Spike Lee restores Meaning to Media!
His new movie, BlacKkKlansman, respins a true story from an autobiography of Colorado Springs’ first African American police officer, Ron Stallworth, and a Jewish detective, Flip Zimmerman, who worked undercover to infiltrate the local Colorado chapter of the Ku Klux Klan in 1979.
Stallworth really liked making Duke look like a fool.
On more than one occasion, Stallworth undercuts the image of Grand Wizard David Duke as a fearsome figure. According to the detective, he talked to Duke weekly or bi-weekly, and in one conversation Duke told Stallworth, again a black man, “I can always tell when I’m talking to a n——-. Take you for example. I can tell that you’re a pure Aryan white man by the way you talk, the way you pronounce certain words and letters.”
He goes on to claim, “N——-s do not have the same intelligence as the white man to properly speak English the way it was meant to be spoken.”
See full book review at The Daily Beast and at Amazon.
The KKK wasn’t his only target.
A good portion of the book also focuses on his undercover work with anti-KKK groups, most notably the Progressive Labor Party.
However, the most fascinating bit outside of his KKK work might have been his very first undercover gig, at the age of 21. Stokely Carmichael, the honorary prime minister of the Black Panther Party, was coming to town, so the police department had its only black officer, Stallworth, go undercover to discover what kind of trouble Carmichael had planned. Ironically, Stallworth found himself caught up in Carmichael’s speech and ending up cheering at various points.
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