SYSK’s Summer Movie Playlist: The True Story of BlacKkKlansman

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Hey, everybody, and welcome to the Summer Movie Playlist,

the place where we grouped some fun movie content because of summer movie season.

We thought you might like this, so we gave it a shot, and today you're going to be listening to

the replay of our episode on Black Klansmen, the true story behind that movie.

It was a great movie.

Love it.

Love Spike Lee.

And this is a great one.

So I hope you enjoy the show.

Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com.

Hey, and welcome to the podcast.

I'm Josh Clark.

There's Charles Bryant.

There's Jerry over there.

You put the three of us together.

It's Movie Crush.

I mean, stuff you should know.

This does have some stank on it, doesn't it?

Some movie stank.

Uh-huh, I I know your game.

It's cool.

I didn't even ask you, have you seen Black Klansman?

I was like,

I can't do this episode without having seen it.

So I watched it last night.

Oh, nice.

Yeah.

Good, huh?

Yeah, it's pretty good.

Yeah.

I like his choice at the end to just completely pull a somersault on the viewer.

Oh, sure, with that last bet.

Yeah, like, spoiler alert.

Pretty powerful.

There's an end to this.

All spoilery.

Yeah, for sure.

We should probably say that out of the gate.

If you haven't seen this yet and you don't want it to be spoiled, don't listen to this episode first.

Yes.

But yeah,

I guess now that we've said that, we can speak freely, right?

Yes.

So

if the entire movie was basically

to disarm you up to the end, then I think it's one of the greatest movies I've ever seen in my life.

And even if it wasn't, that wasn't the entire point of the movie.

It was still great in how he pulled it out at the end, I think.

Yeah, well, this was, I don't know if if you remember, but this is the movie I saw in Perth, Australia.

Oh, yeah.

That happens at the end, that big,

you know,

sort of gut punch of realism at the end.

And I stood up and I was like, hmm, like, I wonder what they're thinking here in Perth.

They were probably thinking, what just happened?

What's wrong with America?

Yeah.

And I'm going, hi, Mate.

Good to see you.

I'm not American.

I'm Canadian.

Can't you tell, Bloke?

Oh, goodness.

Yeah, it was one of those things where I was like, I'm kind of slightly embarrassed right now.

Yeah.

It was like that.

I enjoyed the movie, though.

I thought to see Spike Lee, who

just he's one of my favorite filmmakers in his 60s, still just bringing the juice like this.

I loved it.

Yeah.

I also loved that it was controversial, too,

in that, like, some people criticized Spike Lee for like not going far enough for maybe kind of glossing over some of the ugly aspects of the story.

Yeah, you want to get to that at the end, maybe?

Yeah, yeah, for sure.

But we'll give it a pre-mention shout-out, which is what we just did.

Right.

So we are talking about

the true story of the film Black Klansmen, Spikely's movie that won the grand prize at the Khan Film Festival.

It's nominated for Academy Awards.

Yeah, three Oscars, I believe, including Best Picture.

Yeah, I think Picture Director and Supporting Actor.

For who?

I would guess Adam Driver.

I didn't see.

Really?

Yeah, I was surprised because Denzel's son did a a wonderful job as well.

He loves that being known as that.

Right.

I can't remember his first name, but you know, Denzel's son.

He was

like, there were several times when he was talking and I was like, oh, you are definitely Denzel Washington's son, man.

Just the way he talked,

the sound of his voice, but also his acting, too.

He's a good actor.

Yeah, so, all right, best picture, best supporting actor for Adam Driver,

best director, and best original music score.

Oh, nice.

But yeah, he is, I didn't know he was Denzel's son until after the movie.

Yeah, I could see that.

And he was a football player.

Did you know that?

I didn't.

Who did he play for?

He played for Morehouse here in Atlanta.

He was a running back, and then

played NFL on the practice squad for the Rams

and then eventually played a few years in NFL Europe and the UFL until he hung up his cleats six years ago.

Oh, that's cool.

Yeah.

Playing football in Europe has got to be a surreal experience.

You know?

Yeah, because it's a soccer ball.

Everyone's like, what are you doing?

This is all wrong.

All right.

So should we way back it to the 1970s, the groovy 70s of Denver, Colorado?

First, we should say his name is John David Washington.

Oh, sure.

You were kidding, right?

Denzel's son, yes.

So yeah, let's get in the Wayback Machine and see,

go inspect their terrible, low-quality pot.

So

Ron Stallworth is the True to Life character's name who there was a football player growing when we were growing up named John Stallworth.

So I'm always wanting to say John Stallworth.

