Black Klansman Ron Stallworth Shares More True Policing Tales in 'The Gangs of Zion'

Law enforcement veteran and author of the New York Times bestselling memoir, Black Klansman, Ron Stallworth, joins Writer’s Voices to discuss his second memoir, The Gangs of Zion: A Black Cop’s Crusade in Mormon Country. This time around, Stallworth works in Salt Lake City, Utah, a place with a predominantly White, conservative and Mormon population, and learns that the gangs from Los Angeles are being recruited to train at the Job Corps facility in Clearfield, a town about 30 miles outside of Salt Lake City. While these individuals did train at Job Corps during the week, on the weekends they were causing mayhem in the streets of Salt Lake City and Ogden by dressing in gang colors, making graffiti, and other such things. Stallworth explained why he decided to tell this story, “…life in Utah is interesting, especially for a black man… I decided to tell the story of what I went through trying to get Utah to address the rising gang problem and the crack problem that was going on and I went through a lot of political battles, brushed elbows with some of the political heavyweights in Utah society including Orrin Hatch, the late Orrin Hatch, U.S. senator, and I decided to tell the story as only I can tell it because I’m the only one that was there from the very beginning.”

As for Stallworth’s first memoir, Black Klansman, which became the basis for the Spike Lee-directed, 2019 Academy Award-winning film, BlacKkKlansman, he described what it was like watching himself depicted on-screen for the first time. “…I can honestly say that there were times when I sat there with tears in my eyes because I realized that every time they said the word ‘Stallworth’ or ‘Ron’ they were referring to me. That was my name, my image, in the form of John David Washington on the big screen portraying a chapter in my life. My mother has been deceased now since 1982, but I sat there thinking about my mom and how she would be crying if she saw that her third born child had a movie about him and it was very touching, very moving. I’ve seen the movie now almost a hundred times over the years and it still brings a tear to my eye, lump in my throat.”