"An examination of the history of the author's family and its ties to white supremacist movements."--

Eighty million: this figure, in Edward Ball's estimation, represents the number of Americans with at least one ancestor in the Ku Klux Klan. Yet the stories of these Klansmen, the national Klansmen, remain largely untold. They are white skeletons moldering in family closets, in the North as well as the South. Now, in this pioneering and punctiliously researched microhistory, the National Book Award, winner Ball (Slaves in the Family) turns his attention back to the subject that brought him to national fame: the mechanisms of white supremacy in America, as understood through the lives of his own ancestors. It is the story of Polycarp Constant Lecorgne, a carpenter from New Orleans, a member of the White League, a guerilla fighter for the Klan, and the author's great-great-grandfather. Ball takes listeners back to a time when Louisiana was on the ragged frontier of Napoleon's former empire, a place where racial lines were occasionally blurred.