Life of a Klansman: A Family History in White Supremacy

(Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $28)

If you want to be charitable to Ball’s ancestor, “you might call him a victim of ‘economic anxiety,’” said Julian Lucas in Harper’s. Born in 1832, Polycarp Constant Lecorgne grew up in a moneyed white French Creole family but drifted downward from wealthy carpenter with several slaves to indebted renter on an all-black block in a city where formerly subservient black neighbors were exercising power. Ball never excuses, but makes it easy to grasp, the social upheaval that motivated a white backlash that saw members of the White League infiltrate Louisiana’s police forces, fire companies, and political clubs. When 200 black demonstrators were massacred outside the state’s 1866 constitutional convention, Lecorgne was probably among the army of white assailants.

This is more than one man’s story, said

Erik Gleibermann in The Washington Post. Ball estimates that half of white Americans have Klan members in their family tree, but he doesn’t fully connect the systemic racism of Lecorgne’s time with our own, even when he brings in the voices of descendants of the White League’s victims. “Life of a Klansman is valuable as a self-searching profile of ancestral atrocity,” but because it says so little about 2020 America, it “ultimately lands softly on the bloody terrain.”