This is not him.

This is a cop named Ron Stallworth.

That's right.

And he had a few designations that are pretty important.

He was the first African-American police officer to work for the Colorado Springs Police Department, which he joined as a cadet at the age of 19 in 72.

And then a couple of years later, on his 21st birthday, on his 21st birthday?

That's what I saw.

Yeah, June 18th, I believe.

Nice.

Was sworn in as a...

full-on officer of the law.

Right.

And I'm not sure if they just swear you in on your 21st birthday or if if it just so happened that the swearing-in ceremony was on his 21st birthday.

But regardless, it was a big deal.

He's the first African-American cop and then later on detective for Colorado Springs.

So that's that's a big deal, especially starting out at age 21, too.

That takes a lot of cojones, as they call it in Colorado.

No, I think they call those Rocky Mountain Oysters.

That's right.

That is what they call them for sure.

So he worked undercover for about 30 years, long, great career as an undercover detective.

But it was this case, which only came out about four years ago when he wrote a book about it, about his career,

when he went undercover as a,

well, as a Klansman.

But it's a little more complicated than that.

It was a very complicated operation, right?

Yeah, and this wasn't something that like

I mean, he even says in this NPR interview that he didn't, it was just a job at that that particular point in time.

And when that particular job ended, that is the undercover stint, which was about, what, eight or nine months,

moved on to something else.

And it just happened by circumstance.

So he didn't come in there with a bone to pick with the Klan, aside from probably every bone to pick that he had with the Klan,

just as a black man in America.

Yeah, and it would probably help to give a little background on the Klan at the time because, you know, the Klan was very well known for being really big and really violent at over three waves is basically how the Klan history is divided.

Like the first wave was when

they were founded in the wake of the Civil War.

Then

the second wave came around the 19 teens, like 1915, I mean, that

era.

And then

they had another big resurgence during the civil rights era in the 50s and 60s.

But, you know, in between these waves and after that third wave, it's not like the Klan just went away.

They kept on going.

Their profile was lower, and maybe

the public violence or terrorism that they were engaging in wasn't quite as pronounced, but they were still there.

And in Colorado, in particular, it had a really long history with the Klan, where basically the city of Denver was under the control of the Klan back in the 20s, just 50 years before

Ron Stallworth started working there.

Yeah,

when he got hired there, he got access to files, like secret FBI files.

Right.

And he got to go in and dig in and look at the history of the Klan in Colorado.

And boy, like you ain't kidding.

They were in the House of Representatives.

There were senators.

Both senators were Klan's members.

The mayor, Benjamin Stapleton, who the airport was named after until 95.

Yeah, his great-grandson ran for governor on the GOP ticket this past election and lost to

who is Colorado's first ever openly gay Jewish governor.

Oh, wow.

Colorado is a weird state.

It is an odd state for a lot of people.

Different ideologies all packed in together.

It's very purple in all sorts of ways.

Yeah, so Mayor Benjamin Stapleton was a Klan member.

The governor, Clarence Morley, was a Klan member.

The chief of police, which is ⁇ I mean, you don't want anyone in these positions to be Klan members, but I imagine a chief of police is one of the more problematic areas to have a person in that kind of control.

Particularly that one, too.

He was picked by the Klan, the Colorado Klan,

and basically foisted on Benjamin Stapleton, who

was even like, wow, this guy's even too much for my tastes, and eventually fired him.

But, like, the Klan picked the chief of police of Denver, Colorado, back in the 20s.

Oh, yeah, and they tried to recall Stapleton at one point.

It didn't work.

And when that effort failed, the Klan burned a cross on the top of Table Mountain as a celebration, a show of public celebration.

Right.

So the Klan has deep roots in an old story in Colorado, or at least they used to.

And they were still very much around when

Ron Stallworth started his investigation or started as

the first black detective in Colorado Springs, right?

That's right.

And so he started out, I guess, as kind of plain clothes and was assigned

undercover work pretty quickly just by his

just by being the only African-American

officer in the police force because Stokely Carmichael came to town once.

That's right.

And this is in the film.

We're going to talk about a few differences between the movie and the real story.

But he did, in fact, go to a speech and a rally by famous Black Panther Stokely Carmichael.

And he was, you know, fully kitted out in his bell bottoms and

wearing a wire.

He picked his afro out.

And he...

in fact did make a point to meet him just like he did in the film.

And Carmichael did apparently say, arm yourself and get ready because the revolution is coming.

And I imagine Stallworth had some mixed feelings about that assignment.

Yeah, I would guess so.

