A Memoir

By Ron Stallworth

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Everything that follows was accomplished despite, and in spite of, the supremacists’ claim in some cases to being highly educated, having more intelligence, and being far superior in every way to blacks and Jews, and anyone else they deemed inferior. My investigation of the KKK convinced me that sooner rather than later we would, in fact, overcome those who tried to define minorities by their own personal failings of facial, ethnic bias, bigotry, religious preference, and the false belief that people of color and others who did not fit their definition of “pure Aryan white” were not deserving of respect, much less of being classified as “people”. 

(Stallworth 2018, Author’s Note)

Why do I want to join the Klan? A question I truly thought I never would have been asked, and I felt like saying, “Well, I want to get as much information as possible from you, Ken, so I can destroy the Klan and everything it stands for.” But I didn’t say that. Instead I took a deep breath and thought about what someone wanting to join the Klan would actually say. 

I knew from being called a n- many times in my life, from small confrontations in everyday life that escalated to an ugly rhetoric, to being on the job when I was giving someone a ticket or making an arrest, that when a white person would say that to me, the whole dynamic would change. By saying “n-” 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 the language in reverse. 

(Stallworth 2018, 3)

There was also another incident that stands out in my mind from my early days as a cadet that’s painful to look back on. It occurred during a graveyard shift in the Records Bureau. John, an elderly white I.D. technician, was in a jovial, somewhat frisky mood as we described our ideally attractive favorite female celebrities. He described his fantasy date and I described mine. We went back and forth, with me mentioning a couple of white women who met with his approval. I then mentioned the multitalented, voluptuous, and sultry Lola Falana, then one of the most popular entertainers on the Las Vegas scene. 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. 

I was dumbfounded to say the least. This nice, elderly man had unknowingly and unintentionally slapped me in the face with his statement. To my nineteen-year-old innocent way of seeing the world, an attractive woman was, well … an attractive woman, regardless of skin color. If she had big, seductive eyes, a shapely figure, and a sultry, sensuous demeanor about her – as personified by Ms. Falana – it did not matter if she was black, white, or any other color in the rainbow. My relationship with John, a man I had looked forward to seeing at work each day, was never the same. 

(Stallworth 2018, 14-15)

It’s one thing for a teenager to work in a fast-food restaurant, but another to have responsibilities that can affect people’s lives. 

(Stallworth 2018, 17)

“It’s Stokely Carmichael. The Black Panther leader is in town giving a speech. We’re concerned about the impact he might have. What he might say. We need a black person to go in because our white guys won’t fit in very well.”

Stokely Carmichael, later known as Kwame Ture, was the former prime minister of the Black Panther Party and an iconic contemporary member of the civil rights pantheon that included Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. Carmichael belonged to and later became leader of the SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee), which staged sit-in protests at white-owned businesses that refused service to black citizens in the South. He is the man commonly credited in 1966 with coining the term “Black Power” – the first-pumping, chest-thumping revolutionary clarion call for black empowerment. The protests associated with the contemporary Black Lives Matter movement are direct descendants of Carmichael’s message. 

(Stallworth 2018, 20-21)

All of the people gathers for Carmichael’s speech had an inherent dislike for the police, and it was only exacerbated when a black officer was concerned. To them I was not a “black” man, but rather a police officer who happened to be black. In their eyes I was a “traitor” to the cause for which a black revolutionary brother like Stokely had dedicated his life and was here to speak about. Where black brothers like Stokely were intent on bringing down the white man – a “devil” in their eyes – and his racist-centered society and dominant government structure, brothers like me were caught in a netherworld common to black officers, a “phantom-like” void in which we were too black for the white community we served as well as some of our fellow officers, and too “blue,” for the color of the uniform we wore, for our fellow “soul brothers” steeped in the cause of civil rights / social revolution beneficial for the black community. But a good many of our fellow citizens of color did not tended 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 and commonality of a shared life experience built on a background of biased degradation based on skin pigmentation and other social factors. 

But to black revolutionaries like Stokely, because I and others like me had chosen to wear a badge, gun, and blue uniform representative of the forces of an “oppressive” (their point of view) government and enforce what they perceived to be naturally unjust laws specifically designed to work against those victimized by that oppression, we had become modern-day “house slaves” – house n-, each of us a black Judas who had chosen to collaborate with the governmental “massa” (master) and enforce the “white man’s justice.” We had become slaves to the “system,” the white man’s “boy,” as I was called on many occasions during my career by my self-proclaimed black “brothers.” 

Now, I was proud of being both black and a cop. I was proud of my blackness without being angry. I was in awe of Stokely because he was a figure of the civil rights movement. People like him (MLK, Malcolm X, Rosa Parks, Recy Tylor, John Lewis, and so forth) made life better for people like me. But now here I was being thrust into this unique situation, and I had no qualms because I could differentiate being a cop who was black and a black man in white America. 

