Neither he nor Mr. Lowe seem to have any personal regard for each other. Asked whether they might keep in touch when this is all over, Mr. Griffin shot back, "That's not going to happen." But they have agreed to be allies in legal combat.

"The way I look at it, he has to do a good job for me," Mr. Lowe said in a telephone interview. He erupted in laughter when he said that until he met Mr. Griffin he had had no idea there even were black lawyers. "If he doesn't win, people are going to say, 'Yup, that's what you get for taking an African-American lawyer.' Everybody will know I got sold down the river by the A.C.L.U."

Mr. Griffin offered a similar explanation, with a similar undercurrent of scorn-drenched humor. "I told him, 'If I fail in my representation of you, then you can walk out of here and say: "Oh, he just messed up. That's how 'they' are." Humor and Anguish

In a two-hour interview here, Mr. Griffin, a slight man with a style of dress that might be described as slightly muted "Miami Vice," evinced flashes of humor and anguish over his decision to represent Mr. Lowe. The road that brought them together was laid a few months ago, when the new executive director of the Texas chapter of the A.C.L.U., Jay Jacobson, consulted a list of volunteer lawyers.

Mr. Jacobson said he did not know at the time that Mr. Griffin was black, though he added that that would not have dissuaded him from making the call. Mr. Griffin, a Galveston lawyer who has handled dozens of race-discrimination and race-harassment cases, said he would have violated his conscience if he had turned down the request.

"In our role as lawyers, we're not God," he said. "We recognize rules and principles of law. And if lawyers backed off because someone is unpopular or hated, then our whole system of justice would just fall apart."

In the case against Mr. Lowe, the Texas Commission on Human Rights has been seeking a court order to compel him to turn over membership and mailing lists, financial documents and other records pertaining to the group, an offshoot of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, a Klan branch based in Harrison, Ark. Spotlight on Vidor