It's kind of like, I don't really have any idea of what he personally was like because the movie mixed things up so much and like added layers that weren't necessarily there.

So I have no idea what that experience would have been like for him, you know.

Yeah, one thing we do know is not true is the character in the film of Patrice, whom he meets at that rally, a young woman that he falls in love with.

She was made up for the movie.

Spikely wanted

a love interest, basically, and to represent sort of the female black power movement as a whole.

Right.

So she was completely made up, but she was terrific in the film.

Yeah.

Yeah, Laura Harrier.

She's in the new Spider-Man movies, too.

She's awesome.

Cool.

The new Spider-Verse movie?

No, no, no, that's animated.

Oh, okay.

Well, she could have been a voice actor, I guess.

Right, yeah.

No, she's in in the one, the new ones with

the new kid.

Okay, the new Spidey Kid.

The current Spider-Man.

Current Spider-Man, which is great.

Those are good movies.

I haven't seen any of them.

You're not super into that stuff, though, are you?

Well, I saw the Infinity War one.

He was in that, I think.

Yeah.

He's a bit of a smart Alec, frankly.

He is.

So, okay, he does his research on the deep roots of the clan in Colorado.

He goes undercover.

And then

I don't think he was even assigned this thing.

I think he kind of came up with it on his own by chance almost

in October 1978.

He was 25 at this point.

And he was looking through the local paper.

Well, that was part of his assignment to gather intelligence by reading the paper.

Well, right, but I don't think, I think this was his idea to go undercover like this.

That's the impression I have, too.

He seemed like a self-starter

in a lot of ways.

So he found this ad,

a classified ad in the paper for the Klan.

It said, get in touch if you want further information.

He sent a letter posing as a white racist

to a P.O.

box just thinking that he would just get back some pamphlets or something.

So he signed his real name, which is,

he didn't really think that one through.

No, he didn't.

And he did, he never really fully explains it aside from

the best explanation I saw is that he didn't think anything was going to come of of it.

He thought he'd get, like you said, a couple of pamphlets and that would be that.

And he just wasn't planning to create like a large investigation out of making contact through this ad.

And again, we should probably state this.

It was an ad in the paper for the Klan

to get in touch with the Klan to get more info about the Klan.

And maybe you might want to join.

Who knows?

Right.

So

he makes contact with them by sending off a letter.

And if you ask me,

if Spike Lee were directing this episode, he would put an ad break right here.

That was good.

Who are we to disagree?

All right, we'll be right back.

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Okay, so like we said, Ron Stallworth is thumbing through the newspaper.

He mails off a letter to get more info about the Klan,

and he uses his real name.

And

like you said, Chuck, he was expecting a pamphlet or something in return, like, so you want to be a Klan member or something like that.

Right.

Instead, about two weeks later, he got a call from the number.

So he used everything as far as the undercover operation would go.

He used all of his undercover info except for his name.

So he got a call on his undercover phone line from a guy named Ken O'Dell.

And he was pretty surprised to get this call because, again, he was expecting a pamphlet.

And instead, he had a real live, living, breathing.

Ku Klux Klansman on the other end of the line saying, hey, I got your letter about hating black people and other minorities.

Let's talk.

Yeah, he was was like, why are you interested?

And Stallworth immediately just kind of goes into character.

And I guess that's what you, you know, when you're undercover, you got to be part improv actor

to be able to pull that off.

Well, he also said he drew from his own personal experiences because he grew up in El Paso and encountered a lot of racism there.

And I'm sure on the force in Colorado Springs, too.

So he drew from his own experience as well.

Yeah, so he basically, right out of the gate, says, well, you know, my sister's dating a black man, and every time he puts his hands on her, on her pure white body, I cringe, and I want to do something about it.

And Ken Odell says, you sound like a great guy.

Why don't you come on down and let's meet?

Because you are just the kind of

dude we're looking for.

You sound like real clan material.

Yeah, I thought about maybe doing an episode on the clan.

I thought about that too, and then I'm like, do we want to give them a platform?

Yeah, but then I thought, or, you know, you could just talk about it and how stupid they are.

All right.

Like when I was a kid, I mean, of course, being in Georgia, that stuff was around.

I never saw it firsthand, obviously.

Yeah.

But you heard things even, like growing up in the 70s in Georgia, and I was always so scared of the whole thing because of the outfits and everything and the fire.

Right.

And I was a good little Baptist boy, so there was a lot of fear.

But then I got a little older and I was like, they're just dumb rednecks wearing sheets.

Right.

Sort of demystified it.

It's the moment you become an adult.

