Black Klansman: Race, Hate, and the Undercover Investigation of a Lifetime

by Ron Stallworth

If one black man, aided by a bevy of good, decent, dedicated, open-, and liberal-minded whites and Jews can succeed in prevailing over a group of white racists by making them look like the ignorant fools they truly are, then imagine what a nation of like-minded individuals can accomplish.

The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any. —Alice Walker

By saying “nigger” he’d let me know he thought he was inherently better than me. That word was a way of claiming some false power. That is the language of hate, and now, having to pretend to be a white supremacist, I knew to use that language in reverse.

John recognized her name, and the smile that had dominated his face as we bantered back and forth immediately disappeared. His response shocked me because he said he could not relate to my choice in Ms. Falana as “beautiful” because he did not know what constituted beauty in a “colored” woman. After all these many years, I distinctly remember John’s next statement to me: “I don’t know how you people define beauty in a woman.” He said this very casually without any intended, overt malice. He stated he had never looked at women of color in terms of physical attractiveness and therefore to describe Lola Falana as “beautiful” was something he could not understand or relate to in any way.

a good many of our fellow citizens of color did not tend to view black officers through the jaded lens of suspicion or consider us lost sheep who had strayed from the herd. Rather they saw they shared with black police officers the commonality of a shared life experience built on a background of biased degradation based on skin pigmentation and other social factors.

“Not only do I not have the manpower for this, but the second this Ken hears one of our white officers speaking to him, he’ll know he’s been speaking to a black man on the phone.” “What does a black man talk like?” I asked. “Well, you know…” Arthur trailed off. “No, I don’t know. Explain it to me.” I was met with dead silence.

Arthur and others in the department who had shared these thoughts were essentially saying I would not be able to successfully communicate with these Klansmen over the phone. Being a black man, I would ultimately “shuck and jive” during my conversation, thereby giving away that I was in fact a “black” man; I would, in essence, somehow give in to the urge to say “fuck” and “motherfucker,” and any Klansman I might be speaking with would immediately know he was talking to a “black” man. Just ridiculous, and in its own way, hilarious at the same time in its absurdity.

I’m the voice, you’re the face.”

Ken explained that the media, in his opinion, had made The Cause look bad and in the process him as well, but he wouldn’t elaborate on exactly how the media made him look bad.

result. It was clear from my phone conversations with Ken that he was angry, but now listening to him with Chuck this anger was all the more prominent. There was a distinct rage deep in his voice, at once spiteful and sad, that fueled him.

His Dr. Jekyll appearance belied a Mr. Hyde personality and perspective on racial matters common to the core of America’s social and political climate. Publicly he would not talk about hate but about heritage and history.

As he stated in a Oui magazine article circa 1979, “I’m not preaching white supremacy,” though he has said he firmly believes whites to be superior to blacks and other minorities. “I’m preaching white separatism. I’d like to see all the blacks go back to Africa where they belong, but I’d even be willing to give them part of this country—a couple of states, maybe—as long as they have a separate society.”

In essence, he mainstreamed the Klan, making it seem an acceptable and viable alternative for those looking for a means to express their displeasure with the status quo of their lives and government representatives.

It can be argued that all of Duke’s campaigns were successful in the sense that they gave him a vast public platform from which to spout his philosophy and racist ideological agenda.

debate. The fact that he won an election as a Republican after failing twice as a Democratic candidate says a lot about the mind-set of the electorate. The conservative right-wing Republican political agenda was then and still is much more in sync with white, hate-fueled racist extremist groups like the Ku Klux Klan.

He and David Duke loved to be fawned over—all you had to do was appeal to their sense of self-worth. Admire them.

The goal was to get Klansmen elected to political offices at all levels of government throughout Colorado. If they could not find qualified Klansmen to run for elective office, Wilkens said, “We will also support non-Klansmen who share our philosophy. If a candidate wants our public endorsement we’ll give it to him or we may support him with financial aid. The important thing is to get the right kind of thinking into government.” He mentioned how well the “niggers” organized themselves politically, and that we needed to do the same to protect what we had.

The burning of a religious symbol has never been seen by Klan members as a sign of desecration; it has always been considered an honorable representation of their Christian faith and beliefs. But they historically used it to strike terror in those who feared the force and wrath of the Klan. In other words, from its very beginning the Ku Klux Klan and its members were dedicated to the cause of domestic terrorism.

A Klan armed watch along the Rio Grande border of Mexico was in keeping with David Duke’s approach to immigration control.

The PC was larger than the Klan in Colorado, and its members were, to put it bluntly, nuts. They would openly carry guns on the streets, into stores, everywhere. They were unloaded, in accordance with the law, but as a police officer how are you supposed to know if a gun openly carried is loaded or not? They were, on the whole, angry, dangerous men.

The importance of The Birth of a Nation in relationship to the modern Ku Klux Klan cannot be overstated.

Until the 1960s, it was cited as the greatest American film according to the late movie critic Roger Ebert in a review of the film and its impact. In fact for many years in the early twentieth century, The Birth of a Nation was considered the most popular film ever made and thought to express the widespread, generally acceptable views of white Americans.

“To say that is like saying I am against children, as they were our children, whom we loved and cared for all of our lives.” Griffith was an unapologetic white southerner of the nineteenth century whose movie reflected the attitudes of his peers who were unable to see black Americans as fellow beings worthy of rights.

