:28):
Johnny Lee. Nobody really knew what to expect, so I thought,
let's just get to business. So I was like, Johnny Lee,
was this crime a clan hit? And he looks at
me and he smiles, and he says, can I talk
to y'all first, tell y'all a little bit about myself
before we get right into the moors for a bridge lynching.
(04:51):
And immediately everybody kind of relaxed a little bit, and
I was like, of course. And that's when something extraordinarily
started to happen. Hearts changed, It's all I can tell you.
Because Johnny Lee started to talk and Foe was watching him,
and again she was mad, and she was kind of
giving that expression like you can go ahead and say
(05:11):
whatever you feel like saying, but I don't know if
I'm gonna buy it or not. So Johnny Lee starts
to say that when he was eleven years old, he
watched his father pick up a forty five caliber pistol
and blow his head off, and that his mama had
a boyfriend move into his daddy's house with her and
she basically told him get out at eleven years old. Now,
(05:35):
just one of those things would have been traumatic, your
mama moving another man in your dad's house, being thrown
out of your house at eleven, and then the unimaginable
scene of your father taking his own life in front
of you, some of his blood splattering on you. Well,
I instinctively glanced over at Foe, and she looked at
(05:59):
him as someone that understood and a little bit of sadness,
and her shoulders were very relaxed now. And then he
said that the only thing he knew to do was
get on the bus and go to his sisters in California. Well,
her sister was living with a boyfriend too, that was
a drug dealer, and he beat on him. He beat
on him and told his sister, I'm going to make
(06:20):
a man out of him. Foe knew something about that too.
She's visibly connecting with him. She's got tears in her eyes. Now,
and Johnny continues, and he tells her and the rest
of us. When he was just fourteen years old, he
saw a man talking on TV about how white people
were superior. And he said he had never heard that before.
(06:43):
All he had ever been told is he was nothing,
He was nobody, he was never going to mount anything,
and yet this man on TV was telling him the
exact opposite. He felt like the man was talking directly
to him. So, as a fourteen year old boy, he
wrote the man a fan letter. That man sent somebody
to his house, and that man said, if you want
to change your life, if you don't want to be hungry,
(07:05):
if you want to have a steak dinner tonight, if
you want to have brand new clothes, if you want
to have a family that's going to take care of
you and live in a nice house, come getting this
limousine with me right now. And Johnny Lee Clary did.
And the man that he saw on TV was David Duke.
So at fourteen years old, he's joined the Klan. Now.
(07:31):
In nineteen seventy nine, at just twenty two years old,
Johnny Lee, living in Oklahoma, was slated by the clan
to debate Reverend Wade Watts on TV. Johnny Lee said
he was expecting somebody, you know, militant and angry and
was going to come in there and call him names
(07:51):
and cuss him out. And he said, the door opened
and this really nicely dressed kind man walks through the
door and says, how are you, John I'm Reverend Wade
Watts and stuck his hand out and Johnny shook his
hand and then immediately pulled back because he knew he
had just violated one of the codes of the clan,
(08:12):
and that is you do not touch a person of
another race. And Johnny said that Reverend Watts said to
him that day, I love you, and Jesus loves you too.
You're my brother. Well, Johnny Lee was telling the students
he didn't know what to do with that, because nobody
had ever said that to him, especially somebody that he disliked,
(08:35):
somebody that he had spoke openly against. So Johnny Lee
was supposed to stop Reverend Watts from registering people to vote,
and Reverend Watts was over the NAACP there in Oklahoma,
and he was supposed to shut him down. So he
did several things. He took a bunch of trash and
a bunch of clansmen and they went over there and
(08:56):
they threw trash all over his yard. Then one night
they went over and they stood in his yard in
their full clan regalia. Well, Reverend Watts opened the door
and he said, hey, boys, Halloween ain't for four months.
Well at this point, my students were like, what who
(09:16):
is this guy? Well then Johnny Lee said that wasn't
good enough, that he needed to call him and make
sure he knew you need to be afraid of me.
So Johnny Lee calls him and he says, let me
tell you something. We're coming for you. You need to
be afraid of us. And he said he disguised his voice.
He was talking, you know, real different on the phone.
