k k so, how did you go about in debt all of that research you did tlult the book? how would you explain that process or all of that? >> you had five people from what period that you b had to resear? >> um, i believethem census that i looked at would be from 1840s up j until 1950s because i have some sources here. so, i'll just give you that range. er for it's not that accurate. but. >> i have the advantage in writing this book of three and a half years of full-time labor. and i was able to go to archives that hold the papers of the plantations that i wrote about, as well as the papers of white families who controlled hundreds of other plantations. the key was a piece of good fortuneiv being able to identif where an african-american family lived in slavery. and if you can do that using oral tradition or circumstantial evidence from the year 1870 andt 1665, then i can describe exactly what kind of evidence i'm referring to, then you can, with some luck, find the papers of whites who had enslaved a given family. which then might have anecdotal stories about enslaved individuals. i andt that's what's -- what is pain steaking to accomplish. but around 1870, as you know, melanie. the census records show, for the firstir time, the use of sir nas by african-americans. thee first use of sur names by african-americans. and using those sur names, let's say you have the name betty hampton.ou you could best lucky enough to find in the plantation records, from five years earlier, lists of enslaved people that include betty and her children. and h using the census records, which has the name hampton and betty and her children, you can match these records to the plantation records of slave lists. that was the crux of what slaves in the family did. there are other places where you can find the magic key. o and one of them is in the records of the freedman's bureau. which was the agency established in 1866 to try to help african-americans a transition life of freedom. ands in the records of the freedman's bureau, there are institutions that freed people used, like the freedman's bank, in which they document their family history as a way of applyingng for a loan or applyi for a bank account. and these records are also quite good. so, there's a lot more to it. but those are the two of the magic keys that lead you back further into the past., >> thank you. i'll take that into consideration for my final. so, thank you. >> sure. >> justt for a little more context. so, each student was assigned five or so names of workers -- african-american workers at the cigar factory from mid20th century. so, they were given the names and maybe a connection to either a city directory or a census record? and then they were charged with building a profile based on mostly ancestry.com research. >> yes.r. >> andme i think all of us struggled with it tremendously. when we were able to make the connections, i think there was fabulous revelations that were made but i think it also just gave us a little window into -- you know, it was an edward ball-inspired project, frankly. and it gave us a little window into theah work that you did so long ago. >> right. i see. i understand. yeah. well, ancestry is a marvelous resource. and yet, the public records that you're ableme to retrieve at yo finger tips now are sometimes inadequate to constructing family narratives. they are very partial. they are a first step. and constructing a family narrative with some flesh on it does require talking face to face with folks and finding folks that it will have family memories from a hundred years ago. and with their participation and collaboration. using those oral traditions to make a flesh and blood family history. >> right. if it's okay, i'd like to ask another question. >> of course. s >> so, through my reading, i kemt referencing back to earlier in the story, whenever you mentioned the plantations. i am from monk's corner.r. so, was wondering if, off the top of your head, anything significant that happened or stood out to you about monk's corner and research you did? >> whew. yeah. well, monk's corner was you know 150 years ago, a cross roads, andw it was a place where mr. monk had a general store at the corner of what is now what? 51 and -- >> highway 52 and the canal. >> that's where it was, yeah. but they were talking 250 years ago. a lot of black folks leaving the plantations on copa river settled along and around what is now 52 and by sweat and tears, you know,, were able to acquire tiny homesteads. sometimes from the former slave owners on the west branch. you know the geography as wellads anybody. so, you can picture what i'm talking about. one of the things that is exceptional about this history, along the copa river, is the fact that it survives at all. you know that when the raiding parties from the union army came in from charleston and went up the ashley river and burned most of the plantations along the ashley river, whereas, they went up the river and they did not burn. they only burned one, which was the one i described in this reading, buck hall.iv and almost all the others survived. as a consequence, i think that the outcome was actually somewhat more stable on the river than the ashtly river after the civil war. so, i don't have a hair-raising anecdote that i can toss to you, taylor. and i'm not inclined to make one up. so, it's interesting that, you know, monk's corner was one thing, 150 years ago, and it's now something else. is monk's corner predominantly african-american? or half and half