THE REAL Blackkklansman
HOW AN AFRICAN-AMERICAN DETECTIVE INFILTRATED THE KKK
When Ron Stallworth was a child growing up in Texas and someone called him a n--, his mother encouraged him to respond with a good beat down.
So, it was with much irony, that Stallworth, a former police detective who is the protagonist in the recently released Spike Lee film, Blackkklansman, wielded the Nword himself when he launched his investigation into the Colorado Springs Klan in 1978.
It would become an undercover role that required Stallworth to submerge his identity as a black man and become a white supremacist, spewing the kind of vile language that he despised.
“To deal with people weaponizing the word, you have to talk like them, act like them and think like them. It is a language of hate and that is the language they the live by. They speak it all the time,” said Stallworth, who wrote the book, “Black Klansman: Race, Hate, and the Undercover Investigation of a Lifetime,” upon which the movie is based.
“As a black man in America, I know what it’s like to be called a n-- and what runs through my mind when I hear the word spoken against me.”
Blackkklansman opened last weekend to coincide with the first anniversary of the white nationalists’ rally in Charlottesville in which a woman was killed when an avowed neo-nazi drove his car into a crowd of counterprotesters.
The N-word, the subject of much debate this week about whether there is a tape of U.S. President Donald Trump using the racist slur, became Stallworth’s ticket into the Colorado Klan.
Stallworth recalled his first conversation with Ken O’dell, a Colorado Springs chapter local organizer of the Klan who unknowingly dialed the undercover line, after Stallworth responded to a Klan ad in the classified section of the local newspaper.
“Why do you want to join the Klan?” O’dell asked.
Stallworth told O’dell: “Well, I hate n--, Jews, Mexicans, spics, chinks and anyone else that does not have pure white Aryan blood in their veins.”
O’dell was impressed. “‘You are just the kind of person we are looking for,” he said. “When can we meet?’ ”
At that point, Stallworth formulated a plan to find a white detective to play him in person at Klan meetings. But for the next seven months, a black detective would be “the voice” who spoke to Klan members by phone, outwitting them at every turn.
Stallworth didn’t like using racist language, but he acknowledged “having fun making fools of these guys while getting valuable intelligence information.”
Although no individuals were arrested, the investigation gathered enough information to stop three cross burnings, uncover Klan members in the military and the North American Aerospace Defense Command, and thwart a plan by Klan members to bomb two gay bars in Denver.
Stallworth, 65, who was born in Chicago and grew up in Texas, said Lee’s film connected “the historical thread from the Confederacy to Charlottesville, David Duke and Donald Trump.”
“People need to realize this is a threat to the very fabric of American society.”
In his investigation, Stallworth concluded that David Duke, the Grand Wizard of the KKK who endorsed Trump, “is synonymous with hate and a lightning rod in the current political and media landscape.”
Stallworth recalled calling Duke during his investigation, after he came across a phone number billed as “The Voice of the Klan.” He dialed the number, not expecting what happened next.
“Damned, if David didn’t pick up the line,” Stallworth recalled, calling Duke by his first name. “He laughed and said, ‘I’m the Voice of the Klan. He identified himself as the Grand Wizard, the director.’ ”
And Stallworth proceeded to dupe Duke, a man who espoused that whites, like himself, were a superior race.
Duke, Stallworth recalled, was very pleasant to talk to “when he wasn’t talking race. But inevitably the subject of race would come up. Dr. Jekyll turned into Mr. Hyde and the monster in him came out and he said all the vile things about racial groups and people of colour, ethnicities and people, as they put it, who were not pure Aryan white.”
During one phone conversation, when Duke gave Stallworth a lesson in how he could tell a person’s colour on the phone by the way they talked and pronounced certain words.
“He never picked up on the fact that one of his pure Aryan white Klansmen was ... a proud black man of African descent.”