"Black Klansman" Ron Stallworth on His First Undercover Assignment

Immediately following my swearing-in ceremony and receiving my formal commission, I marched over to Arthur’s office and showed him my brand-new city certificate of employment and department identification card signifying my minutes-long status as a full-fledged cop. I then repeated my obnoxious declaration: “Now that I’m legal will you make me a narc?”

He laughed at my audacious persistence and said, “You need to put in at least two years in uniform before consideration. That’s just the rules.” 

Little did I know that my luck would change much more quickly.

For ten months I went about the business of being a patrolman: writing traffic citations, collaring drunks in public, investigating burglaries, robberies, domestic disputes, etc. It wasn’t exactly what you’d find on a TV police drama, but for me it was all new and exciting. I still hollered at Arthur each time I saw him with my call “Make me a narc,” and one day I got more than a smile and a shake of the head from him.

On that day Arthur asked me, “How’d you like to work an undercover assignment with us, Ron?”

As you can imagine, I didn’t hesitate. “Yes!”

Now was my time to prove my professional mettle to them, and it was to be against one of the foremost leaders of the civil rights movement, a man I had watched numerous times as a teenager on the late-night news agitating the system and provocatively confronting the forces I now represented.

“It’s Stokely Carmichael. The Black Panther leader is in town giving a speech. We’re concerned about the impact he might have. What he might say. We need a black person to go in because our white guys won’t fit in very well.”

Stokely Carmichael, later known as Kwame Ture, was the former prime minister of the Black Panther Party and an iconic contemporary member of the civil rights pantheon that included Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. Carmichael belonged to and later became leader of the SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee), which staged sit-in protests at white-owned businesses that refused service to black citizens in the South. He is the man commonly credited in 1966 with coining the term “Black Power”—the fist-pumping, chest-thumping revolutionary clarion call for black empowerment. The protests associated with the contemporary Black Lives Matter movement are direct descendants of Carmichael’s message.

Arthur explained to me that Stokely was contracted to give a speech at a club called Bell’s Nightingale. The Nightingale was frequented by blacks, with late-night dancing and live bands. Bell’s...

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