(Stallworth 2018, 25-26)

Stokely’s talk was typical of the many he had given over the years. It was laced with references to his philosophical beliefs in Pan-Africanism, an ideological movement that encouraged worldwide economic, social, and political solidarity among people of the African diaspora. It was – is – a belief based on a shared historical legacy united by a common enemy: the white race. Coupled with his belief in a Marxist revolutionary overthrow of the American political system, Stokely’s message was of great interest to the black masses and concern to my superiors. Stokely was dynamic, mesmerizing. The alternating effect of his pitch and tone could raise the audience into a fevered frenzy or bring them down, as if they were listening to a soothing Sunday morning sermon. He was like a master puppeteer, pulling the strings on our emotions and leading us down a path that we probably never knew we wanted to tread. 

I found myself – several times – caught up in the rapture of his reasoning against the very governmental institution I represented and the white people I generally looked on with fondness and good intentions. When these occasions occurred and I found myself enthusiastically clapping and yelling “Right on, brother,” I had to quickly remind myself that we were in adversarial roles and sincerely hope and pray that I was a good enough undercover actor that my surveillance officers listening to the wireless body transmitter would not be able to detect in my voice the tone of agreement with and acceptance of his logic. 

Stokely, with the audience, me included, in the palm of his rhetorical hand, blasted and white man and the white race by stating that throughout their history they had understood only one thing exceptionally well – the power that comes from the barrel of a gun. He then called for the black masses in America to arm themselves to prepare for the “BIG” revolution that was soon to come. This one statement received, perhaps, the greatest applause response from the crowd and the loudest verbal affirmation in the form of “Right on, brother” and “Black Power.” 

At the end of his nearly forty-five-minute presentation, Stokely was given a standing ovation and further shouts of black affirmation from the crowd. His Bell’s Nightingale hosts then formed a receiving line for him to meet and greet his many admirers and those who simply wanted to touch a living, breathing piece of contemporary black history. I stood in the line and slowly made my way toward him. When I finally got within reach, I was struck by the regal grandeur of his physical being. 

Up close, Stokely stood approximately six foot four with flawless cocoa-colored skin. As I shook his hand he gave me one of his warm, infectious smiles with the whitest, most flawless teeth I had ever seen. I thought to myself, This is a pretty good-looking man. 

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.” 

He then pulled back and thanked me for coming to hear him speak. He wished me well, as I did him, and my first undercover assignment and brush with history came to an end. 

(Stallworth 2018, 28-29)

“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. I had heard this from a few other officers I worked with too. They were blinded by mental prejudices and stereotypes about speech patterns of black Americans of African descent. They treated me like in that scene in Airplane! when June Cleaver stands up and speaks jive, which was what many of them menat by the phrase “talk like a black man.” Another colleague told me when I asked that same question, “You know, shucking and jiving and saying ‘f- you’ and ‘motherf-’ all the time.” I immediately burst into laughter at the incongruity of his statement as to its meaning and how that meaning concerned me in the context of the potential success of this investigation.

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 “f-” and “motherf-”, 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. 

(Stallworth 2018, 32-33)

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. This, in tern, forced his campaign opponents to respond, thus making for an often chaotic outpouring of Populist rants in support of Duke and liberal responses against what they perceived to be a neo-Nazi version of Adolf Hitler in a white robe. It made for a lively discussion. Had Duke not been on the ticket in these races much, if not all, af his topical agenda would probably never have been an issue for 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. 

(Stallworth 2018, 51-52)

The group that had been protesting at the mall was no more than concerned citizens making it known that they wanted no part of a hate group like the Klan being in their town. A group like INCAR (International Committee Against Racism, sometimes referred to as just CAR, Committee Against Racism), though, posed more of a threat to groups like the Klan and law enforcement. INCAR and its parent organization, the PLP (Progressive Labor Party), were extremely radical, organized, and dedicated to their conviction of ultimately “smashing” the Ku Klux Klan. They were well planned, on message, and better able to mobilize protest demonstrations to serve their needs. They could turn violent. 

It’s important to remember that this was the 1970s, a period of tremendous political and civil unrest in our nation. Protest bombings in America were commonplace, especially in hard-hit cities like New York, Chicago, and San Francisco. Nearly a dozen radical underground groups, dimly remembered outfits such as the Weather Underground, the New World Liberation Front, and the Symbionese Liberation Army, set off hundreds of bombs during that tumultuous decade – so many, in fact, that many people all but accepted them as a part of daily life. 

