Ron Stallworth, the African-American detective who infiltrated the KKK in 1978, talks to Street Roots about his observations undercover
In October 1978, Detective Ron Stallworth infiltrated the Colorado Springs chapter of the Ku Klux Klan, making him the first black Klansman.
At the time, the Klan’s Grand Wizard, David Duke, was attempting to rebrand the organization. Publicly, Duke said his Knights of the KKK were a non-violent group focused on white heritage. Yet behind the scenes, Duke and other white supremacists spewed racial epithets, planned cross burnings and wanted armed vigilante Klansmen to guard the Rio Grande border, Stallworth said.
In private, Duke threw the N-word around all the time, Stallworth said of his conversations with the notorious leader. “In public, he never used it at all.”
Stallworth, who detailed his undercover efforts in his 2014 memoir, “Black Klansman,” helped prevent several cross burnings the group had planned for the area and unmasked two Klansmen who had top-security-level status at the North American Aerospace Defense Command. While the Klan did not take root in Colorado Springs, Duke was able to successfully take his brand of white nationalism mainstream in the decades that followed, Stallworth said.
“It’s the norm now for white supremacists to claim their views in a political guise, and that political guise is in sync with that of conservative Republicans,” Stallworth said. “The two are united, and one gives cover to the other.”
Stallworth said he discovered that the Klan was looking to establish itself in Colorado Springs when he saw they had placed an ad in a local newspaper, and he decided to respond.
“I was an intelligence detective,” Stallworth said. “Monitoring subversive groups was part of my job, and the Klan is a subversive group, so I simply did my job.”
Stallworth, who used his real name when he responded to the ad, said he thought he would receive literature, pamphlets or a copy of the Klan newspaper in response. Instead, he received a phone call from the head of the chapter, and the investigation began.
For more than seven months, Stallworth pretended to be a white supremacist and spoke with the chapter leader and other Klan members over the phone, while a white detective met with them in person.
Despite the complexities of the investigations, Stallworth said, he was never concerned that the Klan members would discover that there were two Ron Stallworths.
“I was a trained undercover cop,” Stallworth said. “We don’t get nervous; we do our job.”
He called the operation a “typical police investigation.”
“I had no agenda in mind when I started an investigation,” Stallworth said. “We weren’t hoping to do anything other than to gather the information that was out there on the KKK and its impact on Colorado Springs.”
When the Klan invited him to participate in two of the cross burnings it was planning, Stallworth said, he alerted police dispatch, so the area would be saturated if they followed through with their plans.
“They chickened out as a result of that,” Stallworth said.
“Cross burnings always unnerve a community,” Stallworth said. “That’s been the history of it.”
The Klan was not able to execute any of its planned cross burnings during his investigation, which Stallworth said “felt good.”
Stallworth also reached out to the Klan’s national hotline. He was surprised when Duke answered the phone.
“It was supposed to be a recorded message,” Stallworth said.
Duke was pleasant on the phone and a nice conversationalist, Stallworth said, “but he couldn’t go five minutes, if that long, without talking about race and genetic superiority of whites over minorities.”
Duke was also very different from the public persona he had crafted, Stallworth said.
“On the phone, he revealed himself,” Stallworth said. “In public, he concealed a lot.”
The two eventually met when Duke visited Colorado Springs, and Stallworth was assigned to protect him. During his visit, Stallworth asked if they could take a photo together. As the Polaroid was taken, Stallworth quickly threw his arm around Duke.
“(I) wanted to have a photo that clearly indicated that I was in the moment with this fool,” Stallworth said.
He no longer has the photo.
“It’s been lost for years,” he said.
The investigation was abruptly shut down in 1979 when the chapter of the Klan that was under investigation attempted to make Stallworth its leader. Stallworth said he would like to have seen it through to the end.
“We didn’t get to an ultimate conclusion,” Stallworth said. “I would like to have seen how far we could have gone,” Stallworth said. “We’ll never know.”
Duke also left the Klan that year for unrelated reasons and formed the National Association for the Advancement of White People.
The two didn’t speak again for nearly 40 years, until Duke called Stallworth out of concern for how he was going to be portrayed in Spike Lee’s adaptation of his book, “BlacKkKlansman.”
“We talked for an hour, about a variety of things,” Stallworth said. “He said he was not a racist and a white supremacist in spite of endorsing Trump, who is.
“He said Trump’s not a racist or white supremacist because what he’s doing to keep minorities out is to help preserve white culture and white heritage,” Stallworth said. “That’s just one of the things; there was a lot.”
Unlike the times they spoke during the investigation, Stallworth said he was able to push back against Duke’s rhetoric.
“Every chance I got, I did,” Stallworth said.
Duke told Street Roots that Stallworth’s book was inaccurate and that the movie it was adapted into was “nothing more than a lie.” He also said he never used racial epithets in public or private conversations with Stallworth.
“I believe that anybody oppressing others, enslaving others, harming others is evil,” Duke said. “And I’m opposed to it.”
Stallworth said he doesn’t think much of Duke one way or the other.
“David Duke is just another man to me,” Stallworth said. “He was just another subject of an investigation. I didn’t give him any special credence one way or the other.”
Today, Stallworth said, the most powerful white supremacist lives in the White House.
“Donald Trump is a bigoted, racist, white supremacist,” Stallworth said. “People know it, but there’s a certain segment of our society – namely the Republican Party – that provides him cover to be a bigoted, racist, white supremacist and not call him out on it.”
Republicans, Stallworth said, have “lost the moral compass.
“America has lost the moral compass, too,” he said, adding that Donald Trump should be nowhere near the White House. “America screwed up two years ago and allowed him to get into that office.”
The country is now paying a price for electing Trump, Stallworth said.
“We’re going to have to live with it until we can right this wrong,” he said.
Spike Lee’s version of his story hit the big screen earlier this year.
Stallworth said Lee did a “remarkable job” of encapsulating the historical threads “from the Confederacy to Charlottesville, and David Duke and Donald Trump.”
Street Roots is an award-winning, nonprofit, weekly newspaper focusing on economic, environmental and social justice issues. Our newspaper is sold in Portland, Oregon, by people experiencing homelessness and/or extreme poverty as means of earning an income with dignity. Learn more about Street Roots
