The president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference led a court-ordered race relations seminar Saturday for four former Ku Klux Klansmen, and said the response was better than he'd expected. ``I didn't anticipate the tremendous experience we had,'' the Rev. Joseph Lowery of Atlanta said after he and other SCLC representatives met for two hours with the ex-Klansmen in a hotel. However, one of the ex-Klansmen, Roger Handley of Steele, called the session ``a wasted two hours.'' ``He didn't change my feelings,'' said Handley. ``I told Lowery he ought to take his message of brotherly love into the projects where there are drugs, rapes and murders.'' Another former Klansman, Terry Tucker of Cullman, called the session ``a learning experience.'' ``We've got a lot more common ground than people would think,'' he said. ``I never have hated blacks and I don't think they hate us.'' The session was ordered last year by U.S. District Judge E.B. Haltom Jr. as part of a settlement of a lawsuit stemming from Klan violence against black marchers in Decatur on May 26, 1979, in which gunfire wounded two whites and two blacks. Black marchers were protesting the conviction of Tommy Lee Hines, a retarded black man found guilty of raping a white woman. Klansmen attacked the marchers and shots were fired, wounding four people. As part of the court settlement, the men were ordered to leave the Klan, perform community service and pay varying fines. Lowery said he talked to the four ``about the oneness of the human family, self-respect, the economics of race _ how all poor people are taken advantage of, about the futility of violence and violent resistance to racial progress, how darkness can't hold back the dawn.'' Cross-burnings have been a dreaded symbol of the KKK over the years, but Lowery said he told them ``the cross is a symbol of our faith, and we hope it would be used for that.'' Tucker finished serving a two-month prison sentence for the violence in March 1989 and said he's had no contact with the Klan since. ``I feel there are different ways of going about things,'' he said. As for his role in the Decatur melee, Tucker said: ``I probably was just a young person sowing bad oats, that's all.'' Another of the four attending the seminar, Doug Berryhill of Huntsville, said it was ``a productive meeting and I learned quite a bit.'' Herbert Campbell of Tuscumbia, using a newspaper to shield his face from news cameras, was asked if he learned anything. ``I learned to keep a newspaper with me,'' he said. Handley said he would have no reservations about rejoining the Klan. A fifth Klansman, Derane Godfrey of Wylam, was ordered to attend the session but didn't show up. Elizabeth Johnson, a lawyer from the Montgomery-based Southern Poverty Law Center, which brought the lawsuit against the Klan, said she wasn't sure what would be done about Godfrey's absence. Lowery said that at the end of the two-hour course, all but one of those present held hands while prayers were offered. He declined to say which one. Among the blacks at the session were Lowery and his wife, Evelyn; an SCLC aide, Ralph Worrell of Atlanta; the Rev. John Nettles of Gadsden, Alabama SCLC president, and the Rev. Abraham Woods, president of the Birmingham SCLC chapter.
