Meet the Texan who inspired Spike Lee’s ‘BlacKkKlansman’
The El Pasoan has written book about infiltration of KKK as undercover officer
Ron Stallworth is a nononsense kind of guy.
The Chicago-born Texan made headlines in 2014 when he published “Black Klansman,” a book detailing how he, as an AfricanAmerican, infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan while working undercover for the Colorado Springs, Colo., police department in the late ’70s. His experiences are in the news again with the release of Spike Lee’s latest film, “BlacKkKlansman,” opening Friday. It’s based on Stallworth’s book.
But ask the retired police sergeant why he bothered to respond to a classified ad that the KKK had placed in the local paper, an act that snowballed into a sevenmonth clandestine operation, and he has a simple, crisp answer: “I responded to the ad because it was my job.”
During a phone interview from his home in El Paso, Stallworth, 65, says it never occurred to him to do anything else. “As an intelligence officer, if you had any
intelligence on any activity that we deemed to be a threat to the city, obviously, seeing the Klan ad, I viewed it as a potential threat,” he continued.
He wasn’t sure anyone would answer. “I was surprised by getting a phone call with the caller asking to speak to me by name, as opposed to my undercover name,” said Stallworth, who’s coming to Katy on Aug. 23 for a Q&A session at the Alamo Drafthouse. “That’s when I realized that I had signed my real name and it could have been a mistake, but it didn’t pan out that way. In fact, it helped.
“It helped me to accomplish what I needed to accomplish. I gained a membership card, a membership certificate and got to have a lot of fun at David Duke’s expense.”
Fooling David Duke
Part of the intrigue of the movie is seeing how Stallworth snookered then-Klan leader Duke, with whom he had several phone conversations. Those calls with Duke, who insisted he could always tell the difference between a black and a white person on the phone, and other Klan members often provide moments of levity that don’t necessarily often occur in police investigations.
“In the book, I talk about how I would be on the phone talking to various Klan members, pretending to be a white supremacist like them, and my sergeant would be literally falling out of his chair, down on one knee laughing, very red in the face, losing his breath. He would have to run out of the office to gain his composure,” Stallworth said.
Separately, Stallworth, played by John David Washington (Denzel’s son) in the film, once was also assigned as Duke’s bodyguard when the Klansman visited Colorado Springs, though Duke (Topher Grace) had no idea whom he was really dealing with.
But the main investigation’s subterfuge couldn’t take place only on the phone. The local chapter needed to meet Stallworth, and that’s where one of the cop’s white colleagues, an undercover narcotics cop played by Adam Driver, became part of the operation. That character’s name is Flip Zimmerman, though the real partner, known as Chuck, declined to participate in either the book or the movie.
Stallworth says that neither he, Chuck nor any of the other detectives felt particularly afraid for their safety. “We were experienced undercover cops,” he said. “The probability of getting hurt is always there, but you have a job to do. You go out and do it to the best of your ability, and, hopefully, you’re on top of the situation, you’re in control and nobody gets hurt, including the bad guy.”
If his family had any reservations, they held no sway over him. “I don’t give a damn what my family thought or thinks,” he said. “I have a job to do, and I don’t ask anybody’s permission and didn’t ask anybody’s permission, or ask their opinion. Their opinion had no relevance to me.”
Movie diverges from life
As with many films based on actual incidents, not everything on screen happened in real life.
Lee and co-writers Charlie Wachtel, David Rabinowitz and Kevin Willmott gave Stallworth a girlfriend, Patrice, who was deeply involved in the Colorado Springs black-power movement. They also made the Flip character a nonobservant Jew, adding a layer of emotional conflict for Flip who, as the fictionalized Stallworth reminds him in the movie, has “skin in the game,” too, when dealing with a group like the Klan.
The real Stallworth says he had no problems with any of that.
“I was intrigued by (the Jewish angle). I thought it was a good angle and was fully in support of it. The Patrice thing, I didn’t find out until I got a script to read and learned that she had been written in. I had no problems with what Spike did in the creation of the movie because it all worked,” he said. “My only concern was that I hoped that they wouldn’t go around and Hollywood-ize it by having cops doing foolish, stupid, illegal, irresponsible things like a lot of movies and TV shows.”
Though the trailer for “BlacKkKlansman” makes it seem more like a nostalgic, comedic lark, it’s actually serious in tone and, unsurprisingly, Lee makes explicit political connections with what’s going on today. That doesn’t bother Stallworth either.
“I made those comparisons in my book,” he said. “Spike did a better job of it because he has the visual craft.”
Back in Texas
After some time working in Utah, Stallworth has been living in El Paso for the past two years. He has fond memories of the place.
“Growing up in El Paso was a wonderful experience,” he said. “Even though we’re a Southern city in a Southern state, we didn’t experience the violence that was going on in the South. … To us, that was literally a realityTV show on the nightly news.
“It feels real good being back,” he continued. “It’s a changed city from the one I left in 1972. It’s grown, for one thing, significantly. To me, it’s a much better community than it was when I left in ’72.”