african-american? half white? >> i'd probably say 50/50. youu have larger sections of th city that are predominantly african-american. >> right. yeah. and i think that fact dates from right after the civil war, when african-americans left the plan orientationsve and established w lives.la some of the white folks who owned thee plantations on the west branch bordering monk's corn were not eager to sell little parcels of land to african-americans. that was again a matter of chance. a matter of family disposition. how this white family experienced their loss of status and how the next white family experienced their loss of status. whether they wanted to help some of the african-american families that they'd enslaved or not.t and so, yeah. those are just some thoughts here and there about monk's corner. >> thank you. i was just -- whenever i was reading it, i was reading about the plantations that didn't get burned. i don't a know if you know of [ inaudible ] plantation. er for it's a huge one in monk's corner. i didn't know if anything effected them because it's so large. i would assume they would have a backlash, in a sense. >> i don't know the specifics about given plan orientation. but there were 50 plantations up and down the river and on either side of it. community, and each one had a different experience. >> yes, sir. well, thank you, i really appreciate it. >> sure, sure. pleasure. >> hello, mr. ball. >> hey, how are you? >> pretty good. my question is when i was reading your book, i noticed you mentioned how a lot of the slaves they were often raped by their masters, and then when they were inpresentation nateed -- impregnated, the masters put down the birth date of their illegitimate child, they would just leave it blank. was it tough trying to trace the history of the family, especially for those, some of the black descendants of the ball family? was it tough, like, tracing them? >> oh, sure, yeah. very tough. i will -- there were perhaps dozens of african-american families with whom our white families shared blood because of forced sex on the plantations. now, we all hoe that this -- all know that this for white folks is, is a difficult subject, and is there's a lot of denial or unwillingness to sort of look it in the face. but when i started to work on this book, i began to meet african-american family after african-american family who had oral tradition that said, you know, my great, great grandfather was matthew ball, and he came from this particular plantation. i wanted to -- and yet, for reasons that you described, there are few paper trails that you can follow the that lead to, you know, the coupling of a white enslaver and an enslaved woman. .. i knew that i wanted to write about some of the families that had this experience, this oral traditions of their collaboration, participation and yet i knew that i could only write about those families if i had enough persuasive evidence that would convince a reader that our family was in fact related to them. i was able in the case of two things, compile of circumstantial evidence and oral tradition and odd bits of paper evidence that confirmed and remain consistent in such things as this, specifics of the research are almost so obscure. there would be a plantation master named james ballin record so he's unmarried and living in a place called quentiny plantation and there is a woman on a place named harriet and harriet has a son, then james ball, the unmarried james ball sells the plantation, buys another place and moves to it and the only person according to the paper record the goes with ms. harriet and her son and they resettle their and furthermore james ball dies in the record shows he leaves $500 to harriet and to no other african-americans so things like that, sort of circumstantial evidence but persuasive, in the case of a couple families i would find photograph of james ball and family in berkeley county, photograph of their great grandfather who was purported to be the son of james ball and compare these photographs and there was a strong family resemblance so that is a long answer to your question but it is very difficult to excavate the details of this very painful history but i think the in the end it does help both black folks and white folks to come to terms with the real deal, the real story of our history by talking about the stories honestly. >> what was it like finding out information about the connections to your family? >> it the. kate wilson was the matriarch of the family and she was the case of like the one i'm describing with james ball and her in slaver, john carlson, a cousin in the ball family, john carlson was not married to a white woman and she was his partner if you like in a place called ellwood plantation on the east branch of cooper and what is extraordinary about these two is they had eight children over appear go of 25 years so this was a relationship that is not a relationship you can say was sensual, that kate wilson undertook with willingness and a relationship characterized by love. it has to be described in a complicated way but the evidence suggests it was not a relationship that was based upon sexual assault. if it survived for 25 years and produced eight children in these children received money and education from their deceased white father and it is an interesting and complicated example of the interracial relationships that evolved during slavery. i think it is deep and they explored this relationship with the african-american carlson family and a lot of