Ron Stallworth (born 18 June 1953) was an American police officer who infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan in Colorado Springs, Colorado in the late 1970s. He was the first black policeman from Colorado Springs, and he helped to thwart a Klan bomb plot in 1979. The nature of Stallworth's undercover work was kept secret until 2006, when he revealed his activities to Deseret News, and he published his autobiography Black Klansman in 2014.
Biography[]
Stallworth applying for the police department
Ron Stallworth was born in Chicago, Illinois in 1953, and his military family moved to El Paso, Texas before moving to Colorado Springs, Colorado in 1972. He became a police cadet that year, and he wanted to be an undercover officer; his first assignment was to observe a speech given by Stokely Carmichael at a Colorado Springs nightclub, where he, while wired, recorded Carmichael telling him to arm himself due to the inevitability of a war between blacks and whites. He met black student union president Patrice Dumas while undercover, and the two of them dated.
Infiltration[]
Stallworth on the phone with Walter Breachway
In 1979, Stallworth came across a Ku Klux Klan advertisement in a newspaper, and he called while pretending to be a white man, speaking with local chapter head Walter Breachway. He recruited his Jewish coworker Flip Zimmerman to act as him in order to meet Klan members in person, and they cultivated their relations with the local chapter. Stallworth was soon having regular conversations with Grand Wizard David Duke over the phone, and he expedited his membership process; Zimmerman was initiated in Stallworth's place. At the initiation, Zimmerman discovered a Klan plot to bomb a civil rights rally, so the Klan was forced to instead attempt to murder Dumas. The plot was foiled when the bomb exploded in the Klansmen's car, and Stallworth and Zimmerman later tricked their drunken coworker Andy Landers into confessing that he had sexually assaulted Dumas at a traffic stop. Police chief Robert J. Bridges told Stallworth to end the operation after its success, and to keep all details from the public; Stallworth then called Duke and revealed that he was black.
Stallworth went on to work for the Utah Department of Public Safety for 20 years, retiring in 2005. In 2006, he revealed his undercover activities to the Deseret News, and, in 2014, he published his autobiography, Black Klansman.