Yeah, but I mean, of course, then I would later learn that they did real horrific things and took lives and, you know, are a terrorist organization.

Right.

Right.

But I think what you're saying is they made themselves up to be boogeymen.

Yeah, exactly.

And they definitely can be that way, especially in a young mind or something like that.

But

yeah.

So

back to the story, Ron Stallworth is on the phone with this guy named Ken O'Dell who wants to meet him to see if he'd like to join the Klan.

And this is a big problem because I think, as we mentioned a couple of times, Ron Stallworth was African-American.

Yeah, he's like, oh boy, what do I do here?

Right.

So he actually recruited a fellow detective who he in his book calls Chuck.

That's all he's ever publicly referred to the guy as is Chuck.

Wait, was it you, Chuck?

It was not me.

Okay.

That gentleman is, I guess, either still undercover or just never wanted his identity out there.

Right.

So he, yeah, he may still live in Colorado Springs.

Who knows?

Maybe he's on a case right now, for all I know.

But so this Chuck guy,

he was recruited by Ron Stallworth to play Ron Stallworth.

to the clan because Chuck was white.

He was already an undercover narcotics agent.

And apparently he was friendly enough with Ron Stallworth to say, yes,

I will join this investigation, buddy.

Let's do it.

Yeah, and here's the thing, though.

He was

this wasn't his like primary case.

So Chuck is undercover on a lot of different assignments.

So he's not around as much as Stallworth needs him.

So like in the movie, most of this stuff is done over the phone.

Like he spends a lot of time in this investigation on the phone

speaking to these Klansmen who think that he's a white man.

And when they needed to meet, he would send Chuck in, who, and we'll get to the voice part in a minute, because that's when I was watching the movie.

I was like, did none of these dummies not realize that they don't sound anything alike?

Right.

You know, because they've been talking to him on the phone at length.

Yeah.

But they had their first meeting.

They

got together, and I believe they met.

They met somewhere at first and then went to a bar

after, like, as the second part of that meeting.

Yeah, they met at a convenient.

So, the movie supposedly portrays this realistically.

This Chuck guy who is portraying Ron Stallworth to the Klan

met, they met at a convenience store, and

he was told to get in the car, and then they drove to a second location.

Man, that's scary stuff.

And also, he's also wearing a wire at the time.

Like, that's something that the movie kind of gets across, but especially in articles about the story, don't necessarily dive into.

This Chuck Cat was like putting himself out there oh sure as every undercover detective does right so i mean ron stallworth is conducting this investigation he's the mastermind of he's leading this whole thing but this poor chuck guy has to go hang out with these you know violent clans members or clan members on you know

like fairly frequently from what i understand so hats off to him oh yeah absolutely i mean it was it was definitely like it required both of their best efforts to get away with this for that long.

Right.

It was quite the ruse.

So

Chuck meets with them, eventually earns their trust

along with the phone work of Stalworth.

And then he actually gets

successfully admitted about two months later and got his little, I guess you get a little membership card.

He still has it.

He does.

He did not throw it away like in the movie.

He has it framed, in fact.

And on the back of the card were six codes of conduct, one of which said, never discuss any clan affairs with any plainclothes officer on a state local or national level right so there is a lot of comedy in the movie if you haven't seen it

i mean it's it's a serious thing that they're doing but there are a lot of laughs as well a lot of laughs and a lot of like movie formula steps that spikely purposefully follows you know very faithfully too yeah yeah absolutely so um there's a big point there that we left out though chuck so to get that membership card supposedly like again as they say in colorado the oysters on this guy.

So he met, so the fake fake Ron Stallworth, Chuck, met with the Klan, impressed them enough between

the real Ron Stallworth's phone calls and Chuck's, whatever Chuck was saying in person.

All this combined made the Colorado Springs Klan members say, okay, we like you.

We want you to be a member.

Fill out this application and we'll send it off to

the national director.

Again, the Klan, we should say, I don't know if we've ever said this, the Klan calls itself the organization

rather than the Klan.

And the guy who ran the thing, I don't know if he still runs it or not, but he definitely did at this time during this investigation, is a guy named David Duke, who, if you grew up in the 80s or I think even the 90s, you were probably pretty familiar with David Duke.

I believe he ran for president once, didn't he?

I don't know.

I mean, he was, wasn't he the governor of Louisiana?

I don't, maybe that's what it is.

Maybe he ran for that, but he was the grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, and he was trying to make it a more political organization,

less of a terrorist organization and more of a political organization under his guidance.

But it was still the Ku Klux Klan.

Like there were still plenty of times when he was wearing robes and stuff.