(Stallworth 2018, 55)

But Fred [Wilkens] loved the spotlight. He was always giving interviews, scaring up attention, and the local media seemed more than enthusiastic to profile the Klan leader firefighter. Like Duke, he wanted to mainstream the Klan, saying that “the Klan does not desire to oppose or suppress any race but believes that for each to develop to its full potential they must do so separately. Consequently, the Klan is totally opposed to racial integration and racial intermarriage … a total separation of the races for their mutual benefit.” 

(Stallworth 2018, 59)

From its 1869 origin in Pulaski, Tennessee, the Ku Klux Klan and its Confederate soldier membership under the leadership of the first recognized Grand Wizard, General Nathan Bedford Forrest, wore white sheets with holes cut out to expose the mouth, nose, and eyes, though some just exposed the eyes. According to historical records, some even placed robes on their horses. To what purpose was this ruse being played?

Recently freed slaves were known by their slave masters and the general white populace to hold strong superstitious beliefs in ghosts and otherworldly spirits. These beliefs were especially strong in reference to recently deceased Confederate soldiers. Taking advantage of these superstitions, the original Klansmen sought to capitalize on this “otherworldly” belief by terrorizing the slaves into believing the white-sheeted horses and riders were ghostly spirits of those fallen Confederate soldiers and their steeds, returned to earthly form to ensure that the ways and traditions of the antebellum South were properly observed and maintained by the freed men and women. The success of the early Klansmen in accomplishing this objective would, in effect, negate the results of the recently fought war and the government’s attempt at Reconstruction of the physically and morally battered South. 

Another symbolic representation was the “fiery cross” burned at the site of those – white and black – who had offended them. One can only imagine the state of mind of those superstitious slaves at the sight of a “ghostly apparition” of horses and riders and the “demonic” spectacle of the fiery cross as vengeful action for alleged sins against the honored traditions of the “Old South.” 

Traditionally, the burning of a cross, or a “cross-lighting ceremony,” is considered a religious celebration. 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. 

Though such superstitious beliefs no longer persist, the symbols are still used to induce terror in the hearts and minds of the Klan’s victims. 

(Stallworth 2018, 63-64)

Sometimes my conversations with David Duke were light, personal discussions about his wife, Chloe, and their children. How they were doing and what was going on in their lives. He always responded with cordial enthusiasm like the proud and loving husband and father he was. He was more than willing to share tales of the beauty of their being. As a matter of fact, when you took away the topic of white supremacy and KKK nonsense from discourse with Duke, he was a very pleasant conversationalist. He seemed like a “regular” guy. Once that topic entered the margins of Klan ideology, however, Dr. Jekyll became Mr. Hyde and the monster in him was unleashed. He once told me that his wife was a partner in his Klan experience and his children were being raised in the Klan world under the tutelage of the Klan Youth Corps. 

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 “n-” calling him while pretending to be white. He replied, “No, I can always tell when I’m talking to a n-.” 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 n- would pronounce it ‘are-uh.’ N- do no have the same intelligence as the white man to proplerly 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. 

I replied in as flattering a tone as I could muster, without laughing or getting sick, “Mr. Duke, I want to thank you for this lesson because if you had not brought it to my attention I would never have noticed the difference between how we talk and how n- talk. From now on I’m going to pay close attention to my telephone conversations to make sure I’m not talking to one of ‘them’ [a n-].” 

He seemed humbled and pleased by my fawning over his gracious nature in sharing his knowledge and “wisdom”. He told me he was glad to help and hoped this lesson was beneficial. 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 “n-”, “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. My use of the “are-uh” was my way of playing with his head and having a little fun at his expense. He never picked up on the fact that one of his pure Aryan white Klansmen was speaking English like a “n-” and was, in fact, a proud black man of African descent. 

Duke’s assessment of blacks’ use of language was interesting in that he was only partially right. Some blacks from the South do, in fact, pronounce the word “are” in the manner in which he described. An example was my late mother-in-law. She was born and bred in Alabama, a graduate of Alabama State University with a master’s degree in business, and was a retired head of the Business Department at a Colorado Springs high school. She was active in her A.M.E. (African Methodist Episcopal) church and black community affairs, yet throughout my thirty-year experience with her she pronounced the word “are” exactly as described by David Duke. 

The racial fallacy in his argument is that this pronunciation is not unique to blacks. Many people from the South, whites included, employ this speech pattern. In other words, it has nothing to do with pure Aryan white racial intelligence superiority as stated by the Grand Wizard, but rather is more of a regional reflection of a cultural linguistic upbringing. In other words, his logic was extremely flawed and unsubstantiated by facts. 

(Stallworth 2018, 109-111)

It is interesting to take a closer look at Duke’s political leanings in 1978 and 1979. Though he listed himself as a conservative Democrat at the time, he did not change his party affiliation to Republican for nearly ten years. Much of his political thinking, as in his world in general, revolved around the issue of race. In that world whites were more intelligent than and overall superior to blacks and other minority groups. He believed that the white race was defender of America’s virtue and its values and the Klan was the physical embodiment of that defense. His views were more suited for an America that existed during the years of the Eisenhower presidency (1953 to 1961), a period when white dominance in America was the norm and the Klan literally ruled communities across the South. 

