Ron Stallworth

The 2018 film BlacKkKlansman is based on his experience infiltrating the Ku Klux Klan. In the film, he is portrayed by John David Washington.

In 2014, Stallworth published a book, Black Klansman, about his experience investigating the KKK. For his source material, he used a casebook that he assembled during the assignment and kept for himself after it was over. The book was taken to QC Entertainment by producer Shaun Redick to make a film based on it called BlacKkKlansman. Spike Lee signed on as co-producer and director. Stallworth was repped on the deal by his manager, Andrew Frances of Adwater & Stir. The film was released in 2018, with John David Washington playing the role of Stallworth. BlacKkKlansman won the Grand Prize of the Jury at the Cannes Film Festival. BlacKkKlansman was also nominated for six Academy Awards and won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay.

In January 2006, Stallworth gave an interview to the Deseret News of Salt Lake City in which he related the details of his infiltration and investigation of the KKK. He disclosed that the investigation revealed several Klan members were active members of the United States Armed Forces, including two individuals posted at NORAD (the North American Aerospace Defense Command, which provides aerospace warning, air sovereignty, and protection for Northern America). The two at NORAD were reassigned and Stallworth was told that they were given remote postings, "somewhere like the North Pole or Greenland".

After the investigation into the Klan closed, Stallworth kept it a secret and told no one about his role in it. He transferred to the Utah Department of Public Safety, where he retired in 2005 after working as an investigator for nearly 20 years. After retirement he earned a bachelor's degree in criminal justice from Columbia College's Salt Lake City Campus in 2007.

In 1979, Stallworth noticed a classified ad in the local paper seeking members to start a new chapter of the Ku Klux Klan in Colorado Springs. Stallworth responded to the posting via mail to a P.O. box, and provided them an address and phone number. A member of the KKK called Stallworth, who then posed as a racist white man who "hated blacks, Jews, Mexicans, Asians". During the conversation, he learned that the man founding the new chapter was a soldier at nearby Fort Carson. Stallworth arranged to meet the man at a local bar and sent a white undercover narcotics officer, wired to record any conversations, to stand in for him at the meeting.

In the summer of 1972, his family moved to Colorado Springs, Colorado, where Stallworth first took an interest in a career in law enforcement. He joined the department as a cadet in November 1972.

Stallworth graduated from Austin High School in 1971, where he was a member of the student council, and a member of a district-wide advisory board; he was also voted "most popular".

Ron Stallworth (born June 18, 1953) is an American retired police officer who infiltrated the ranks of the Ku Klux Klan in Colorado Springs, Colorado, in the late 1970s. He was the first African-American police officer and detective in the Colorado Springs Police Department.

Stallworth was born June 18, 1953 in Chicago, Illinois, and raised in El Paso, Texas, after his mother moved the family there. According to Stallworth, "[m]y mother's moving our family to El Paso was the best decision she ever made, as the city was a far cry from the poverty, gangs, and conflict in Chicago's South Side, where I would have come of age if she had not left."