He just never did in public.

So during this time,

he was the national director, the grand wizard of the Klan.

And when Ron Stallworth didn't get his application pushed through fast enough, he picked up the phone and called the national headquarters and ended up talking with David Duke and saying, hey, my application is taking a while.

Is there anything you can do about it?

And this kicked off like

what Ron Stallworth would later characterize in a weird way as a friendship between him, a black undercover detective in Colorado, and David Duke, the grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.

Yeah, and by the way, I don't want to get

angry emails from David Duke supporters.

He was a Republican

Louisiana state rep.

He was not governor.

But I think he ran for some high office.

Oh, he did.

He ran

a candidate for the Democratic presidential primaries in the late 80s and then the Republican primaries in 92.

He ran as a Democrat and then a I could see that solid South kind of thing.

Yeah, and I think he ran for state Senate and lost, U.S.

Senate and lost,

U.S.

House and lost and he did run for governor of louisiana but he lost gotcha okay and and you may be if you're if you didn't grow up in the 80s you may have heard his name more recently uh because um he fully endorsed uh donald trump's campaign and after donald trump won he um this was his quote on twitter make no mistake our people have played a huge role in electing trump So he was he was in the news again more recently.

Well, he was also in Charlottesville,

if not leading the rally to Unite the Right, definitely a big speaker at it,

a big part of it.

And

Spike Lee uses some of his footage from that rally to kind of get across that, you know, this stuff is still going on.

This isn't from the 70s or

earlier.

How great was Topher Grace?

He was wonderful.

He was so good.

And he looks a lot like David Duke of the 70s.

He really does.

Unfortunately for him.

The stash and the three-piece suits and all that.

Yeah, he did a good job.

But so, so, yeah, in the movie Toefer Grace from that 70s show,

always, he will always be from that 70s show.

Yeah.

He plays, what do you want me to say?

Like, he had a bit part in Ocean's 11 or something?

Brad Pitt's character was teaching him to play poker, I think.

I forgot about that.

You know, that guy.

No, he's that 70s show, of course.

So, so he plays David Duke in the movie.

And

it's really funny.

Like Spikely added stuff that just you would think like, well, yeah, of course it's totally believable.

Like Chuck being Jewish in real life.

Right.

And he actually wasn't.

That's fabricated by the movie.

So you would just not even think twice about that, but it turns out that's not true.

The stuff that seems the least true is actually the stuff that actually happened.

And for a very long time, well, at the very least, over the course of this nine-month investigation, there were multiple phone calls that were very cordial and friendly where Ron Stallworth would call David Duke, imposing as a white Klan member, and pump information.

They would talk about, you know, David Duke's family and like just have normal conversations that would inevitably turn back to racism and the

weakening of the white race at the hands of, you know, the Jewish media and all the minorities who are taking over.

And so it would inevitably turn disgusting.

But he said later, I think in the book and in interviews, where if you could separate that stuff out he was actually a pleasant person to talk to and that's where that weird friendship that he characterized it as kind of developed from those conversations but there is like he couldn't make this stuff up you know exactly but there is at least one video of David Duke basically admitting that yes this he had conversations with this guy he tries to downplay it sure but uh it he does basically verify that yes, that's true, that really happened.

Well, and Duke's probably like, I can't remember every phone call I had with every random racist over the years, right?

There were a lot of them, even this guy posing as one.

All right, well, let's take another break, and we're going to go, we're going to talk a little bit more about this weird David-Duke relationship right after this.

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Here we go.

Steve's got a trunk full of groceries and no one to help him.

Oh, that's tough, Jim.

Looks like a five-trip load at least.

He grabs the first bag, the second, huh?

Bob, it looks like he's trying to do it all in one trip.

He shimmies the door open, steps over the dog.

Oh, and he stumbles.

Oh, right into the kitchen without missing a beat.

Jim, now that's a man who eats his protein-packed Oikos.

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Oikos, stronger, makes everything better.

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All right, so he's buttying up with David Duke on the phone.

He's fooling everybody.

And he even, like, you get the sense that he does have a little bit of sense of humor, Stallworth, because at one point he even goaded him on the phone a little bit.

And this is in the movie, and it was totally true.

He said, you know, Mr.

Duke, have you ever worried about like a black man posing as a white man and infiltrating your organization?

And Duke said, no.

And he said,

and this is from the NPR interview with Stallworth.

He said, I can tell you're white because you don't talk like a black man.

He said, you talk like a very smart, intellectual white man.

And I can tell by the way you pronounce certain words.

And he said, you know, give me an example.

