The black cop who infiltrated the KKK

Updated

In the late 1970s, Ron Stallworth hoodwinked the Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. This is the inside story of how he did it — and why he thinks racism has only gotten worse since then.

Warning: this story includes racist language and imagery that some readers may find confronting.

"I hate niggers, spics, chinks, Jews, Japs and anybody else that doesn't have pure Aryan white blood like I do."

It's October 1978, and Ron Stallworth is spouting hate to the man at the other end of the phone line; a member of the Ku Klux Klan.

He's exactly the kind of guy the Klansman is hoping to recruit.

It's not long before Stallworth is accepted into the Klan's inner circle. He speaks often to its Grand Wizard, is trusted with plans to commit crimes, and is considered so loyal that he's invited to lead his local chapter.

The only problem for the KKK is that Stallworth is an undercover detective — and he's black.

Looking back on it now, Stallworth admits he wouldn't believe it was real if it hadn't happened to him.

"This investigation was incredible — because it actually happened, and because of how it unfolded," he says.

"The burning of a cross is a domestic act of terrorism. And we prevented three of them. No child had to wake up to that during my investigation."

But we're getting ahead of the story.

Before he was the first black member of the KKK, Stallworth was the first black cadet in the Colorado Springs Police Department.

The all-white department, he was warned, would likely be hostile. Testing his nerve, the interview panel put to him a series of scenarios, riddled with slurs.

"How would you feel if an officer called you a nigger? ... How would you react?"

Stallworth persevered, and was officially sworn in on June 18, 1974, his 21st birthday.

Around four years later he was working in intelligence, and a classified ad in the local paper caught his eye.

It was for the Ku Klux Klan, which was expanding from coast to coast — a response to the civil rights movement of the '60s.

Stallworth sent off a written reply, giving the Klan his name and number.

A little over a week later, his phone rang, and an unlikely mission began.

"I used the language of hate that they used in order to gain their confidence, and pretended to be one of them," Stallworth says.

"It was very funny. I was laughing on the phone, talking like one of them. My sergeant would be listening to my end of the conversation and he'd be laughing so hard he would turn red in the face and lose his breath."

The gambit was this: Stallworth posed as a racist extremist on the phone, and a white colleague, known as Chuck, posed as him for face-to-face meetings.

"We called him the white Ron Stallworth," he recalls.

"They never picked up on the fact that they were talking to two distinct voices."

During the nine-month investigation, Stallworth cultivated a unique relationship with David Duke, then the Grand Wizard of the Klan.

Early on, he had dialled Duke's direct number, hoping to talk to someone high up about a hold-up in his membership application.

"He actually answered the phone," Stallworth says with a smile.

The Grand Wizard personally saw that Stallworth's membership was processed.

The pair continued to speak on and off about the advancement of white America — a ruse Stallworth found "hilarious".

At one point, the detective asked Duke how he could be sure he wasn't talking to an African American man.

"[He said] he could tell from the sound of a person's voice on the phone whether they were black or white," Stallworth recalls.

"There's nothing normal about David Duke. He was a guy who, when he wasn't talking about race, would be a very nice conversationalist and the kind of guy you'd want to sit down and have a drink with.

"But the minute race came up — and race was always on the agenda — Dr Jekyll turned into Mr Hyde and the monster in him came out."

There was only ever one time that Stallworth worried his audacious trick was about to come unstuck.

It was on January 10, 1979, when Duke came to town. He'd been getting death threats, and needed a police bodyguard.

Stallworth was shocked when his police chief told him he'd been assigned to that role.

He argued his case — surely Duke would recognise his voice — but his boss was willing to take that chance.

When the pair met, Stallworth told Duke he would protect him even though he didn't agree with his philosophy.

The Grand Wizard had no idea he'd actually spoken to Stallworth many times before.

And he had no idea that when he shook Stallworth's hand, using the secret Klan handshake, the officer knew exactly what it was.

"You position two fingers — the index and middle fingers — along the inside wrist of the other person, and they wiggle their fingers in the flesh as they're pumping the hand up and down," Stallworth says.

At one point in the day, he was in a room filled with KKK members — including Chuck, the white Ron Stallworth.

Stallworth boldly asked his undercover colleague to take a photo of him with Duke and the KKK's state leader, known as the Grand Dragon.

"I put my arm on both their shoulders, and David Duke was so offended," Stallworth recalls.

When Duke tried to snatch the polaroid from his hand, Stallworth warned him of the hefty penalty for assaulting a police officer.

Duke stood down, Stallworth says, after a brief standoff.

For a small moment in time, a black man had power over the head of the KKK.

Stallworth grew to be considered so loyal to the white cause that he was nominated to become the head of his local KKK chapter.

At that point, the investigation was shut down.

He believes his chief was worried about the department's image — he didn't want it coming out that his officers had links to the KKK.

The investigation helped expose Klan members, including high-level members of the military. The two detectives learned of plots to steal weapons, and bomb gay bars in the local area.

Stallworth stopped at least three cross burnings, by increasing security whenever he was invited to one.

His incredible story has now been turned into a movie, BlacKkKlansman, directed by Spike Lee.

"It's very surreal. It's kind of like an out of body experience, watching my words being spoken by the actors, watching the portrayal of me by John David Washington," Stallworth says.

Lee was well aware that his film would be a commentary on race in America.

It closes with footage from a 2017 white supremacist march in Charlottesville, Virginia, that resulted in violent clashes with counter-protesters. Anti-racism activist Heather Heyer was run over and killed.

Duke, who is played in the film by Topher Grace, was part of the rally. After it, President Donald Trump blamed "both sides" for the violence.

It was a "defining moment" for Lee.

"Those terrorist groups wrote themselves into the film," the filmmaker told Associated Press recently.

"The real-life David Duke wrote himself into the film. The President of the United States wrote himself into the film. They gave us an ending we're not good enough to write."

Stallworth describes race as the single most divisive factor in American society. If anything, he says, it's only gotten worse since the 1970s.

"It has become more prevalent and out in the open, by virtue of the fact that we have a man in the White House who advocates a lot of the positions that white supremacists do," he says.

"Donald Trump basically followed David Duke's playbook in order to get to the Oval Office, and 63 million Americans rewarded him for it.

"The white nationalist position, David Duke has always espoused that. The belief that immigrants are a threat to America and that we need border control, David Duke espoused that, and he talked about it during the time I was dealing with him."

Stallworth, who retired in 2005, hopes his story will inspire people to raise their voices against hate.

"You cannot sit quiet while the KKK and other white supremacist groups rear their ugly heads," he says.

"Whether they call themselves alt-right, neo-Nazi, skinheads — they're all of the same stripe, and they all need to be stopped and confronted at every opportunity.

"You have to be willing to stand up and confront them. Stomp — don't tiptoe around it — stomp on the issue.

"Don't be intimidated by who they are, or what they represent, or how they dress. Just don't back down from them."

But asked whether he can picture a future where racism doesn't exist, Stallworth goes quiet.

"Nothing will change. People who say that you could eradicate racism are being naive and foolish," he finally says.

"Racism is a part of human nature, and you're not going to eradicate it, all you can do is try to keep it in check.

"If you want proof of that, we're fighting the same issues now that we were fighting 50 years ago when the Klan was at its heyday.

"And back then we were fighting the same battle that they were fighting at the turn of the century, when the Klan was really dominant.

"The stuff doesn't go away. You're not going to eradicate racism. All you can do is control it."

BlacKkKlansman is in Australian cinemas from August 16.

Topics: race-relations, history, arts-and-entertainment, film-movies, community-and-society, united-states

First posted