detail, so -- >> don't like the subject of another book. >> it does, doesn't it? >> how did, how did - the subject oftentimes of russia or how was it handled -- >> white families? i think, in a variety of ways they were two templates, two models come to mind, one is there is a white couple, slaveowning couple in the big house, 50 african-americans who live adjacent to the big house and the husband is of a personality that wishes to avail himself of sexual pleasure and he does so either by force or threat or some kind of bargaining quid pro quo relationship with women on the slave street and his wife, a white wife is probably aware of her husband's - perhaps he's not doing this all the time but perhaps he establishes a second family and it sounds like this is one template to me, the wife is aware of it and is just an awful kind of poison circulating in the household not to mention on the slave street. another template is young sons, this is probably more common. the young sons of the white landowners often had their first sexual experiences and 16, 17-year-old men with the enslaved women. that was a kind of institutional aspect of the slave/master relationship the young white man became sexually apprenticed for took advantage of young black women on the plantation for his own sexual experience. as we know from memories and history of the south white women were not, for generations and generations, allowed to be sexually active so young white men are forbidden, socially and in many other ways, for been from sexual love with white women and so slaved african-american women are often the mothers of children. the story of strom thurmond, strong thurmond resembles the template almost to me, is an 18-year-old kid, and fathered a child with one of the cooks in the family home, that is the way it worked and those are the two templates >> any other questions? >> you guys want to talk about the hot stuff to talk about the real nitty-gritty. >> the question. >> in your book, i read l of the ball slave did not take the ball name when they were freed and it said in the book for the most part they were treated well, they were educated. i was wondering why do you think a lot of slaves didn't take on your family name? >> the people formerly enslaved by the balls were not universally as you say treated well and certainly not universally educated but there is this pattern a lot of the country african-americans did not carry the surnames of their former enslavers. and other parts of the south, alabama and mississippi it is much more common that they carry the surnames of their former enslavers in the way devolved is this. there is oral tradition in the ball family that goes as follows, the biggest slave master at the end of the war is william ball who owns 12 plantations and enslaved 900 people, did not actually -- presented himself to huge meetings of the former ball slaves and said do not take my name. perhaps he did this in a strict way or perhaps he was more gentle about a request, i just don't know but his desire was the former ball slaves do not carry the name ball. in 95% of the cases former ball slaves do not carry the name ball, one in 20 did use the name ball. i think this is something more common than is generally acknowledged throughout the self, conventional understanding is african-americans carry the names of their former enslavers but i don't believe it is widely true because this was a point in the life of a man and a woman when they had this enormous sense of possibility and they could select a name of their own choosing and use it publicly and use it legally and share it with their children and millions of african-americans chose names. in the case of the low country families seen by looking at the list of sharecropper contracts and the census records people chose surnames that were being used by white folks elsewhere but they did not choose surnames that came from the family of their former enslavers. they might have chosen the name simmons, they lived 25 miles away and had some regard, joseph the name of anson, a white family they had some regard for. that is one way that it worked. >> thank you. >> might have time for one more question before we need to take a break and invite the public. anyone with a final question? >> with african-american genealogy center, what will happen to the african-american family? >> good question and i'm optimistic that it will encourage hundreds if not thousands of people to investigate their family histories. tony carrier is a good egg and she has in her mind, she knows what records need to be retrieved to make it possible for african-americans to investigate their family histories so i think it might have a beneficial effect because as i said, i repeat this perhaps, a bit heavily, to investigate your family history in the most difficult areas, has a therapeutic, against an unusual and unexpected strength to learn about the hard parts of what's. i'm describing the experience of african-americans who find time and will to do this as well as white folks who want to. into the heart -- hard parts of their family narrative. it has a therapeutic effect so i am a domestic the family history center will spend some of that therapy. >> reporter: i am too and thank you for your generous time. we will take a break and be back at 2:30, is it >> take about a 5 or 6 minute break and we will come back and get started at 3:30. >> all right. >> wonderful. >> welcome back to our class, we are delighted to have all of you with us for a special