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 .
He is also the recipient of a Public Scholar Award from the National Endowment for the Humanities..
He has taught at Yale University and has been awarded fellowships by the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard and the New York Public Library\'s Cullman Center.
About author(s): Edward Ball \'s previous books include The Inventor and the Tycoon , about the birth of moving pictures in California, and Slaves in the Family , an account of his family\'s History as slaveholders in South Carolina, which received the National Book Award for Nonfiction.
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.
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.
That is, one-half of White Americans could write a Klan Family memoir, if they wished .
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.
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.
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.
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.
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. --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.
The interconnected strands of race and History give Ball\'s entrancing stories a Faulknerian resonance. . .
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
