The Gary Null Show – 08.18.15

Having grown up in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles, Reverend James Stern is an African American pastor and civil rights activist devoted to racial justice and reconciliation between the Blacks, Whites and other races.  He is the founder of No Color Inc and Racial Reconciliation. His community work has included  facilitating dialogues between the black community and Korean shop owners following the 1992 LA riots, brokering a truce between the Crips and the Bloods and founding a community banking system within the NAACP. In addition, James has a particularly unique history. Having been incarcerated in Mississippi for mail fraud he found himself sharing a prison cell with the former Ku Klux Klan wizard and recruiting officer Edgar Ray Killen. Previously Killen had been sentenced to 60 years for masterminding the murders of three civil rights workers in 1964.  That story later became dramatized in the film Mississippi Burning. During the course of James’ and Killen’s developing relationship, James became the klansman’s confessor and Killen confided many secrets in conversation and letters about the Klan and its history that remain relatively unknown.   His website is JamesHStern.com