occasion. for which we are very grateful. our guest speaker -- i would like to take a moment for this. after months long nationwide search, delighted to share the memories of the chief executive office of the national - matthews is an experienced executive thought leader and educator with a track record of readership. with this project. exciting new phase of the museum at a forward step for the staff to look closer. the contributions of the day. thank you so much. we are delighted to welcome arthur edward ball to our class today. slaves were in the family and won the national book award, there's a reason we are building this. awaiting this book opened my eyes, my heart, my mind to history that i did not previously know, history lost in our country still, inspired me to set off on a quest would tell the long history to charles was extraordinary dedicated to manufacturers and staff that brought us this far. edward writing this book is a great service. you very much. factors edward will discuss his latest book, "life of a klansman". "life of a klansman," edward ball returns to the subject of slaves and family, mechanisms of white supremacy in america, the lives of his own innocent's and tells the story of a complex clan, took up this radical races after the war. ball, defendant of this klansman paints a portrait of his family's anti-black that is part history, part memoir. welcome back, thanks for being here. >> thank you, good to be with you. thank you for this invitation to talk once again to your circle admirers and to join with charlestonians in looking at the past in a way that it has influence on the present. i am not in charleston. i'm in connecticut where i live. charleston. i'm in connecticut where i live. i'm not in the holy city. but my heart is with you and i wish i could be with you. when the epidemic finally lifts, i'll make my reservations immediately to come spend some time once again. i want to talk today about the kluklux, refers to the militia. words that share familiarity that only people who knew actually marauders in the white supremacist movement could use. members of the ku klux klan from 150 years ago, when they first came together, did not see themselves as founders of movement. they would not have thought that their great, great grandchildren would talk about them. and yet, not only are we talking about the ku klux, the angry and vicious gangs of reconstruction, men who disguised themselves and hurt and sometimes killed people. not only are we talking about them, we are circulating ideas today that recall those of the ku klux and we're perpetrating acts resembled by those carried out by the first klans. i hope you can see some pictures on the screen. let me take you to august 2019, where a marauder, white supremacist killed 22 people, ruining the lives of hundreds' and this marauder writes a manifesto that talks about white supremacy as his guiding idea. i'll take you to charlottesville, virginia, august 2017, when white supremacists took over a city, ate up a lot of people and killed one person. these people used language that klansman once coined and symbols that announced white racial identity. the number 14 on the shield is a fairly new symbol. or sign. it refers to a creed that is housed in a sentence, the 14-word manifesto written by david lane, founder of a supremacist cell in the 1980s called "the order." the 14-word sentence, we mugs secure the existence of our people and a future for white children. we're all familiar with the events of june 2015 at emmanuel a.m.e. on calhoun street. the 11 people there have their books open at the prayer meeting to the parable of the sewer, as he sews, so shall he reap. and the killer in that massacre also wrote a manifesto calling for a separate white nation. let's go to january 6th, 2021, and the u.s. capitol where a marauding mob, a large gang, carried white supremacist symbols. during the storming of the capitol. now, the assault on the capitol was not a klan operation. but it drew energies from the barely submerged river of white supremacist thought and action that originates with the ku klux klan. we are in a moment, or a phase, which has lasted several years, that is punctuated by violent white supremacy. since 2015, some 250 people have died from white supremacist violence that announces itself as racial vengeance. and that does not include the police killings of unarmed frang americans. the status of those killings in a discussion of racial identity can be argued. recent years seem to me like a return, like a remembrance of things past. they seem familiar, despite the grotesque uniqueness of these many acts. why are these things familiar? today, i want to tell a story about where it all began. when i was a boy, i lived for a lot of years in louisiana. in new orleans. that's the home of my mother's family. my mother's people have lived in new orleans for about 200 years. my father's family are all from charleston and they have been there for about 300 years. i lived with my family in charleston for a different part of my child hood. in new orleans, my mother's family have been and remain to this day plain people, clerks, tradesman, carpenters, nurses. nobody at all with a higher education for 150 years until the 1970s. so, when my family arrived in new orleans, as i was a child, about ten, we moved in with my grandmother into her bungalow, which was raised up against the floods that plague new orleans. it's near tulane university. if you know the city, in the carrollton district. and