Life of a Klansman : a family history in white supremacy

Title:

Author:

Ball, Edward, 1958- author.

Personal Author:

Ball, Edward, 1958- author.

ISBN:

9780374186326

Edition:

First edition.

Physical Description:

395 pages : illustrations, maps, genealogical table ; 24 cm

Contents:

Prologue: Our Klansman -- The Ku-Klux Act -- Grands blancs / Big Whites -- Tribes -- Introduction to an Atrocity -- White Terror -- Petits blancs / Little Whites -- Redemption.

Abstract:

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

Sifting through family lore about "our Klansman" as well as public and private records, Ball reconstructs the story of his great-great grandfather, Constant Lecorgne. A white French Creole, father of five, and working class ship carpenter, Lecorgne had a career in white terror of notable and bloody completeness: massacres, night riding, masked marches, street rampages-- all part of a tireless effort that he and other Klansmen made to restore white power when it was threatened by the emancipation of four million enslaved African Americans. Ball also sought out descendants of African Americans who were once victimized by Lecorgne and his comrades, and shares their stories. -- adapted from jacket

Personal Subject:

Lecorgne, Constant, 1832-1886.

Lecorgne family.

Corporate Subject:

White League (La.) -- Biography.

Ku Klux Klan (1915- ) -- Biography.

Subject Term:

Reconstruction (U.S. history, 1865-1877) -- Louisiana -- New Orleans.

Racism -- Louisiana -- New Orleans -- History -- 19th century.

White supremacy movements -- Louisiana -- New Orleans -- History -- 19th century.

Creoles -- Louisiana -- History -- 19th century.

Geographic Term:

New Orleans (La.) -- Race relations -- 19th century.

New Orleans (La.) -- Biography.

Genre:

Biography.

Summary:

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

Holds:

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Summary

"A haunting tapestry of interwoven stories that inform us not just about our past but about the resentment-bred demons that are all too present in our society today . . . The interconnected strands of race and history give Ball's entrancing stories a Faulknerian resonance." --Walter Isaacson, The New York Times Book Review

A 2020 NPR staff pick | One of The New York Times ' thirteen books to watch for in August | One of The Washington Post 's ten books to read in August | A Literary Hub best book of the summer| One of Kirkus Reviews' sixteen best books to read in August

The life and times of a militant white supremacist, written by one of his offspring, National Book Award-winner Edward Ball

Life of a Klansman tells the story of a warrior in the Ku Klux Klan, a carpenter in Louisiana who took up the cause of fanatical racism during the years after the Civil War. Edward Ball, a descendant of the Klansman, paints a portrait of his family's anti-black militant that is part history, part memoir rich in personal detail.

Sifting through family lore about "our Klansman" as well as public and private records, Ball reconstructs the story of his great-great grandfather, Constant Lecorgne. A white French Creole, father of five, and working class ship carpenter, Lecorgne had a career in white terror of notable and bloody completeness: massacres, night riding, masked marches, street rampages--all part of a tireless effort that he and other Klansmen made to restore white power when it was threatened by the emancipation of four million enslaved African Americans. To offer a non-white view of the Ku-klux, Ball seeks out descendants of African Americans who were once victimized by "our Klansman" and his comrades, and shares their stories.

For whites, to have a Klansman in the family tree is no rare thing: Demographic estimates suggest that fifty percent of whites in the United States have at least one ancestor who belonged to the Ku Klux Klan at some point in its history. That is, one-half of white Americans could write a Klan family memoir, if they wished .

In an era when racist ideology and violence are again loose in the public square, Life of a Klansman offers a personal origin story of white supremacy. Ball's family memoir traces the vines that have grown from militant roots in the Old South into the bitter fruit of the present, when whiteness is again a cause that can veer into hate and domestic terror.

Reviews (1)

Kirkus Review

The National Book Award winner continues his investigation of his Southern roots. Where Slaves in the Family (1998) and The Sweet Hell Inside (2001) explored the author's ancestors' relations with the people they enslaved, his latest potent exploration of the past is a study of an even more willful evil. The man whom Ball refers to as "our Klansman" had a "pretty name," or so his mother said: Polycarp Constant Lecorgne. The author, a consummate historical excavator, has known this "family story" since childhood, but it took a long while to face; it's a story that "begins with a woman making notes and talking about family and ends with a lot of people dead in a ditch." Lecorgne was a product of his time, to be sure, but worse than most, drummed out of the Confederate Army for his part in a drunken riot, "allowed to flee, rather than face prison." That shame did not keep him from becoming a committed member of white supremacist groups including the KKK, in which he committed heinous crimes, participating in the murder of freed black citizens and even a siege of a local police station--though, thanks to a politically well-placed brother with the resonant name of Yves of God, he managed not to do hard time. Ball's resonant tale involves many other actors, including a distant cousin who was, a government report noted, "in the habit of shooting at blacks who come near his house" as well as an African American journalist and medical doctor who pressed for civil rights for his people even as Reconstruction faltered. Ball closes with a self-searching meditation: "It is dreadful what this character, my unlikable protagonist, does with himself and others," he writes, but Lecorgne was not alone, and he does not expiate the rest of white America for its ongoing sins. An illuminating contribution to the literature of race and racism in America. (40 b/w illustrations; family tree) Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.