Life of a Klansman: A Family History in White Supremacy

Much as people like to imagine ourselves as products of our own free will, our lives are constricted by the choices made by those who came before us. For half of white Americans, those forebears include at least one member of the Ku Klux Klan, murderous vigilantes and militia members who successfully overthrew Reconstruction and resurrected white supremacy in the post-Civil War South.

Edward Ball set out to tell this history by focusing on his own Ku Kluxer, his great-great-grandfather. Constant Lecorgne, a white Creole in New Orleans, was an insignificant figure, an impoverished carpenter who upon his death of malaria in 1886 merited neither an obituary nor a gravestone. But he was a foot soldier in the victorious white supremacist movement that set us on our historical path.

Ball has done a masterful job of historical research, collecting up the scant crumbs left behind by Lecorgne and his family and interweaving them with rich period detail from the epic struggles of the day. There were moments when I thought the author stretched a bit too far in extrapolating from the meager record to ascribe motivations and especially emotions to the long-dead carpenter, but that is my only minor quibble. Overall, this book is a phenomenal work of historical reconstruction that sheds new light on a momentous period that all of us would do well to understand.

Edward Ball’s contention that his great-great-grandfather was a Klansman is based on his aunt Maud’s journal’s and family recollections that were handed down and on at least one official source where Constant Lecorgne was arrested after a failed insurrection against the Metropolitan police and the Northern occupation that controlled New Orleans.

Ball bolsters that claim with some voodoo science. He claims a Southerner of the time would have so imbued unconsciously with bits and pieces of stereotype against blacks that he/she couldn’t help but discriminate against them. He mentions his favorite children’s story, Black Sambo; you can’t get much more racist than that. Then there’s Constant’s Confederate war service and his familiarity with the leader of the White Camellias, New Orleans’s version of he Klan.

Ball also builds a case that the North was complicit in Southern white supremacy. By 1876 when Rutherford B. Hayes agreed to end Radical Reconstruction in return for the presidency. He actually lost the popular vote, but it was razor thin. Then there’s Plessey vs. Ferguson, a terrible Supreme Court decision that ruled in favor of what eventually became the Jim Crow laws, despite the 13th and 14th Amendments.

The North was also growing really tired of trying to force desegregation on the South. U.S. Grant had successfully stopped the KuKluxKlan from murdering and harassing blacks and Republican carpetbaggers but it was soon replaced with the White League which might have been worse. Radical Reconstruction was actually a response to such atrocities as the Mechanics Institute Massacre which left around 200 dead. Another one occurred seven years later at the behest of the White League just about the time the Republican congress was losing its will to do something about black discrimination. This one occurred in the small town of Grant Parish and left 150 dead. The outrage was missing in the North.

Ball often interrupts his Constant Lecorgne story with an attempt to find descendants of people like a black newspaper publisher and doctor who grew frustrated after Grant Parish and closed his paper, returning to medicine. His descendant had been surprised to learn he had a black ancestor. Black Creoles often passed for white.

There’s a certain amount of karma involved towards the end of the book when Constant dies and his wife Gabrielle is forced to take a job most self-respecting Southern women would rather die than take.

Life of a Klansman is a very important book for all Americans. It is the American story and I think should be read as such. Yes, it is about one man, the author’s great, great, grandfather. He lived in New Orleans before, during, and after the Civil War. The author has done a great deal of research, is careful in his reconstruction, but critically adds his reflections along the way. The readers sees the world slaves made possible, the civil war, and most critically the successes and then failure of Reconstruction. The story ends with the North allowing the White South to resurrect slavery under the Black Codes, etc. I don’t see how you can read this book, (but of course you can), and not see the creation and support for a world of white supremacy (and terror) that is still with us today. In this sense, it is the American story and a story with which, the author makes clear, we, and especially white people, need to come to terms with and hopefully rectify.

I have read a lot about the horrors of what we did in this country in the form of slave trade. But this is the most poignant of any of them. I also have read a lot of memoirs, but never one as unique as this. Edward Ball know probably most of the content of this memoir simply because there aren’t written records to go to. However, from his research he can make certain assumptions. So he will write, for example, “This probably is what happened when….” The book is centered on Constant, the klansman down in and around New Orleans. The back story is so important in this work, how tens of thousands of slaves were brought to the United States from the Caribbean islands and sold. Edward Ball has laced into the memoir of Constant, his ancestor, fascinating historical references as well as actual text, including a very moving speech by Frederick Douglas. Do be aware that the voice of the narrator is often one in which there is only conjecture. That, for me, makes it all the more authentic.

This is one of the most compelling books Ive read in years. It is such an important background for where we are now. Please read this with an open mind. The language is devastatingly harsh, but if you dont think it is still in operation, remember an open mic incident very recently. This book will guide me forward.

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