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Life of a Klansman: A Family History in White Supremacy
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About This Book
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. Author 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.
Reviews
"Never does the author lose sight of his complicit inheritance of privilege at the expense of black lives."
"Ball artfully reanimates ideas that attempted to justify slavery and, later, black subjugation ..."
"...a powerful, horrifying history of a family and a nation ..."
"Some of her family died at the hands of Lecorgne's fellow Klansmen."
"Throughout, he writes to a White audience, using the pronoun 'we' ..."
"Because he has few documents, Ball indulges in a lot of surmises and speculations, perhaps a bit too many for my taste ..."
"To compound matters, Ball's prose is relentlessly truncated: short declarative sentences that leave the reader longing for a subordinate clause, a compound sentence, or even a dangling participle ..."
"a clear-eyed work of historical reclamation and an intimate, self-lacerating take on memory and collective responsibility."
"When gaps emerge in psychology, motive, or context, the author relies on the vast historical, literary, and artistic archives (family papers, public records, periodicals, photographs, and scholarship) about 19th-century white New Orleanian experience to speculate artistically about his ancestors ..."
"[a] guide to that massive bedrock half-hidden by the dirt."
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