That era, which included Wisconsin senator Joe McCarthy and his crusade against communism, was one of an attitude of “cultural elitism” on the part of the white mainstream. That attitude was very notable in the attack back then against rock ‘n’ roll, the new form of music that was emerging from the roots of black culture and being widely accepted by white youth. The Klan played key roles in denouncing this emerging trend and tried to suppress its continued influence among white youth. 

That thinking from over a half century ago, that political perspective and the words used to describe an emerging cultural trend that ran contrary to the white mainstream of the time, found a rebirth in the actions and words of the modern conservative movement. 

(Stallworth 2018, 112-113)

The two Klansmen who joined the fray by walking the route of the protest were completely ignored by everyone, including the media representatives present. I watched one of them walk up to one of the reporters and ask him if he was looking for a story. When the reporter said yes, the Klansman told the reporter to follow him to his pickup truck. Once there the Klansman put on his robe and the interview began, followed by the march. Other media members observed this and rushed over to the Klansman and stuck microphones and cameras in his face like the maddening rush of paparazzi today. It was a feeding frenzy, news-making event originating in the actions of the media itself. 

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. 

(Stallworth 2018, 125-126)

I proceeded to tell him about the intimate details of the case that the minister and church members had conveniently chosen to leave out of the narrative. He perked up at my mention of the family nature of the white murder victim, an innocent young man with no prior knowledge of his fifteen-year-old killer. He displayed surprise and anger at learning the reason behind the killing – the teenager merely wanted to see what it felt like to kill someone and chose this particular victim at random. I told Dr. Abernathy that his confession had been voluntarily given and he had never retracted it. I also emphasized to him that his victim could just as easily have been a person of color, at which point would the church be holding the same grievance against the district attorney over the victim’s race?

I finally said to Dr. Abernathy that this poor victim was a hardworking man just trying to provide for his young family in a hot, dirty, low-paying job, who became a random choice of a young, sick kid’s desire to experience bloodlust. Race was not a motivating factor in any aspect of this case other than the random coming together of the two principal parties. 

(Stallworth 2018, 170)

Ken O’Dell once mentioned to me that the Klan was going to set up their own border patrol to watch for “wetbacks” coming across the Rio Grande border to El Paso, Texas. He said the Klan would be armed with scope rifles and they would try to shoot the wetbacks to prevent them from entering the United States. Couple O’Dell’s words with Klan Grand Wizard David Duke’s 1977 statement in the Klan newspaper The Crusader, “We believe very strongly white people are becoming second-class citizens in this country … When I think of America, I think of a white country.” Duke went on to elaborate that one thousand Klansmen would patrol the back roads and midnight border crossings of “illegal immigrants” coming from Mexico into the United States along the San Ysidro, California, border. These sentiments and ideas run parallel to Donal Trump’s presidential campaign mantra of building “…a great wall the length of the Mexican border to keep out their rapists and drug dealers.”

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. 

Though the Republican Party of the nineteenth century, being the party of Lincoln, was the opposition to the rise of the Ku Klux Klan and white supremacist domination insofar as America’s newly freed Black slaves were concerned; 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 (Dixie-crats) 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. 

David Duke twice ran for public office in Louisiana as a Democrat and lost. When he switched his affiliation to Republican, because he was closer in ideology and racial thinking to the GOP than to the Democrats, and ran again for the Louisiana House of Representatives, the conservative voters in his district rewarded him with a victory. In each case his position on the issues remained the same; white supremacist/ehtno-nationalist endorsement of a race-centered rhetoric and nativist populism. What changed were the voters. Democrats rejected Duke’s politics while Republicans embraced him. 

As for the Progressive Labor Party’s (PLP) protest efforts against Duke and the Ku Klux Klan, that thread, too, is historically connected to the modern-day protest efforts of the so-called Antifa, anti-facists, radical communists, socialists, and anarchists. The PLP, like the Antifa, were dedicated to fighting far right extremism. Like the Antifa movement the PLP rejected the police and government authority to keep far right extremism in check. The two believe government, particularly the police, aid and abet far right extremist like the Ku Klux Klan and cannot be trusted to act in the best interest of the public because they follow the rules as established in the U.S. Constitution. To that end both the PLP and Antifa believe aggressive and, if necessary, physical confrontation is appropriate with no regard for consequences. Our history is always in our present. 

(Stallworth 2018, 186-188)

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References

Stallworth, Ron. 2018. Black Klansman: A Memoir. N.p.: Flatiron Books.

ISBN 978-1-250-29904-8