The Denver City Council honored one of its own Monday, issuing a proclamation honoring Kevin Flynn and Gary Gerhardt for their investigative journalism into white supremacy.
Denver has a past checkered with white supremacists. Flynn and Gerhardt authored a book about it, “The Silent Brotherhood: Inside America’s Racist Underground,” released in 1989, that has been made into a movie. Flynn recently attended the world premiere of the film in Venice. The film, premiering in the U.S. Friday at the Denver Film Festival, stars Jude Law and Nicholas Hoult. It will be released into theaters on Dec. 6.
The proclamation, sponsored by council members Darrell Watson and Paul Kashmann, also a former journalist, details how then Rocky Mountain News reporters Flynn, now a City Council member, and Gerhardt, who has since died, uncovered the activities of the Ku Klux Klan, Aryan Nation, The Order, and other white supremacy groups.
Dangerous travels across the U.S.
“Flynn and Gerhardt spent two years traveling the northwest, visiting the Aryan Nation compound in Idaho, a survivalist camp in the Arkansas Ozarks, and meeting local police and FBI agents at crime scenes from California to Montana to research and publish the harrowing true story of racism, crime and murder,” according to the proclamation.