Stallworth was born in Chicago in 1953, and raised in El Paso, after his mother moved the family there. According to Stallworth, "my mother moving our family to El Paso was the best decision she ever made, as Chicago was a far cry from the poverty, gangs, and conflict in city's South Side, where I would have come of age if she had not left." Stallworth graduated from Austin High School in 1971, where he was a member of the student council, and a member of a district-wide advisory board; he was also voted "most popular".
In the summer of 1972, his family moved to Colorado Springs, Colorado, where Stallworth first took an interest in a career in law enforcement. He joined the department as a cadet in November 1972. According to Stallworth himself, he knew, even as a cadet, that he wanted to work as an undercover police officer eventually. His first undercover assignment came when Kwame Ture was invited to speak at a black nightclub in Colorado Springs. Stallworth was asked if he would go undercover to observe the speech, and he eagerly accepted the assignment. He was subsequently assigned to the intelligence section of his department.
Infiltration of the Ku Klux Klan
In 1979, Stallworth noticed a classified ad in the local paper seeking members to start a new chapter of the Ku Klux Klan in Colorado Springs. Stallworth responded to the posting via mail to a P.O. box, and provided them an address and phone number. A member of the KKK called Stallworth, who then posed as a racist white man who "hated blacks, Jews, Mexicans, Asians". During the conversation, he learned that the man founding the new chapter was a soldier at nearby Fort Carson. Stallworth arranged to meet the man at a local bar and sent a white undercover narcotics officer, wired to record any conversations, to stand in for him at the meeting. The subterfuge was a success, and Stallworth continued to pose as a KKK member for the next nine months, usually talking on the phone with other members and sending the white officer in his place when face-to-face meetings were necessary. Stallworth phoned David Duke, who was the Grand Wizard of the KKK at the time, at his headquarters in New Orleans to ask about the status of his membership application. Duke apologized for the delay in getting the application processed and promised to see to it personally that Stallworth's application was processed and sent to him. Within a short time, Stallworth's Klan certificate of membership arrived in the mail, signed by Duke. Stallworth framed the certificate and hung it on the wall of his office, where it stayed for years.
Retirement
After the investigation into the Klan closed, Stallworth kept it a secret and told no one about his role in it. He transferred to the Utah Department of Public Safety, where he retired in 2005 after working as an investigator for nearly 20 years. After retirement he earned a bachelor's degree in criminal justice from Columbia College's Salt Lake City Campus in 2007. In January 2006, Stallworth gave an interview to the Deseret News of SLC in which he related the details of his infiltration and investigation of the KKK. He disclosed that the investigation revealed several Klan members were active members of the United States Armed Forces, including two individuals posted at NORAD. The two at NORAD were reassigned and Stallworth was told that they were given remote postings, "somewhere like the North Pole or Greenland". In 2014, Stallworth published a book, Black Klansman, about his experience investigating the KKK. For his source material, he used a casebook that he assembled during the assignment and kept for himself after it was over. The book was taken to QC Entertainment by producer Shaun Redick to make a film based on it called BlacKkKlansman. Spike Lee signed on as co-producer and director. Stallworth was represented on the deal by his manager, Andrew Frances of Adwater & Stir. The film was released in 2018, with John David Washington playing the role of Stallworth. BlacKkKlansman won the Grand Prize of the Jury at the Cannes Film Festival and was also nominated for six Academy Awards, winning an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay.
