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

by Ron Stallworth

All of those fights resulted in some trouble with school, and I had to speak to my mother about them. She wasn’t upset with me, far from it, but she did ask me, “Did you whip their ass?” I always said yes, even though two of those times I was lying to her. I might have been the one who got “whipped,” but none of those other kids ever called me a nigger again.

As we shook hands, I asked him if he truly believed an armed conflict between the black and white races was inevitable. He squeezed my hand tighter and pulled my face closer to his, eyes quickly darted around the room as he whispered, “Brother, arm yourself and get ready because the revolution is coming and we’re gonna have to kill whitey. Trust me, it is coming.”

“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.

Doug called for a violent confrontation with the Klan: “When racist vermin like the Klan and Nazis wriggle out from under a rock, we believe in smashing the rock right back down on them.”

As undercover investigators we would never have challenged Ken, who was—I can’t stress this enough—a total idiot.

From that point on, whenever I spoke to Duke on the phone I always found a point in the conversation to inject a question that incorporated the word “are” in it except I would pronounce it like a “nigger,” “are-uh.” This was my symbolic way of sticking a finger in Duke’s eye and an extended middle finger in his face to show him that this high school–educated black man with only twenty college credits was smarter than he, a college graduate with a master’s degree.

The Salt Lake Area Gang Project is currently in its twenty-seventh year of operation.

Great success !