National Book Award winner Edward Ball grew up with a skeleton in his family’s closet. His great-great grandfather Constant Lecourgne was a carpenter by day and a Klansman by night. He was arrested for involvement in an insurrection against the Reconstruction-era government of Louisiana. Lecourgne lost that battle but not long afterward, his side won the war.
Life of a Klansman is Ball’s latest ancestry investigation (he’s also written Slaves in the Family) but he doesn’t let Yankees off the hook. Reminding reader of the Ku Klux Klan’s popularity outside the South in the 1920s, the four million Klansmen of 1925 have 137 million living descendants, half of America’s white population, including the current occupant of the White House. Fred Trump was arrested for attacking Italians in Queens (the KKK hated Catholics too). Life of a Klansman is a micro history casting light on the larger subject of white supremacy as one of America’s bedrock—and often unacknowledged—principles.
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