At times, my conversation was educational with a racist comical tone to it. I once asked “Mr. Duke,” everyone referred to him respectfully as “Mister,” if he was ever concerned about some smart-aleck “nigger” calling him while pretending to be white. He replied, “No, I can always tell when I’m talking to a nigger.” When I asked him how he could tell, he said the following: “Take you, for example. I can tell that you’re a pure Aryan white man by the way you talk, the way you pronounce certain words and letters.” I asked him to be more specific and he said, “A white man pronounces the English language the way it was meant to be pronounced. For example take the word ‘are’ or the letter ‘r.’ A pure Aryan like you or I say it the proper way, ‘are,’ whereas a nigger would pronounce it ‘are-uh.’ Niggers do not have the same intelligence as the white man to properly speak English the way it was meant to be spoken. Whenever you talk to someone on the phone and are unfamiliar with them, always listen to their speech pattern for a short while to determine how they pronounce certain words.” He never told me what those other words were.

Another significant factor about this particular conversation was Duke’s freewheeling use of the pejorative “nigger.” He was publicizing himself at the time and being reported by the media as being the “new face of the modern Klan.” He was not the stereotypical, uneducated, potbellied, tobacco-chewing/spitting, beer-guzzling Klansman of movie lore. David Duke was respectable-looking, always appearing in public in a suit and tie; he wore his Klan robe only for private ceremonial purposes. He was educated, holding a master’s degree in political science from Louisiana State University, well spoken, and an excellent debater. He was the “new” Klan leader. His image and public persona reflected that of his Klan organization. He and they did not use “nigger” in public but freely threw it out among themselves in private.

Years later, after Duke and his wife divorced, Black married Duke’s ex-wife and they founded the internet’s first hate site, Stormfront.org.

The part of the card that grabbed my attention was the back side, with its “six pledges” concerning the “Personal Code” of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. PERSONAL CODE 1. To untiringly work for the preservation, protection, and advancement of the white race 2. To forever be loyal to the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan—as the only true Klan 3. To obey all orders from the officers of the Empire 4. To keep secret all fellow members and Klan rituals 5. To never discuss any Klan affairs with any plain clothes officers on a state, local or national level 6. Fulfill social, fraternal, and financial obligations to this order as long as I live

The media all too often unwittingly creates the very news it reports because of its zeal to get a story. This only benefits the person or subject being covered and gives them or it a power neither deserves.

Officer Ed essentially did what I had done three months earlier to get the investigation under way—which he was aware of—except he, by virtue of being a white officer, was able to have a face-to-face contact with Ken rather than a telephone conversation. As for the literature he was requesting from Ken, I had all of the Klan literature we wanted or needed, including a subscription to their newspaper, The Crusader. Officer Ed had accomplished nothing of any consequence except to inject himself into an investigation that did not need or want his presence. I already had two undercover officers—Chuck and Jim—available for any face-to-face contact necessary and saw no need to oversee a third officer. Officer Ed’s efforts were literally two months behind the curve.

The journalists, again demonstrating complicity in promoting the Klan’s efforts, followed Ken’s truck a couple of blocks farther, the two vehicles stopped, and the occupants made contact with one another. The media interviewed Ken for five minutes and then everyone left the area. Ken’s interview was aired on the ten o’clock news that evening.

Officer Ed’s insistence on injecting himself into the case was to become a recurring nightmare to me.

Duke told me the story of that encounter as if I (Chuck) had not been there. The incident still clearly bothered him, as he commented on the problem with giving minorities positions of authority that they use, as he put it, to take advantage of whites.

Success often lies not in what happens but in what you prevent from happening.

Were those calls attempts by Ken to tell me about the cross-burning plans for the night? I will never know. No responsibility was ever acknowledged for the cross burning.

Today, I am often asked by those familiar with my story if there are any parallels to our current times and my undercover investigation forty years ago? My answer is always the same, a resounding and unequivocal yes! The hate-fueled, bigoted rhetoric and terroristic intent of white supremacist thinkers like David Duke, Fred Wilkens, and Ken O’Dell was in keeping with the long generational arc of the Ku Klux Klan dating back to its founding immediately after the Civil War. We see and hear echoes of that same rhetoric and intent in the political climate of today. In August of 2017, in Charlottesville, Virginia, white nationalists gathered for the Unite the Right rally. David Duke was in attendance, and a protester was murdered when an alt-right white supremacist drove into a crowd. A tragedy, and the direct parallel to my own experiences with the Klan and David Duke in the 1970s is pretty clear.

The white nationalist, nativist politics that we see today were first imagined and applied by David Duke during the heyday of his Grand Wizardship, and the time of my undercover Klan investigation. This hatred has never gone away, but has been reinvigorated in the dark corners of the internet, Twitter trolls, alt-right publications, and a nativist president in Trump.

it is my belief that the Republican Party of the twenty-first century finds a symbiotic connection to white nationalist groups like the Klan, neo-Nazis, skinheads, militias, and alt-right white supremacist thinking. Evidence of this began in the Lyndon Johnson administration with the departure of Southern Democrats (Dixiecrats) to the Republican Party in protest of his civil rights agenda. The Republicans began a spiral slide to the far right that embraced all things abhorrent to nonwhites.