And he said, black people tend to pronounce the word are, ara, and I can tell by listening to you that you're not black because you do not pronounce that word in that manner.

It's science.

Case closed.

Oh, boy, he was so easily duped.

I love it.

And then they also

did, in fact, meet in person.

That part is true as well.

Duke came to town and was having lunch.

It was not a big ceremony like in the movie, but he came to town to have lunch and the department assigned Stallworth to protect him.

And so he goes there to the restaurant, introduces himself to protect him.

Duke says, all right, I appreciate you them, you know, sending someone my way.

And Chuck is undercover there as well.

And he does, in fact, Stallworth pose with David Duke and gets a Polaroid with him.

So this sounded to me like,

what was going on here?

Like, I mean, like, you've got this investigation going.

This takes place during this undercover investigation that Stallworth's conducting.

You have a guy who's already putting himself out there, Chuck,

as the white Ron Stallworth.

And then the chief says, Oh, yes, by the way, you, the only African-American police officer in our entire squad, you go be David Duke's bodyguard for the day while he's in town in Colorado Springs.

Like, that was just bizarre.

And not only do it,

do that, that very obvious overt act to of slap in the face to David Duke, which was great,

but it could have jeopardized

this whole thing because you also, you had the guy portraying Ron Stallworth

in the same room at the same lunch.

It just seemed really strange.

And again, that was one of those things where when you watch the movie, you would think like, well, that's just made up.

No, that actually took place, at least according to Ron Stallworth's memoirs.

And that

Chuck was in the room, was asked to take a picture by Ron Stallworth with David Duke and the Grand Dragon, I guess, who must be like the head of the state in Colorado.

And then at the last second,

when he was counting down, he put his arms around the shoulders of the two clan guys and then got his hands on the picture.

Apparently, all of that was the case, but he's since lost the picture.

Yeah, and Duke really did try to get it back.

And Stallworth got to it quicker and said, basically,

if you try to take this thing, I will have you arrested for assaulting a police officer.

Right.

Don't do it.

Don't think about it.

Right.

So he said he lost it in a move.

He wished he had taken better care of it.

But

the idea that it was

like, that's just so nuts.

It tells you a lot about the investigation, though, to me.

Like, it makes you say, like, okay, how seriously were they taking this investigation at the time?

If Stallworth later said, all right, this is...

This is just, you know, this is just another job to me.

When I started it, I did the job.

And then when it was done, I moved on to another job.

The fact that he didn't talk about it much until I think he spoke about it to the press once in 2006 in a Deseret News article, and then didn't talk about it again until 2014 when his memoirs came out.

It was just like a thing that they were doing, that other people were doing other stuff too.

And then to have like that part of it, the idea that you would jeopardize it in that way, just makes it seem like they weren't taking it as that big of an operation as as like a the movie would like to to believe I'm not sure well I think in

in real life it was it was a information gathering investigation like it was never we're going to take down the Klan in Colorado it was let's infiltrate and get as much information and fact-finding as we can

and in the end after eight months

That's kind of what happened.

It was, he considers, Stallworth considers it a success in that they fulfilled their mission.

They did prevent three cross-burning ceremonies during that eight-month span or a nine-month span.

Right.

And they did identify clan members who worked at NORAD,

who apparently they said they, I mean, these days they would be fired probably, but they said they reassigned them to like Greenland or something.

Right, because they had access to nuclear weapons.

Apparently, they had very high-level clearance at NORAD.

Which is scary.

And then they also found plans that they didn't act on.

Like the whole bomb plot in the movie was made up for dramatic purposes.

But they did find links between for a plan to

bomb a gay nightclub and another plan to steal automatic weapons from an army base, like an inside job.

So it was, you know, it was valuable work they were doing for sure.

It just wasn't like we're going to take the clan down.

Like, I don't think it was the department's

big job at the time.

No, certainly not.

And in the memoirs and in the movie, too, the reason that's given for the

undercover operation to end is because it started to become successful.

Ron Stallworth was nominated to lead the Colorado Springs chapter of the Klan.

Like, Ken O'Dell basically said, you should take my job.

Everybody likes you.

You're really good at this.

You're smart.

You should lead the Klan here.

And the police chief of Colorado Springs said, that's it.

Close it down.

Burn all the evidence of this investigation.

He apparently was worried about what a PR nightmare it would be if it got out that some of his detectives were in the Colorado Springs Klan.

But at the same time, what strikes me as odd is that the FBI wasn't like, oh, well, geez, this guy is...

like being nominated to lead the Colorado Springs Klan.