(09:38):
And Reverend Watts didn't miss a beat. He said, hey there, Johnny,
I just will remind you I love you and God
loves you too. And Johnny Lee was like, I've got
to do something. I've got to get his attention because
I'm supposed to be in charge of this area for
the clan, and I mean, he's making a joke out
(09:59):
of me. So Johnny Lee Cleary burn his church down,
and when he called him after burning his church down.
Reverend Watts said, Dear Lord, please forgive Johnny Johnny Lee
has left with this. How can this man care anything
about me? How can he want the Good Lord to
(10:21):
forgive me? How can he tell me I'm his brother?
How can he tell me he loves me? So Johnny's
walking down the street one day with four or five
of his clansmen and they see Reverend Watts sitting in
a restaurant and he's just been served. Johnny Lee walks
in with his clansmen in tow and Reverend Watts has
got a fork in one hand and a knife in
(10:41):
the other, and he's fixing to have his fried chicken dinner.
And Johnny Lee tells the students and the experts that
he looked at Reverend Watts and he said, whatever you
do to that chicken, I'm gonna do to you. And
Reverend Watts dropped the knife and dropped the fork, and
picked the chicken up and kissed it. And Johnny Lee said,
(11:03):
even the klansmen fell out laughing, and he just stormed
out of the restaurant and got them out on the sidewalk.
And it's like, I'm going to suspend every one of you.
I can't believe y'all are laughing, and you know, letting
him have the last word essentially. Well, Johnny Lee thought
back about the first time they met in nineteen seventy nine,
(11:24):
and he said, after that episode where they were debating
on the issues of race, he said, I was walking
out and Reverend Watts calls me over and his wife
is standing there holding a little baby, and he said
to Johnny Lee, I want you to look at this
little baby. Her daddy's black and her mama's white. She's
(11:44):
a little mixed baby, and you can't tell me in
your heart that you hate her. And Johnny Lee said
he was kind of just caught off guard by that
whole scene, and he looks down at this little baby,
and he said, Reverend kept talking to him, but what
amazed him was that little baby smiled at him. And
(12:06):
he said he got a little choked up and he
couldn't even really say anything else, and he just left.
And all this time, the meeting the little baby, the
throwing the trash, the showing up in their hoods on
his front lawn, the burning his church down, the episode
in the restaurant, through all of it, whenever he saw
Reverend Wade Watts. He would say to him, Johnny, I
(12:29):
love you, and Jesus loves you too. So Johnny Lee
decided at some point he had had a change of
heart and he might need to get out of the clan.
But he wasn't sure how to do that, but he
told us, he said, well, you know, I was going
to give it one more shot, and we might even
need to get with Reverend wattson beat him, like, send
(12:52):
a really clear message, one last thing. So he calls
him up and he said, we're coming to get you,
and Reverend Watts said that'd be fine. How bout if
we meet at Pete's the barbecue joined out on Highway
two seventy four. I'll buy you dinner. In fact, I'll
buy all of you dinner. They got the best ribs
in the state. And Johnny Lee just hung up, just
(13:13):
hung the phone up, and the other clansmen they were like,
what did he say? And Johnny Lee said, he said
he's gonna feed us. He said to meet him at Pete's.
And Johnny Lee said he was sitting at a hotel
and there was a Bible in it, and he grabbed
the bible and he just flipped it open and he
(13:33):
said it turned to Luke chapter fifteen, the Prodigal Son.
He said, he got down on his knees right then
and there, and he said, Okay, God, if you're telling
me that I can turn my life around, that I
can go back, then I'm going to go back, and
I'm going to talk to the man whose church I
burned down. And Johnny Lee contacted Reverend Watts. He said,
(13:56):
I've turned my life around and I'm now a preacher.
And Reverend Watts said, well, Johnny, I'm proud of you, son,
and I love you, and God loves you too. Why
don't you come preach it my church? Now? At this point,
several of the experts and Foe and mysel are all
(14:17):
little terry eye. We've just heard a story about somebody's
heart that was completely changed, whose life was completely changed.
And Reverend Watts has just opened the doors to the
church that this man burnt to the ground and said,
please come back. We want to hear from you from
(14:37):
the pool pit. So Johnny Lee goes. He's nervous, he's
not real sure of the reception he's going to get.
And he preached, and he said he was so moved
by the whole experience. At the end, he offered, if
anybody wants to come forward and devote your life to Christ,
come on, and he said there was a little girl
(14:58):
about fourteen years old that came down front, and he
was like, this is amazing, and that fourteen year old
little girl was that little baby that smiled at him.