living with my grandmother also was a woman named mod. my grandmother's sister, mod lacorn. it was with aunt mod, as we called her, that i first learned about our klansman. in the south, whether white or black or mixed race, there's often a family historian. aunt maud was about 75 when i first paid attention. a school teacher, unmarried. never married. she wore horn rimmed glasses and had a closet of gingham dresses with long sleeves. come here, boy, let me tell you about our people. our people, they came from brittney on the west coast of france. the first man was called eve lacorn, the first immigrant, and he was a sailer in napoleon's navy. and napoleon was involved in war from one end of the earth to the other. and eve was one of his junior officers. so, the empper napoleon sent ships because there was an uprising in the place they now call haiti. when the ship arrived, eve got off and never got back on. and he put down his roots here. he found himself a bride, who was about 19, whose name was marguerite za rang. marguerite zu rang. this is yve lecorn's grave and signature. shortly after he arrived in new orleans, in 1820. after this man married marguerite, he married himself into a fine creole family, who had this plantation on the mississippi river. but he married one of the daughters who was from a branch that was less wealthy than the other branch. and her branch of the family was in decline. so, yve and marguerite moved into a creole cottage in the french quarter and had five children. and my aunt maud continued the story. they had five children and among them was my grandfather, constance lecorn. constant lecorn. he was a redeemer. redemption, as she said. that was after the civil war, when the colored people had taken over the state and they were starting businesses. they were acting as those everything was theirs and they were voting. the redemption called reconstru, that awful time. reconstruction was not when the south tried to build itself up again after the war between the states. no, reconstruction was when they put colored people in the seatr who had resisted that. so my grandfather constant, he was a redeemer. he wanted to restore white supremacy. he got tied up in that white league. the white league, the only difference between the white league and the ku klux is they were secretive and the white league were not. and thank god for the white league, because they put the negro out of the seat of power. so it was from aunt maude, the family historian, that i first learned about our klansmen. 30 years later, maude having died, my parents having died, i'm cleaning out the family house. and i find a batch of files labeled "lecorn" and began reading and make a decision to tell the story of our klansmen. i go back and forth from my home in connecticut to new orleans to look in the archives, and i hire a researcher to help excavate the documentary record and the story takes shape. constant lecorn was born in 1832 to a french family in new orleans. he's the second of three sons. his parents gave his older brother the education and constant goes into a trade. he grows up a small fin man, nervous and alert with sharp features, skinny nose and beautiful hands, an underbite and a furrowed brow. constant's parents were of the white class who start high and then lose their economic advantage. in new orleans, his parents were among the one quarter of whites to enslave people, however they enslaved five people. not 55. one of them was a man named ovid. ovid, who constant inherited just before the civil war began and then sold because he wanted to build a house and use the money from the sale of ovide to build a house. constant's father dies at age 54 when he is 8 and his mother cannot make the family work. she has five minor children without the five enslaved people that they own. she hires them out. she rents them to whites more prosperous than she is, and that becomes the family income. at age 24, in 1856, constant marries a woman named gabrielle, age 19. an orphan of french descent from the caribbean island of martinique. steam boats on the mississippi. as the civil war approaches in 1860, constant and his wife gabrielle live in a rented house with their two children. his parents are dead. his mother when she died gave him two of her enslaved people. ovide and dina. he sells ovide, holds on to dina. and then the war begins. constant goes to fight with the confederacy, as do 50,000 other white men in louisiana. he and his wife invest in the fight, buying confederate bonds, and they lose all their money. when he comes home after three years, he's sick, exhausted, and bitter, and he arrives in a city, as my aunt maude called it, full of carpet bagger and with the negroes twice as numerous. now he finds his livelihood wrecked and their enslaved woman, dina, is free and gone. louisiana is occupied by the u.s. army. and new orleans is crowded with black freed people who have left the sugar and cotton plantations north of the city. about 350,000 african-americans in louisiana are emancipated. many thousand moved to new orleans, and constant the carpenter now competes with black craftsmen to make a living, and he does badly. lecorn, this is my great, great grandfather, and i will call him by his surname now, lecorn felt himself a victim. he saw the new world as anathema, and he descended into resentment. the government, the occupation government, was pro-negro and the colored actually held office, which seemed to him to be a genuine perversion. reconstruction, as