He's talking to David Duke.

Like, really,

this could not be kind of blown up into a larger investigation or a larger sting or something like that.

And then secondly, and

Ron Stallworth himself addresses this,

there's very frequently a criticism of, well, if this was such a big operation and they found all this stuff, why wasn't anyone arrested?

Why weren't there any arrests?

And

just David Duke says.

Right, not just David Duke.

Stallworth says also that some that in law enforcement, too, people question that, like, why wasn't anyone arrested?

And he said it was an Intel investigation.

And that's what they did, is they gathered stuff.

But then he very rightly points out, like you said, like the fact that they prevented crossburnings alone makes it a worthwhile and valuable operation.

I think just some people on the outside are saying, well,

why wasn't more done?

Why didn't more come out of this?

And I'm not quite sure what they're driving at, but

Stallworth brings that up in an interview I read with him, like that people do ask that and wonder about that.

Yeah, and Stallworth

is very proud of the fact that with the crossburnings, he was like, no, I can't remember the quote, but he said something about like, no children in Colorado Springs got to, you know, no young black kids had to see crosses on fire during that eight or nine month period.

And he's very proud of that, as he should be.

Yeah, for real.

So I mentioned the voice earlier and the fact that he had a different voice, obviously, than Chuck.

And he said one time, only one time, and I think this was in the movie, wasn't it?

Or was it?

It's been a while.

Yeah, it was, actually.

No, it was.

I remember.

Yeah, so one time in the whole investigation, did someone say, like, wait a minute, you sound different.

Chuck had just been at an in-person meeting, came back,

and then Stallworth wants to follow up on the phone with Ken O'Dell about something right afterward.

So he had just heard Chuck's voice for whatever, this whole meeting, and was talking to him.

And he was like, wait a minute, you sound different.

What's going on?

And he just pulled it off.

He coughed and said he had a sinus infection.

And Ken O'Dell was like, oh, well, here's how you clear that that up and gave him some good sinus medication advice.

Right.

Yeah, that definitely appeared in the movie.

I mean, you cannot make this thing up.

You know, it's crazy.

No, for real.

And apparently, for a long time, Stallworth was saying, like, yeah, it was just another job.

It was just another operation.

And I guess he told some fellow law enforcement friends or whatever about it.

And they're like, dude,

this is a movie.

You need to write this down.

You need to get this out there.

This is a one in a million story.

Yeah, I wonder one reason it didn't go bigger operation-wise was because

the sort of hackneyed way they got into it.

Like, he's the voice, but they're sending a white man.

Did you see that?

Like, it's, it's, I'm surprised they pulled it off for that long.

Yeah, I could totally see that.

One final thing that did not happen in real life, but did happen in the movie, and this is when you usually will change real life is to get a more satisfying ending.

But Stalwart did not, unfortunately, reveal his true identity to David Duke like he does to Hilarious Effect in the film, unfortunately.

No.

How sad to learn that?

He was saying, like, yeah, he just, he didn't really talk about it until the 2000s.

So David Duke didn't know until, I guess, the memoirs came out.

Yeah.

And you know, well, I guess we should talk about Spike Lee.

getting criticized.

Boots Riley, director,

who I had on Movie Crush, by the way.

I know.

What was his movie?

Sorry to bother you, was his film that he made.

No, I mean, his pick for Movie Crush.

His pick was a movie called Mishima, A Life in Four Chapters.

Okay.

Yeah, it was a great film, and

his knowledge on movies was deep.

He turned me on to a lot of cool things.

I thought for a very, very terrible second, you were saying his pick was his own movie.

No, no.

But he,

you know, Boots does not hold back back on what he thinks.

And while you would think that he would be like, oh, no, I'm going to be a champion of Spike Lee and telling the story, he came out very publicly on Twitter and very

intelligently criticized it.

He didn't just bag on it.

He wrote a big

long statement on exactly what he thought was wrong with it.

Yeah, he basically said, look, man, if you take away all the embellishments that Spike Lee added to this movie, what you have is a guy who who's probably biggest assignment, and I'm not sure where he got this, but he focused on that Stokely Carmichael thing and the fact that Ron Stallworth had worked undercover to infiltrate the black power movement in Colorado Springs and that he had worked on that for like three years and that this Klan thing was just like a nine-month thing.

And he also criticized Spike Lee for making it making the movie seem like law enforcement and the black power movement came together to fight racism.

Right.

And that like that was a larger point or that that was historically accurate or something like that.

It was a really interesting, it was like a three-page essay that he posted on Twitter that made some good points.

