Life of a Klansman: A Family History in White Supremacy

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.

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.