'I deserved to die'

(Louise Krafft/Special to the Press-Register)Humble of manner at 60, Thomas A. Tarrants III spends his days in stark contrast to those of his violent youth, when he wielded a machine gun as a member of the Ku Klux Klan and was convicted of an attempted bombing. "I was filled with rage," he says of his younger years. Now president of the C.S. Lewis Institute in suburban Washington, D.C., the Mobile native mentors those looking to grow closer to God.

Tommy Tarrants did plenty of bad in his life and saw cohorts killed along the way. Eventually, Scripture changed his life and helped him earn forgiveness.

SPRINGFIELD, Va. -- Soft- spoken, humble of manner, Thomas A. Tarrants III leans back in his office chair in suburban Washington, D.C., surrounded by books on religion and philosophy, and looks down at a newspaper headline from Nov. 28, 1968: "Tarrants Found Guilty, Sentenced to 30 Years."

The 60-year old sees a mugshot of himself at age 21 next to the story:

"A self-styled guerrilla waging a 'holy crusade' against a 'Communist-Jewish conspiracy' was convicted Wednesday night of the attempted bombing of the home of a Jewish businessman."

He is silent a long time. "I feel shame and disgust," he says. "You can see what a head case I was."

Today, he is president of the C.S. Lewis Institute, a nondenominational organization with the motto "Discipleship of heart and mind." His life is a stark contrast to the violent bigotry of his youth.

He explains that his work includes mentoring the C.S. Lewis Fellows, men and women who come to the institute to deepen their understanding of spiritual matters.

In his initial lecture to the fellows, he says, he uses his own trials as "an example of the life-changing power of God's grace." He tells them about his boyhood in Mobile, the sin of hatred that consumed him, and his salvation in a jail cell.

His listeners must surely find it hard to envision him as a kid raising his hand to grab the throat of a Jewish classmate or a gun to blast into homes of black families.

"I was filled with rage," Tarrants says.

In his 1979 memoir, "The Conversion of a Klansman: The Story of a Former Ku Klux Klan Terrorist," Tarrants sketched out his slide toward vehement hatred of Jews and black people.

A 1967 police mugshot shows Tarrants, who by 1968 would be sentenced to 30 years in prison for an attempted Klan bombing of a Jewish man's home in Mississippi.

While he was aware of Jewish people in Mobile - he describes a grammar-school crush on a Jewish girl and says his grandmother worked for a jewelry store owned by Jews - he knew nothing of Jews personally, nor the tenets of their religion.

As a teen he became a loner, he says, alienated from his family -- "I hated my father" -- and was adrift. He relished firearms and bought a handgun, sawed-off shotgun and machine gun with money from after-school jobs, and stored them in his bedroom.

In recent years, he says, when seeing stories of alienated kids who explode, such as the massacres at Columbine and Virginia Tech, he glimpses something of his own youth. "I was a problem waiting to happen," he says.

It was the anti-Red fervor of the 1950s and'60s, and a conviction that the Jews were behind an international Communist conspiracy, that focused Tarrants' rage.

He devoured propaganda literature about an alleged Jewish plot to control the world, such as "The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion." He listened to tapes by Wesley Swift, a Klan expositor who gave rise to the neo-Nazi Aryan Nation.

He eventually linked up with a racist political outfit named the National States Rights Party. "A lot of our meetings took place in cars, walking, talking. There was a great paranoia about tapping of the phone," he says.

Spurred on by those connections, he says, he set out on several drives through Mobile's black neighborhoods, shooting into people's homes. "Our hope and dream was that a race war would come," he says.

He hung out with members of a secret paramilitary troop, the Minutemen. He became versed in guerrilla warfare.

"I thought I was a Christian fighting against the Communist-Jewish conspiracy," he says sadly. "It was a noble thing. I was doing it for God and country."

In the fall of 1963, the integration of Murphy High School proved to Tarrants, a student there, that his world was being turned upside down.

He agitated at the school for resistance. Then, when not enough resistance came,
he angrily called the office of Gov. George Wallace and left a message asking for intervention. A response came from the FBI, which called his home looking for him.

He was convinced, at the time, that his home telephone had been tapped. He was
suspended from Murphy for 10 days.

"'The Jews were behind it.' The message sells in times of social upheaval," he says,
thinking back.

By 1967, Tarrants was arranging meetings in Tuscaloosa with Robert Shelton, imperial wizard of the United Klans of America.

Tarrants also headed to Mississippi and met with the imperial wizard of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, Sam Bowers, and joined up with him.

An application for the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan stated, in part: "We do not accept Jews, because they reject Christ, and, through the machinations of their International Banking Cartel, are at the root center of what we call Communism today.

"We do not accept Papists, because they bow to a Roman dictator. ... We do not accept Turks, Mongols, Tarters, Orientals, Negroes, nor any other person whose native background or culture is foreign to the Anglo-Saxon system of government by responsible, free individual citizens."

He had been grievously misdirected, he says now.

Even in the midst of committing violent crimes, he says, he felt certain that he would go to heaven. "I went about feeling like I had had my ticket punched," he says. "I had made a profession of faith. But I had no change of heart, of life."

He was unbowed in that arrogance, even after being convicted in 1968 of the attempted bombing of the home of Meyer Davidson, a Jewish man in Meridian, Miss.

Placed in solitary confinement at Mississippi's Parchman penitentiary following a brief escape, Tarrants began to plumb his soul.

It was in a 6-by-9-foot jail cell -- "reading was the only thing that kept me from going crazy ... cra-zi-er" -- that he began to reflect on the meaning of his life. He took to heart the words of Socrates: "The unexamined life is not worth living."

He embraced Matthew 16:26: "For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?" He says, "I fell on my knees and prayed and felt a thousand-
pound weight lifted from me."

Thus began what he describes as "a startling transformation."

Others came to believe that Tarrants was a changed man and spoke on his behalf, including Al Binder, a Mississippi lawyer who was Jewish and influential in political circles.

In December 1976, Tarrants got out of Parchman on a work-release program that enabled him to enroll at the University of Mississippi. Three years later, he published his memoir.

Knowing that the Klan would call him a traitor and possibly try to harm him, Tarrants moved to Washington, D.C. He completed a master's degree in divinity and a doctorate in ministry, and became a clergyman and spiritual counselor.

When he looks back over his life, he realizes that he had close calls along the way.

When he dropped the homemade bomb of 29 sticks of dynamite on that Meridian driveway, nothing happened.