Of all the Black and African American directors there are, none stand out in history as much as Spike Lee. Lee’s 2018 film “BlacKkKlansmen,” starring John David Washington as Ron Stallworth and Adam Driver as Flip Zimmerman, is a movie based on the story of Colorado Springs’ first African-American detective and his infiltration of the Ku Klux Klan in 1979.
Stallworth begins as a filing officer in the Colorado Springs Police Department, filing evidence and paper work until one day, he is moved straight into intelligence. With the movie being set in the 1970s, you can see the stark differences between how detectives gathered information and intelligence then and now. Newspapers were a great way to find things out and were considered more central to the general population.
When Stallworth opens the newspaper, he sees an ad to join the Ku Klux Klan and decides to cold call them and pretend to be a racist, Klan-loving, minority-hating American — and the Klan loves it.
I really enjoyed a lot of the comparisons the movie drew between the then, and still current, white supremacist “preservation” movement and the Civil Rights and Black Power movement. At multiple points in the film, Spike Lee cuts between scenes of the KKK in the basement of a church and scenes of the Colorado Springs Black Student Union listening to Jerome Turner — a real life civil-rights activist, played in “The BlacKkKlansman” by Harry Belafonte — tell the story of Jesse Washington being lynched in 1916 by a white mob.
The strongest part of the film to me was when the Black Student Union was juxtaposed with the KKK toward the end. At first glance, it seems like the scene is building tension; the Klan are unorganized, shouting, screaming and throwing things at a film screen while repeating “white power” and displaying Nazi salutes, while the Black Student Union are all seated and chanting “Black power” in a succinct and organized manner at the end of Jerome Turner’s speech.
After rewatching the scene, I realized that it was less about building tension and more about comparing where these two movements come from. The KKK comes from an obvious place of hate, and you can really tell that from the screaming and hollering they do in that scene. The Black Student Union, on the other hand, demonstrates their belief in change and equality, and that can be seen in the way they chanted “Black power.”
“The BlacKkKlansman” has a certain “je ne sais quoi” that comes with many Spike Lee movies. It may not be for all audiences, especially those who can’t stomach racism and things of that nature, but for those of you who can, I really recommend and encourage you to watch it.
Camillo Cretara is a freelance reporter for the Daily Lobo. He can be reached at culture@dailylobo.com or on X @DailyLobo