In nineteen seventy nine, I think meeting with Johnny Lee
(15:19):
Clary was one of the most important experts that we
have ever met with because it put in perspective for
us when you work a case and you go back
and you actually find evidence, which we did over one
hundred and fifteen different fragments, casings, bullets, or artifacts and
(15:41):
turn them over to the FBI, and there's still no
movement when we reach out to the community and we're
looking for either a deathbed confession maybe or somebody from
the family to come forward to say this gun was
passed down and here's the story. I was told, any
small statement or piece of evidence, you may put some
(16:03):
puzzle pieces together, it may give answers. But what happened
in this case when Claire and Holly and Laura and
Janie and so many other people got involved and started
working this case. It became clear that we probably weren't
going to be able to move this case in the
direction that we wanted. The solvability factors just weren't there. Yes,
(16:28):
we had a nickel from nineteen forty seven, we had
a button from the era. We had bullets and shell
casings from that period. But we couldn't put a gun
in somebody's hand. And even though the jailer, mister Howard
is on our list of people that should have been
looked at more closely, Lloyd Harrison is on the list
of somebody that should have been looked at more closely.
(16:51):
All those things are obvious. But to me, something bigger
and even more important in some ways happened. And that's
to show that love wins. Maybe there were twenty five
people on that bridge, I could name two hundred that
have tried to do something about it. Love wins, good
conquers evil. And in this case, my students got to
(17:14):
meet somebody they originally did not want to meet with.
They thought he was going to be a certain person,
and they found out he joined a gang for the
same reasons that I might have joined a gang to survive.
Because he was eleven, he was fourteen, he was seventeen.
He had no family, no money, no education, no job skills.
(17:38):
And sometimes people that run street games or organized crime
or any of that, they look for desperate people. That's
who they go get. And if you're lucky, like Johnny
Lee Clary, there's a Reverend Wade Watts out there to
save you. I think it's important that I update y'all
(18:01):
on FOE and what she's doing now. She is one
of the best bel enforcement officers in Georgia. She is incredible.
She is finding fugitives all over the place. We all
got together recently and we jokingly told her we've got
(18:21):
to change her nickname from FOE to GPS. So she's
doing really well, and I just wanted y'all listening to
know that's where she wound up and that's what she's doing.
When I think about Morris fort Bridge, the last mass lynching,
I choose to think about Reverend Wade Watts. So I'm
(18:44):
going to end this little antidote by quoting the Reverend
Wade Watts. And this is something that he said to
Johnny Lee Clary. 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.
(19:06):
I'm Cheryl my column and this is its own summon.
H
This episode Tonight does not have an antidote, because the
whole thing is an antidote. It was Tuesday, August the eighteenth,
two thousand and nine, at high noon at the Microtel
(00:22):
Hotel in Lawrenceville, Georgia. Me, several students and a few
experts were about to meet with the ex Imperial Wizard
of the Ku Klux Klan. Now let me give you
a little backstory. While investigating the moors Ford Bridge cold
case civil rights case, we could find zero evidence that
the Klan had orchestrated or called for a hit on
(00:46):
the Malcolms and the Dorseys, meaning their murder had to
come from either another state or a leader outside or
inside Monroe, Georgia. To make certain that we had looked
everywhere and left no stone unturned, I contacted the KKK
at their eight hundred number. I asked if anyone would
(01:09):
be willing to speak to me about the moor's Ford
Bridge Lyncheon. I never got a call back, so I
reached out to Johnny Lee Claric. Johnny Lee had joined
the Klan as a young boy and rose up to
the ranks to the Imperial Wizard. He said that he
would meet with me He said that he would keep
(01:29):
it a small group only he wouldn't meet with more
than ten of us. He said he had gotten several
death threats, credible death threats. The FBI confirmed they were
credible death threats, so he said that he would only
give me the location the morning that we were going
to meet. At the time, I had several students that
(01:51):
were going into law enforcement in some capacity, and I
also had a couple of students that had a very
similar background to him, and I thought it would be
imperative that they meet and hear his story. I knew
that hearing from him and his intel into the klu
klutz Klan would be invaluable as future investigators, but I
(02:15):
had no idea what was fixing to happen in that room.
