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

by Ron Stallworth

On June 18, 1974, my twenty-first birthday,

those “wannabe” blacks known as “wiggers”—“white niggers”—by today’s hip-hop community.

Dude what.

Fortunately, the people I was dealing with were not, to use an old adage, “the brightest bulbs in the socket,”

This writing sucks

He spawned a new racism for the right-wing masses, one that melded the antipathy to blacks and other minorities to general dissatisfaction with government and fear of an ever-changing complex world.

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.

The case was immortalized in the movie Mississippi Burning

Among the first things the inductees had to do was answer “yes” to the following ten questions:

Editing, dude

Men who can stand before a demagogue And damn his treacherous flatteries without winking!

It was a Polaroid, and I’ve since lost the photo.

Wtf

When Sergeant Trapp left the office for an extended period of time I grabbed the investigative casebook and a few other articles accumulated during the course of the investigation, tucked them under my arms, and walked out of the office to my car and drove home. I’ve kept them with me throughout my travels over the past thirty-five years and they were the basis on which this book was written.

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.

Last, but certainly not least, thanks to Jordan Peele and Spike Lee who learned of my story and chose to take it on as a creative project. I am forever in your debt.