Always on time, well organised and, based on all the conversations the Ku Klux Klan’s members had with him, a powerful advocate for their hateful racist politics. What they didn’t know was that Ron was a black police officer.
In 1979, Officer Ron Stallworth, then 29, spent a year infiltrating the KKK and exposing their links with the police, military and organised crime.
His audacious scheme, which started when he saw an advert in his local paper asking for potential KKK members, has inspired what some critics have called “the most important film of the year”, BlacKkKlansman. But in many ways, the truth is even stranger than Spike Lee’s movie makes it out to be.
Working as an intelligence officer for the Colorado Springs Police Department, Ron was the only black officer on the force. So he took the rising tide of racist violence very seriously. And when he answered that advert, picking up the phone to talk to local KKK organiser Ken O’Dell, Ron knew he was risking more than embarrassment if they found out who he was.
America was gripped by far-right terrorism in the 1970s. In 1971, KKK members used dynamite to blow up ten buses which were to be used to desegregate schools in Pontiac, Michigan.
In the months when Ron was planning his scheme, five communist protestors demonstrating in a Death To The Klan march were killed by the KKK and the American Nazi Party in the Greensboro massacre in North Carolina.
In 1980, four black women were shot in Chattanooga, Tennessee, after a KKK rally. Just six months, later Michael Donald, age 20, was lynched in Alabama, his body found hanging from a tree.
With this kind of bigoted violence going on, it’s fair to say that Ron knew the kind of character he was supposed to be playing when trying to ingratiate himself with the KKK’s O’Dell.
Ron said: “I eventually spoke with him over the phone responding to that ad, and he explained to me that he was starting a Klan chapter in Colorado Springs and was looking for new people.
“So I told him that I was a white man, that I hated blacks, Jews, Mexicans, Asians. That I thought the white man had not gotten a fair deal in this country.
“[That] I was really upset because my sister had dated a n***** and it offended me that his black hands had touched her white body. And, as a result, I wanted to join the group and do what I could to put a stop to all of this nonsense.”
That was all it took – Ron, who now lives in El Paso, Texas, with his wife, was in. But very quickly he knew he was going to get caught if he couldn’t solve a major problem. How could he, a black man, walk into the public meetings of a large and violent racist organisation dedicated to seeing him back in chains?
He was fine dealing with them over the phone, but he knew that when it came to having face-to-face meet-ups, he couldn’t go himself.
So he drafted in his friend, Chuck, who worked in the drug squad, to be Ron Stallworth in person.
It was also at this point that Ron realised he had – perhaps shortsightedly – signed his own name on his first letter to the KKK.
However, it wasn’t just the practical problems holding up Ron’s investigation. Senior officers took a while to be convinced of its merits.
“They felt like they couldn’t lose investigators to a bunch of nonsense like ‘men running around in sheets’,” said Ron.
But with no signs of America’s racial violence subsiding, senior officers eventually agreed. Ron arranged to meet O’Dell, who was a serving soldier, at a bar near Fort Carson military base.
He sent Chuck in wearing a wire, and guided him through the tricky conversations. “That’s how we conducted this investigation over the next eight or nine months or so,” Ron said.
“I did most of the talking on the phone with these individuals, and when it came time for physical contact, the face-to-face meeting, I would send the white officer in posing as me.”
After months of phone calls and secret meetings, the infiltration was going so well that, incredibly, O’Dell recommended that Ron be made the head of the Colorado Springs branch of the KKK. He was put in touch with the hate group’s leader, David Duke.
At one point – clearly confident that his plan hadn’t been rumbled – he even asked the KKK’s leader about the threat of infiltration. Ron explained: “I said, aren’t you afraid of an undercover police officer infiltrating your organisation or maybe a black man calling you up and pretending to be white?”
“He said no, he wasn’t fearful of that at all, because he could always tell when he was talking to a black person.”
Pushing his luck, Ron asked how Duke knew that he wasn’t black.
“He said, you don’t talk like a black man. You talk like a very smart, intellectual white man. I can tell by the way you pronounce certain words.”
Then, in an incident that seems more like far-fetched movie plot than real life, Ron – in his role as a serving police officer, rather than an undercover agent – met Duke in person. He was tasked with protecting the so-called Grand Wizard while he delivered a racist rant in public.
He said: “I went and introduced myself to David Duke without giving him a name and told him I would do everything I could to protect him, even though I didn’t agree with him. We shook hands and I became his bodyguard.”
Ron’s investigation in many ways highlighted his worst-possible fears.
He found Klansmen in all walks of life, from local shop owners to school teachers and his neighbours.
During his time undercover, which didn’t become public until 2006, Ron stopped three cross burnings and a string of racist attacks in Colorado. He uncovered a plan to nail bomb a gay bar, and discovered which businesses and banks helped the Klan hide its money.But what didn’t surprise him were the number of KKK members who were serving police and army officers.
He even discovered two men who worked for NORAD – the US Air Force’s air-defence system, in charge of the nation’s nuclear weapons. Within 24 hours, they had been moved from their crucial roles.
Ron said: “When I asked what position they were in, all I was told was that they’re in very sensitive positions.
“Specifically, I was told – you might say they had their fingers on nuclear triggers.”
All these years later, the ex-cop knows the work he did then could not be repeated today.
He says: “The investigation I did can never be done again.
“We live in a technological age where you can easily find out whether someone’s a cop or other such information that you couldn’t find out back then.”
Poignantly, Ron still carries his red Ku Klux Klan membership card with him.
He says: “I’ve carried it every day since I’ve got it in January ‘79. It’s a memento of my career. And, like I like to tell people, if I’m ever in a fatal car crash, some poor cop’s going to come up on my mangled black body and go through my personal effects and find this card – and it’s just going to freak him out.”