I had one student we called her Foe because she
would jokingly say, I'm your enemy, I'm everybody's enemy. I'm
a foe, So that's what we called her now. Her
background and Johnny Lee were similar in this regard. They
(02:35):
both lost a father to violence, both of them were
thrown out of their house by their mother, both had
gang affiliations, and both had joined a gang, not because
they wanted to necessarily be in that gang, but it
was for survival. When I sat down with my students
and told them the opportunity they were fixing to have
(03:00):
right at me, and she says, Matt, what do you mean,
ex Imperial Wizard? She was mad. She wasn't happy at all.
She thought you had finally crossed the line. You have
taken me, you know, out in the middle of nowhere.
You've had me cutting down trees. You've had me processing
(03:21):
scenes with hogs that you brought from somewhere and a
cow head that you brought from somewhere. You made me
get involved with some elements of these cases where the
black market was involved, and you made me take care
of a baby tiger. But in her estimation, I had
finally snapped if I thought that she was fixing to
(03:42):
go meet with the Klan in some secret location that
only he was going to tell us about. We had
a real honest conversation, and I told her that she
had a great career ahead of her, and that in
this business you do not get to pick and choose
who you work for. You don't get to pick and
choose who you advocate for, who you protect. When those
(04:05):
nine one one calls come in, you go, and if
that person happens to hate you, you protect them anyway.
You care about what happens to them anyway. So begrudgingly
she went. We loaded up the bus, we waited for
the call, and it came and we headed to the hotel.
We all sat down. Everybody was a little nervous, including
(04:28):
Johnny Lee. Nobody really knew what to expect, so I thought,
let's just get to business. So I was like, Johnny Lee,
was this crime a clan hit? And he looks at
me and he smiles, and he says, can I talk
to y'all first, tell y'all a little bit about myself
before we get right into the moors for a bridge lynching.
(04:51):
And immediately everybody kind of relaxed a little bit, and
I was like, of course. And that's when something extraordinarily
started to happen. Hearts changed, It's all I can tell you.
Because Johnny Lee started to talk and Foe was watching him,
and again she was mad, and she was kind of
giving that expression like you can go ahead and say
(05:11):
whatever you feel like saying, but I don't know if
I'm gonna buy it or not. So Johnny Lee starts
to say that when he was eleven years old, he
watched his father pick up a forty five caliber pistol
and blow his head off, and that his mama had
a boyfriend move into his daddy's house with her and
she basically told him get out at eleven years old. Now,
(05:35):
just one of those things would have been traumatic, your
mama moving another man in your dad's house, being thrown
out of your house at eleven, and then the unimaginable
scene of your father taking his own life in front
of you, some of his blood splattering on you. Well,
I instinctively glanced over at Foe, and she looked at
(05:59):
him as someone that understood and a little bit of sadness,
and her shoulders were very relaxed now. And then he
said that the only thing he knew to do was
get on the bus and go to his sisters in California. Well,
her sister was living with a boyfriend too, that was
a drug dealer, and he beat on him. He beat
on him and told his sister, I'm going to make
(06:20):
a man out of him. Foe knew something about that too.
She's visibly connecting with him. She's got tears in her eyes. Now,
and Johnny continues, and he tells her and the rest
of us. When he was just fourteen years old, he
saw a man talking on TV about how white people
were superior. And he said he had never heard that before.
(06:43):
All he had ever been told is he was nothing,
He was nobody, he was never going to mount anything,
and yet this man on TV was telling him the
exact opposite. He felt like the man was talking directly
to him. So, as a fourteen year old boy, he
wrote the man a fan letter. That man sent somebody
to his house, and that man said, if you want
to change your life, if you don't want to be hungry,
(07:05):
if you want to have a steak dinner tonight, if
you want to have brand new clothes, if you want
to have a family that's going to take care of
you and live in a nice house, come getting this
limousine with me right now. And Johnny Lee Clary did.
And the man that he saw on TV was David Duke.
So at fourteen years old, he's joined the Klan. Now.
