Richard Harris, pastor of Living Hope Community Church in Lakeland, wrote "One Nation Under Curse" about his days as a member of the KKK in Indiana and how he was called to his religious faith.
By Cary McMullen
LEDGER RELIGION EDITOR
The photo shows a skinny, shaggy-haired teenager with huge 1970s-era glasses. He's wearing a white satin robe and on it is the insignia of the Ku Klux Klan.
The Rev. Richard C. Harris shakes his head slightly.
"It's hard to believe it was really me because I don't have those beliefs anymore," he said.
Harris has a lot of memorabilia from his years in the Klan - the white robe of a county officer, the red robe of a state officer, old manuals showing the secret passwords, signs and countersigns exchanged by Klansmen, racist propaganda. The one thing he doesn't have is the green robe of the Grand Dragon, or statewide chief, of Indiana, an office he held for two years as a young man.
On the day he quit the Klan, just 24 hours after undergoing a religious conversion, he gave the robe back to the man who recruited him.
Harris, pastor of Living Hope Community Church in Lakeland, has been out of the Klan for more than 30 years now. He has been speaking out against the Klan and its racism for a long time, but he just published a book about his years in the KKK, "One Nation Under Curse," which has landed him guest appearances on numerous nationally syndicated radio talk shows.
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