New movie based on former Colorado Springs detective who infiltrated KKK

A new movie coming to a theater near you is based on a former Colorado Springs detective. Ron Stallworth, a black man, was hired back in 1978, and he quickly started an investigation that would make history.

In a sit-down interview with our affiliate ABC4 in Salt Lake City, he said he filled out an application he saw in a newspaper to become part of the local Ku Klux Klan group. He didn’t expect anything back, but days after he sent it in, he got a phone from the local leader; they wanted him to join.

He said, “Within three days to maybe a week, I get a phone to the undercover phone line in my office and I pick it up and the voice on other end identifies himself as the local Klan organizer and he asks to speak to Ron Stallworth.”

It posed a problem he didn’t know how to fix over the phone, so he enlisted a white coworker to pose as him. It required both men to go undercover in a way they didn’t imagine, Stallworth says.

“He had to maintain a conversational flow with him as if he were me and I were him; and I, in turn, had to maintain a conversational flow over the phone with him. We had to pretend to be one person,” Stallworth said.

For nine months, Stallworth and a man he calls Chuck went back and forth finding out secrets and thwarting crimes the KKK had planned to disrupt the city.

Stallworth said he prided himself that he prevented several cross burnings.

“They were going to put them on high strategic locations so that anywhere you were driving in Colorado Springs, you could look off in the distance and see these crosses burning. At no time were they ever able to pull these off,” Stallworth said.

In Stallworth’s time as this undercover member, he was able to identify high ranking military members that associated themselves with the group. Two men, in particular, landed him inside NORAD, where a deputy commander looked at his investigation file.

He said, “unknowingly to me, I had identified [members] of the Klan who were serving in NORAD and had top security clearance. They said by the end of business today, so by 5 p.m. that day, those two guys would be on a military transport out of there, ’cause the Pentagon doesn’t want them to be in a top security clearance job like this and won’t tolerate this type of behavior.”

The movie is directed by Spike Lee and produced by Jordan Peele. Playing Stallworth is the actor John Daniel Washington. It’s expected to hit theaters in August.