In real life, it was not just Ron and Chuck who played the role of “Ron.” On at least one occasion, neither Ron nor Chuck were available to take a call from the local K.K.K. point of contact and travel to a second location, which ended up being a dive bar. The first meetup between white Ron Stallworth and the K.K.K., as in the movie, took place outside a convenience store-where Chuck was directed to get in a car with the K.K.K. (“He was not Jewish,” Stallworth said, adding that he has not spoken to Chuck in several years.)īecause of Chuck’s other undercover assignments, he was not available often-so most of Stallworth’s investigation was conducted over the phone. In real life, Stallworth recruited an undercover narcotics officer named Chuck to play him. In the film, Stallworth recruits a Jewish character named Flip Zimmerman ( Adam Driver) to play white Ron Stallworth in all face-to-face scenarios. organizer was so eager to meet in person that Stallworth had to stall-to officially launch an investigation and prepare a proxy. He told me that I was the exact kind of person that they were lookingįor, and he was very enthusiastic about meeting with me.” The cleaned-up version, which Stallworth later offered NPR: Caught off guard, Stallworth launched a profane monologue about hating minorities that Washington, as Stallworth, recites almost word for word on-screen. chapter called Stallworth at the untraceable number he had provided, and asked him why he was interested in joining the organization. Making his pitch: A man starting a local K.K.K. At most, he figured he would get a pamphlet-not a phone call two weeks later. He used his real name, he has explained, because he did not think the correspondence would lead to an investigation. He provided an unlisted, untraceable phone number and an untraceable address-but he did sign the letter with his real name. box-not a phone number, like in the movie-so Stallworth reached out to request more information about the organization via snail mail. It was during one of these searches, in 1978, when the detective noticed a classified ad for a local Ku Klux Klan chapter. Part of Stallworth’s new job was to scan local newspapers for rumblings of suspicious activity. Patrice, the BlacKkKlansman character played by Laura Harrier, was invented for the movie’s sake.Īs for whether he shared details of the investigation with his girlfriend or his family, Stallworth said this: “I didn’t talk about what I was doing, for the most part.”Įstablishing contact with the K.K.K.: Several months after his first special assignment, the real Stallworth became the youngest and first black undercover narcotics detective in Colorado Springs Police Department history. Love interest: It turns out that the real Stallworth did meet an attractive young woman at the Carmichael event-but she was German, and Stallworth did not flirt with her for two reasons: he was on the job, and he was already dating the woman who would become his first wife. Otherwise, wrote Stallworth in his memoir, “No one would ever believe that I was pulling this investigation off.”Īhead, a rundown of Stallworth’s real story-as told by his memoir and a recent phone interview-and which parts of BlacKkKlansman were invented for dramatic effect. As such, he brought a Polaroid camera to his face-to-face meeting with David Duke, former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, and requested a group photo. infiltration-a story that seemed too wild to be true. “I thought they were doing a Dave Chappelle skit again!” Lee has said, referring to the comedian’s 2003 sketch about Clayton Bigsby, the “black white supremacist.” But Stallworth’s extraordinary 2014 memoir confirms that the most insane events in Lee’s BlacKkKlansman movie did, in fact, happen in some cases, the truth was even more outlandish than what played out on-screen.Įven as Stallworth was living this case in the late 1970s, the detective had an inkling that he might one day need concrete evidence of his K.K.K. in the late 1970s-the filmmaker couldn’t fathom his story being true. When Spike Lee first heard about Ron Stallworth-an African-American detective who infiltrated the Colorado Springs K.K.K.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |