No sense in going where you're not wanted.
Integration was such a hot-button issue in the '60s that few filmmakers dared to tackle it head on. Roger Corman did so with his 1962 film The Intruder, which failed to catch on with audiences, while Samuel Fuller was hot on his heels with 1963's Shock Corridor, which broached the subject of racial intolerance in conjunction with a variety of other societal ills. Neither has what anyone would call a light touch, but they're beacons of subtlety compared to The Black Klansman, which the perpetually lead-footed Ted V. Mikels (low-rent producer/director of such fare as Girl in Gold Boots and The Astro-Zombies) foisted upon audiences in 1966.
Starting with the title song, which is sung from the point of view of someone who's miffed that "the Ku Klux Klan killed my little girl," so he vows to "destroy them from within," the film places itself within the context of Los Angeles race riots and the passage of a Civil Rights bill. The latter is screamed from a newspaper headline, the former documented by the light-skinned Jerry Ellsworth (Richard Gilden), a jazz musician and part-time photographer who doesn't need to do much to pass for white apart from buying a wig that doesn't look all that different from his own hair. This comes in handy when word reaches him that his daughter has been killed, the sole casualty of a church firebombed in the wake of an unrelated racially motivated murder in his hometown of Turnerville, Alabama. The news so enrages him that he spurns his fiancée Andrea (Rima Kutner, queen of the non-reaction) with a cry of "Get out of my bed, white woman!" and shaves off his beatnik beard so he can more readily infiltrate the good-old-boy network of Turnerville bigwig Rook (Harry Lovejoy), founder of the Knights of White Supremacy, an independent Klan offshoot that Jerry, posing as L.A. building contractor "John Ashley," claims to want to start a chapter of out west.
In the interest of leaving no racially insensitive stone unturned, Mikels and writers Arthur A. Names and John T. Wilson (who went on to co-write Girl in Gold Boots) also introduce "Harlem gangster" Raymond (Max Julien), who's brought in by Rev. Farley (Jakie Deslonde), brother of lynching victim Delbert (Kirk Kirksey), who only wanted to get a cup of coffee at the town's whites-only café, to prime the local boys for a full-on race war. Furthermore, when Andrea arrives in Turnerville with Jerry's best friend, sax player Lonnie (James McEachin, credited as Jimmy Mack), in tow, they're mistaken for an interracial couple and hassled by the black militants and white supremacists alike. Meanwhile, in the course of his search for the man who threw the bomb that fateful night, Jerry enjoys the benefits of being Caucasian, which include bedding Rook's loose daughter Carole Ann (Maureen Gaffney), thus giving the self-styled Klan leader ("I'm the Exalted Cyclops!" he whines as he's being abandoned by his white-robed flock) something else to be apoplectic about when Jerry, having gone through their secret initiation, reveals his ruse. Of course, that might have been more of a shocker if Mikels hadn't cast a white actor (even one accustomed to playing bit parts like "Arab Student" and "Indian Brave") in the role.