we call it, was the name of the first attempt to remake the united states as a racially mixed democracy. to some, not least to 4 million ex-slaves, it meant power sharing with whites, perhaps wealth sharing, and somewhere in the distance, shared humanity. these fantastical ideas called radical reconstruction by their millions of white opponents, met with mass obstruction and violent defiance. that's one of constant's houses. the ku klux klan arose in tennessee, probably in 1866, soon after the end of the civil war, and it was a resistance movement. it was an armed militia that wanted to return to a world run by whites, dominated by whites, with only whites in economic and political authority. the name ku klux derives from greek, circle, and gangs, as everyone knows, often dressed in costumes and masks. klansmen made a cult of disguise, wearing hoods to avoid identification by the army occupiers. klansmen also knew their victims personally and preferred to torment them anonymously. in louisiana, the klan used other names. the knights of the white kamil yeah was one. the white league, another, the innocence, a third. in mississippi, there was the white line. in north carolina, the red shirts. the ku klux klan is as wide as the south for about eight years, and along side it, there were all of those parallel militias that i just named. now, an early disguise of the white brigades was the ranks of volunteer fire companies. volunteer firemen joined in great numbers, in great numbers, confederate veterans joined volunteer fire companies, which became overstaffed and armed. and were like a kind of seed bed for the white supremacist movement. constant lecorn's fire company was called home hook and ladder, which was made up of his former company's 14th regimen louisiana infantry. constant took the extreme step and joined this armed resistance. he became a guerilla fighter who wanted to return the south to white rule, and he became a foot soldier in that campaign. the first major explosion in new orleans occurred in july 1866, and circumstantial evidence is preponderant that constant lecorn was there. at the mechanics institute, a meeting hall for tradesmen during a convention to agitate for the black vote, home hook and ladder was among the fire companies on the scene sent by the mayor, the white mayor, to break up this political meeting. the shooting started, an assault on the klan, an assault of the klan, the incipient klan, consisting of fire companies and ranks of unnamed gangs left 200 black people dead, according to one newspaper editor, who was witness to the events, and it was a massacre about voting rights. it's relevant to observe that much of the fight during the election of 2020 was about voting, who gets to vote, whose votes are counted, especially about when it is black people who are voting. during the next eight years, evidence shows lecorn and perhaps 5,000 others in the state, all of them known as ku klux in the newspapers, raided, marched, and beat people. lecorn seems to have joined a group called the knights of the white kamilia, led by a family friend. the knights of the white camilia were costumed and hooded. they harassed people. they conducted night raids. they whipped people. they carried out individual killings. in the nighttime attack, lecorn and an armed gang of 20 surrounded a police depot in new orleans. the second group stormed the city's main armory but failed to overcommits u.s. army defenders. lecorn's gang held its position and the standoff ensued for days with the military camped nearby. if the klan could bring down the louisiana government, even for a week, then the u.s. army would shore up the new and precarious civil rights model, could be forced to withdraw from the state and white rule might be taken back. the army stormed the building and one man was killed. lecorn and the others were charged with treason and with violating the ku klux klan act. in washington, congress had hoped the 1871 ku klux klan act would stamp out the white gangs. the klan penalty was five years. the treason penalty was hanging. constant lecorn was not the only one in the family who fought for white rule. his cousins, his nephew, his brother-in-law joined him in the coup attempt. in addition, several of his french cousins played greater or lesser roles in the militia with the medieval name the knights of the white camalia. a sympathetic white judge freed lecorn and his coconspirators. he returned to the street and to the fight. now, if you believe that to have a klansman among your relatives is a strange or deviant thing, think of this. in 1925, the ku klux klan could claim 5 million members, white and christian. now, it is likely for publicity reasons, this number was exaggerated. let's assume that actual klan membership stood near 4 million. the descendants of 4 million klansmen living in 1925, if you count forward 100 years to their grandchildren and great grandchildren in the year 2025, add up to about 135 million living white americans. 