(07:31):
In nineteen seventy nine, at just twenty two years old,
Johnny Lee, living in Oklahoma, was slated by the clan
to debate Reverend Wade Watts on TV. Johnny Lee said
he was expecting somebody, you know, militant and angry and
was going to come in there and call him names
(07:51):
and cuss him out. And he said, the door opened
and this really nicely dressed kind man walks through the
door and says, how are you, John I'm Reverend Wade
Watts and stuck his hand out and Johnny shook his
hand and then immediately pulled back because he knew he
had just violated one of the codes of the clan,
(08:12):
and that is you do not touch a person of
another race. And Johnny said that Reverend Watts said to
him that day, I love you, and Jesus loves you too.
You're my brother. Well, Johnny Lee was telling the students
he didn't know what to do with that, because nobody
had ever said that to him, especially somebody that he disliked,
(08:35):
somebody that he had spoke openly against. So Johnny Lee
was supposed to stop Reverend Watts from registering people to vote,
and Reverend Watts was over the NAACP there in Oklahoma,
and he was supposed to shut him down. So he
did several things. He took a bunch of trash and
a bunch of clansmen and they went over there and
(08:56):
they threw trash all over his yard. Then one night
they went over and they stood in his yard in
their full clan regalia. Well, Reverend Watts opened the door
and he said, hey, boys, Halloween ain't for four months.
Well at this point, my students were like, what who
(09:16):
is this guy? Well then Johnny Lee said that wasn't
good enough, that he needed to call him and make
sure he knew you need to be afraid of me.
So Johnny Lee calls him and he says, let me
tell you something. We're coming for you. You need to
be afraid of us. And he said he disguised his voice.
He was talking, you know, real different on the phone.
(09:38):
And Reverend Watts didn't miss a beat. He said, hey there, Johnny,
I just will remind you I love you and God
loves you too. And Johnny Lee was like, I've got
to do something. I've got to get his attention because
I'm supposed to be in charge of this area for
the clan, and I mean, he's making a joke out
(09:59):
of me. So Johnny Lee Cleary burn his church down,
and when he called him after burning his church down.
Reverend Watts said, Dear Lord, please forgive Johnny Johnny Lee
has left with this. How can this man care anything
about me? How can he want the Good Lord to
(10:21):
forgive me? How can he tell me I'm his brother?
How can he tell me he loves me? So Johnny's
walking down the street one day with four or five
of his clansmen and they see Reverend Watts sitting in
a restaurant and he's just been served. Johnny Lee walks
in with his clansmen in tow and Reverend Watts has
got a fork in one hand and a knife in
(10:41):
the other, and he's fixing to have his fried chicken dinner.
And Johnny Lee tells the students and the experts that
he looked at Reverend Watts and he said, whatever you
do to that chicken, I'm gonna do to you. And
Reverend Watts dropped the knife and dropped the fork, and
picked the chicken up and kissed it. And Johnny Lee said,
(11:03):
even the klansmen fell out laughing, and he just stormed
out of the restaurant and got them out on the sidewalk.
And it's like, I'm going to suspend every one of you.
I can't believe y'all are laughing, and you know, letting
him have the last word essentially. Well, Johnny Lee thought
back about the first time they met in nineteen seventy nine,
(11:24):
and he said, after that episode where they were debating
on the issues of race, he said, I was walking
out and Reverend Watts calls me over and his wife
is standing there holding a little baby, and he said
to Johnny Lee, I want you to look at this
little baby. Her daddy's black and her mama's white. She's
(11:44):
a little mixed baby, and you can't tell me in
your heart that you hate her. And Johnny Lee said
he was kind of just caught off guard by that
whole scene, and he looks down at this little baby,
and he said, Reverend kept talking to him, but what
amazed him was that little baby smiled at him. And
(12:06):
he said he got a little choked up and he
couldn't even really say anything else, and he just left.
And all this time, the meeting the little baby, the
throwing the trash, the showing up in their hoods on
his front lawn, the burning his church down, the episode
in the restaurant, through all of it, whenever he saw
Reverend Wade Watts. He would say to him, Johnny, I
(12:29):
love you, and Jesus loves you too. So Johnny Lee
decided at some point he had had a change of
heart and he might need to get out of the clan.
But he wasn't sure how to do that, but he
told us, he said, well, you know, I was going
to give it one more shot, and we might even
need to get with Reverend wattson beat him, like, send
(12:52):
a really clear message, one last thing. So he calls
him up and he said, we're coming to get you,
and Reverend Watts said that'd be fine. How bout if
we meet at Pete's the barbecue joined out on Highway
two seventy four. I'll buy you dinner. In fact, I'll
buy all of you dinner. They got the best ribs
in the state. And Johnny Lee just hung up, just
(13:13):
hung the phone up, and the other clansmen they were like,
what did he say? And Johnny Lee said, he said
he's gonna feed us. He said to meet him at Pete's.
