American Notes Tennessee

Talk about strange bedfellows. Even David Duke, the blow-dried Louisiana legislator and former Ku Klux Klansman, must have been taken aback when a black Pentecostal church in Memphis invited him to speak at a rally to raise money for a gymnasium to serve inner-city black youths. "Duke draws a crowd, he has a message and he says he's a Christian," explained Jimmy Boyd, the owner of a local gospel radio station, who arranged the event.

But Duke is also an ambitious politician who is a candidate for Governor of Louisiana, a state with a large black vote. At the rally at a downtown convention center he delivered a typically bombastic Save Our Nation spiel, including his usual appeal to overhaul welfare and do away with quotas and set-aside programs for minority businessmen. The rally drew a meager audience of 30 people and was pitiful as a fund raiser. Duke, however, profited handsomely: he got a chance to soften his racist image without saying anything new.