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

by Ron Stallworth

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.

“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.

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.

ran for a Louisiana State Senate seat as a conservative Democrat and won 26 percent of the vote. In 1988 he did, in fact, run in the Democratic primaries for president but failed to get on the ticket. He then sought to gain the nomination from the Populist Party and was successful.

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.

“Wake up, white man! The black man wants your woman and job. The Jew wants your money. The Zionist Occupied Government [ZOG] wants to take away your citizenship rights guaranteed under the U.S. Constitution and make you slaves to all mud people and their Jewish masters. Your only means of salvation is to join the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, the only group of patriots dedicated to preserving your heritage and rightful place in a white American society.”

Regarding blacks, Wilkens stated, “We believe they are unsuitable and unadaptable to white society. As long as they continue to participate in the white culture we will continue to have higher crime, higher taxes for welfare, lowering of educational and labor standards, and in general, a continuing deterioration of white civilization. While we wish to be on a friendly basis with black society, we choose to live totally separated. This is our feeling regarding Mexicans and other minorities as well.”

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.

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

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

By 1923 it was estimated that the Klan in Colorado had approximately thirty thousand to forty-five thousand members, half of whom lived in Denver. There were also chapters in Canon City, home of the state penitentiary; Boulder, home of the University of Colorado; Colorado Springs; and Pueblo, about thirty-five miles south of Colorado Springs. Once established, the Klan made a grasp for political power. They took control of the state’s Republican Party and selected virtually all of its candidates in the 1924 elections. By 1925, the Colorado State Senate and House of Representatives were filled with a majority of Klan members elected through the Republican Party.

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.

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.

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