BlacKkKlansman is the dramatized telling of the true story of undercover police officer Ron Stallworth’s infiltration of the Ku Klux Klan in 1978. Stallworth was the first Black officer in the Colorado Springs police department.
The film starts there; as a rookie cop he is used by the department to go undercover to learn more about speaker Kwame Ture hosted by Colorado College’s Black Student Union. The police chief has the standard racist bullshit reasons for investigating this group, but Stallworth does his job and in the process realizes he can do more as a cop to help the Black community working from the inside.
When Stallworth sees an ad for the Ku Klux Klan in the newspaper he picks up the phone and calls them. Pretending to be a racist white man, he manages to see a way into the organization, even after mistakenly giving them his real name. He takes his plan to his supervisor who wants to know if this could really work. Officer Stallworth assures him it can be done. “I believe we can with the right white man, we can do anything.”
Over the phone Det. Stallworth manages to get the attention of the local Klan group, and with Det. Flip Zimmerman as the white version of Stallworth the two cops set to gaining the trust of these racist men and uncovering a violent plot.
Det. Zimmerman as Stallworth asks Klan member Ivanhoe what the group does and he drunkenly states, “What kinda stuff we do, we uh, cross burnings and marches and stuff, so people don’t fuck with us.” Det. Zimmerman, who is Jewish, also comes face to face with the Klan’s antisemitism and is asked to take a “Jew lie detector test” by Felix, a more deranged and violent member of the group.
The two cops working as one “Ron Stallworth” easily dupe the Klansmen, whose evil intentions may be thwarted by their own stupidity. Trolling David Duke into presenting Ron Stallworth with his KKK membership card in person is just icing on the cake.
BlacKkKlansman stars John David Washington, Adam Driver, Topher Grace, Laura Harrier, Jasper Pääkkönen, Ryan Eggold, Ashlie Atkinson, and Corey Hawkins. Directed by Spike Lee and produced by Jordan Peele.
BlacKkKlansman is available on Kanopy with a library card. $3.79-3.99 in the usual places.
To make requests and see the movie lists and schedules go to WonkMovie.
The animated short is We Real Cool from The Poetry Foundation.
“Using simple, illuminative paper-cut puppetry, this enchanting video imagines the moment of witness that inspired Gwendolyn Brooks to write her landmark poem, ‘We Real Cool.’ Created by Manual Cinema in association with Crescendo Literary, with story by Eve Ewing and Nate Marshall and music by Jamila Woods and Ayanna Woods.”
