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° . . . S @ £0-380 (Rev. 5-8-£1) (Indicate Cage. name of newscager, city ang state) OXVILLE JOURNAL OXVILLE, TN ee Jou: Friday, Va /2.1/AO Work against Klan. g3,°°"° devastated his life, Delmar De mis Says ~ ne, _ -S samt 2 7S Eee eee eo See eal =. et it gg = = . =. wee es OT Sa rg = Ta ER ee ave Journal staff . SEVIERVILLE — When Delmar Dennis was a young man in Mississippi, he joined the Ku Klux Klan, became an informant for the FBI and helped put away the killers of three civil rights workers. That good deed has come close to ruining him, he sa . wt has devastated my life. I was ordained a min- ister at the age of 18, and people I thought were my friends turned on me and never were my friends again,” he said. “I have had a very hard time making a living, and just about when everybody forgets about it, something else comes up. The 25th anniver- sary of something, the movie ‘Mississippi Burning, and now this.” “This” is the arrest this week of Byron de la Beckwith for the 1963 murder of Medgar Evers. A long-overlooked statement Dennis made in a book published in 1975 finally got noticed this year, and Dennis will be a major witness in Beckwith’s trial this summer. These days Dennis, who owns a printing company in Sevier County, has gone back into the ministry. He wears clerical garb and pastors a new Reform Church congregation that meets in a Pigeon Forge moteL He is dreading going back to Jackson to testify. “Tl be doing a lot of praying to get ready for that,” he said, He has been long been active in conservative e politics, and in 1984 was a candidate for president-on the ultra-right American -Party*ticket.-But being a conservative Christian identified with the civil right