In 1978, Ron Stallworth was
the first black detective in the Colorado Springs Police Department. With the
help of a white colleague, he began a remarkable undercover investigation that
led to him not just leading a local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan from a distance
but also briefly serving as the bodyguard of the KKK's grand wizard, David Duke.
In
BlacKkKlansman, out August 10, Spike Lee addresses the
connections between Stallworth's experience four decades ago and contemporary
racist violence. (The
release date is timed to the anniversary of the
tragic events that took place
in Charlottesville, Virginia, where white nationalists clashed with
counterprotesters over the city's plans to remove a Confederate statue.) Stallworth's memoir sticks with the past and is
rich with details about detective work and racism at its most fervent. When
Duke gives Stallworth a hard-eyed stare, he thinks, "I had arrested pimps,
prostitutes and drug dealers and put them in jail and prison...who had not spewed the visual vile I received from David Duke."