And Johnny Lee said he was sitting at a hotel
and there was a Bible in it, and he grabbed
the bible and he just flipped it open and he
(13:33):
said it turned to Luke chapter fifteen, the Prodigal Son.
He said, he got down on his knees right then
and there, and he said, Okay, God, if you're telling
me that I can turn my life around, that I
can go back, then I'm going to go back, and
I'm going to talk to the man whose church I
burned down. And Johnny Lee contacted Reverend Watts. He said,
(13:56):
I've turned my life around and I'm now a preacher.
And Reverend Watts said, well, Johnny, I'm proud of you, son,
and I love you, and God loves you too. Why
don't you come preach it my church? Now? At this point,
several of the experts and Foe and mysel are all
(14:17):
little terry eye. We've just heard a story about somebody's
heart that was completely changed, whose life was completely changed.
And Reverend Watts has just opened the doors to the
church that this man burnt to the ground and said,
please come back. We want to hear from you from
(14:37):
the pool pit. So Johnny Lee goes. He's nervous, he's
not real sure of the reception he's going to get.
And he preached, and he said he was so moved
by the whole experience. At the end, he offered, if
anybody wants to come forward and devote your life to Christ,
come on, and he said there was a little girl
(14:58):
about fourteen years old that came down front, and he
was like, this is amazing, and that fourteen year old
little girl was that little baby that smiled at him.
In nineteen seventy nine, I think meeting with Johnny Lee
(15:19):
Clary was one of the most important experts that we
have ever met with because it put in perspective for
us when you work a case and you go back
and you actually find evidence, which we did over one
hundred and fifteen different fragments, casings, bullets, or artifacts and
(15:41):
turn them over to the FBI, and there's still no
movement when we reach out to the community and we're
looking for either a deathbed confession maybe or somebody from
the family to come forward to say this gun was
passed down and here's the story. I was told, any
small statement or piece of evidence, you may put some
(16:03):
puzzle pieces together, it may give answers. But what happened
in this case when Claire and Holly and Laura and
Janie and so many other people got involved and started
working this case. It became clear that we probably weren't
going to be able to move this case in the
direction that we wanted. The solvability factors just weren't there. Yes,
(16:28):
we had a nickel from nineteen forty seven, we had
a button from the era. We had bullets and shell
casings from that period. But we couldn't put a gun
in somebody's hand. And even though the jailer, mister Howard
is on our list of people that should have been
looked at more closely, Lloyd Harrison is on the list
of somebody that should have been looked at more closely.
(16:51):
All those things are obvious. But to me, something bigger
and even more important in some ways happened. And that's
to show that love wins. Maybe there were twenty five
people on that bridge, I could name two hundred that
have tried to do something about it. Love wins, good
conquers evil. And in this case, my students got to
(17:14):
meet somebody they originally did not want to meet with.
They thought he was going to be a certain person,
and they found out he joined a gang for the
same reasons that I might have joined a gang to survive.
Because he was eleven, he was fourteen, he was seventeen.
He had no family, no money, no education, no job skills.
(17:38):
And sometimes people that run street games or organized crime
or any of that, they look for desperate people. That's
who they go get. And if you're lucky, like Johnny
Lee Clary, there's a Reverend Wade Watts out there to
save you. I think it's important that I update y'all
(18:01):
on FOE and what she's doing now. She is one
of the best bel enforcement officers in Georgia. She is incredible.
She is finding fugitives all over the place. We all
got together recently and we jokingly told her we've got
(18:21):
to change her nickname from FOE to GPS. So she's
doing really well, and I just wanted y'all listening to
know that's where she wound up and that's what she's doing.
When I think about Morris fort Bridge, the last mass lynching,
I choose to think about Reverend Wade Watts. So I'm
(18:44):
going to end this little antidote by quoting the Reverend
Wade Watts. And this is something that he said to
Johnny Lee Clary. 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.
(19:06):
I'm Cheryl my column and this is its own summon.
H
Host
Sheryl McCollum
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