He basically said, from what I can tell, it looks like Ron Stallworth was working for COINTELPR, which is the FBI's

It was their program to undermine groups, including black power groups, which we mentioned it in the Black Panther episode we did.

And the COINTELPRO definitely deserves its own episode.

And it was ended officially in 1971, but I think Boots Riley's point was

it may have been officially ended, but the work was still going on.

And if this guy was infiltrating black power

groups in Colorado Springs, he was almost certainly trying to break them up one way or another, probably using COINTEL

purposes or practices.

And Ron Stallworth, he had a pretty great quote in response to it.

He said,

I pray for my demented, dissolute brother in response to Bruce Riley, and Spike Lee has no comment about it whatsoever.

So who knows?

But you make a good point that

he's not just giving blind allegiance to anything.

Sure.

Well, Spike did comment eventually.

Oh, I didn't see that.

Yeah, he was in an interview, and the first thing he said was like,

hey, hey,

I'm a young man of 61 or something like that.

And, like, you know, young me might have kind of gotten into a war of words, but he's just not into that anymore.

But he did say

briefly something about,

listen, I'm not going to come out and say that all cops are racist and all cops do bad things because they don't all do bad things.

There's a lot of great cops.

There's also bad cops.

And he kind of just couched it in that and then was like, but, you know, I'm not going to be really talking about this anymore.

Right.

Yeah, I hadn't seen that he'd even had that comment.

Yeah.

So

it's interesting stuff and it's a good movie at the very least.

Oh, for sure.

You know,

I think Ron Salwar is like, man, they made a movie about my story.

That's pretty awesome.

And at the very least, it's a pretty great movie.

How about that?

Totally.

Totally.

So

if you you got anything else?

I got nothing else.

If you want to know more about Black Klansmen, you should probably go see that movie.

And I guess we probably should have said at the outset, this episode is not an ad.

No, of course not.

We just

like the movie a lot, right?

Yeah, I mean, you could say it's an ad, but like, no one gave us money or asked us to do this.

Sure.

But I am endorsing it.

Okay, there you go.

I am endorsing it as well.

It has two thumbs up, as it were.

Yeah.

Rest in peace, Roger Ebert.

And Gene Siskel.

Two thumbs.

Okay, so if

I already said that.

How about some listener mail?

Yeah, I'm going to call this ping-pong response from a former pro.

Oh, nice.

Hey, guys, want to commend you on the job you did, covering a sport that you didn't have an extensive knowledge of.

I'm a professional table tennis coach and former player.

I started playing in college, thought I was really good until I was coerced to go to a tournament at Princeton University about 20 years ago, and I got destroyed.

I didn't like that, so I sought out to coach.

And the rest is history.

You guys clearly did a lot of research

to highlight the things that most novice players aren't aware of, but there were a few things I couldn't help but point out.

Josh, you mentioned the components of the modern racket.

You said the pimpled sign, those are called pips, are for spinning the ball, that the smooth side is for defensive play, but the opposite is actually true.

Oh, no.

I didn't catch that because I would have pointed that out.

I thought everyone knew that.

Thank you for that.

You get good spin on that smooth side.

For real?

Oh, yeah, yeah.

It's grippy.

All right.

He said the smooth side is is very tacky,

as in sticky.

Oh, I see.

And that combined with the sponge underneath allows the ball to sink in just enough so that the tacky surface grips the ball and generates a lot of spin.

Also, you can really have any combination of rubber that you want as long as it's ITTF approved.

Players are not restricted to having one smooth side and one with pips, but one side does have to be red and the other black.

Most defensive players use pips on their backhand because pips vary the spin that is coming back at you and is very hard to read.

Also, Chuck, you mentioned that defensive players are called chiselers.

They're actually called choppers as they chop the ball back with varying backspin.

I've never heard the term chiselers.

I'm wondering if it is extremely outdated.

Maybe.

I bet you that was the case.

Yeah.

I had old research.

Chislers.

All right, that's what they call it in the 20s.

He said, if you guys are ever in the Dunnellen, New Jersey area, stop by.

We're there right now.

Stop by the Lily Yip Table Tennis Club and I'll gladly hook you guys up with a lesson.

I will gladly humiliate you in person.

And that is Thomas from Philly.

Thanks, Thomas.

Much appreciated.

We like it when we are gently corrected because we like to be right.

So thanks for that.

If you want to get in touch with us, let us know,

I don't know, something we got wrong about Black Klansmen.

Let us know.

You can find all of our social links on stuffyshouldknow.com.

And as always, send us an email to stuffpodcast at houseuffworks.com.

For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com.

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