135 million form 50% of the white population of the united states. seen another way, that means that 1 of 2 whites have a family link to the ku klux. every other white person, if he or she knew the names of ancestors and wished to research their lives, could produce a klan family memoir. now, why retrieve from obscurity this bitter and bloody story about constant lecorn, a foot soldier in the first white militias? i have a personal motive, and that is that it bothers me. it feels like finding a corpse in a bedroom. i'm disgusted and ashamed. i had an inkling that my great great grandfather was a violent supremacist, but i did not see until research just what this family member had gotten up to. he was not a thoughtful man. he could write an invoice for his carpentry work, but that's about it. and he did not develop the idea of white entitlement that still circulates. but god knows he put poison in that idea, and he damaged the lives of hundreds. still, for public reasons, and not personal reasons, why revive this filthy story and bring it back? one reason is to try to harness the tale of lecorn and to repurpose it in some hope of shining a light on the steps forward. it's 50 years now after the end of the civil rights movement. and the white and black divide nationally is caustic and fresh, and that is because the u.s. possesses a tragic history, some of which white americans tend to be unaware of. in fact, much of this tragic history lies in the repressed parts of our collective memory. many people find it uncomfortable to speak about whiteness. we dislike as whites being labeled members of a race. we dislike acknowledging that race is power. and that is because in part the ku klux and people like lecorn succeeded in the redemption. they made whiteness a norm, part of the atmosphere. now, if you think that i'm flattening all difference, making white people the same as klansmen, i do not want to do that. however, i do have the idea that there is white supremacy, violent white supremacy, and all the way across the spectrum, there is something kinder and gentler, father knows best whiteness. it is atmospheric, and it is permeating the social common. i think as soon as i stop talking, which will be in one minute, someone is going to ask, what can i do? what can be done about white supremacy? and one answer i think is uncomfortable. that is to see it not as an alien phenomenon but as something familiar, perhaps in my case, something familial. familial. i wrote this book "life of a klansman" in order to see life as something familial, and for other reasons. i do not think that we're in a midst to the return of the barbarism of the race wars. in fact, i think we have reason to be optimistic. last summer, the mass marches showed the country something new. after the killing of george floyd, some 20 million people demonstrated in the street for weeks. sometimes for months. among the marchers were perhaps one third of them white people. this was without precedent. during the civil rights campaigns of the high years of 1966, '67, '68, when they involved the participation of whites, it was a ratio of 1 in 10. last summer, the whites who marched are whites who may be seeing their own racial identity in a new way. and that is reason for optimism. so i do have reason to hope. and as my aunt maude told me about the redemption, my grandfather constant lecorn, he was a redeemer. the redemption was a return to order. we have had since mid-january, as it may turn out, a kind of redemption. the end of the previous administration was a pivot point. it is possibly a redemptive turn. a redemption that is beginning to gather strength, and i whoep hope that the white militias and their supporters, their many fellow travelers are going to be turned back and the geyser pushed back underground, beneath the surface. thank you all very much for taking this walk with me. thank you very much for inviting me to talk. and that story i just told is in this book, which is about, i don't know, six months old now, something like that. and it's better told than the way i just told it, in that book. >> buy this book. buy this book. if edward didn't make that clear, absolutely. "life of a klansman." edward, thank you so much. you generously agreed to answer questions. at this point, i would like to invite any of our guests to put questions into the chat, and i'll do my best to relay those to edward. >> while we're waiting here, edward, can you talk a little bit about the relationship between slaves and the family in this current project? and you know, on any level. in terms of the research or in terms of what those two major projects have meant to you personally. >> yeah. sure. well, my book "slaves in the family" was published 22, 23 years ago. and tells the story of the ball family of charleston, and their 25 rice plantations, as well as the stories of ten african-american families whose ancestors, the ball family had once enslaved on their rice plantations north of charleston. and when i wrote that book, i practically swam in a river of source material, some 10,000 pages of records that survived from this slave dynasty, if you will allow me to use that expression. allowing me to chronicle the lives of hundreds of people who lived anonymously, without the benefit of literacy, without the benefit of inscribing their own histories. i started to research this book "life of a klansman" which tells the story of one man in my mother's family in new orleans. my mother's family are all in louisiana. and like 99% of society, his family left very few paper records that chronicled their experiences. there was no archive. and i only had a few scraps of paper that he had written his signature on, this man, constant lecorn. so i had to decide, i wanted to write his story, and i actually began writing it as a novel. because i thought faced with what you might call the silence of the archive, i thought that i would have to write it as fiction. and i wrote about 100 pages. and not only were they not very good 100 pages, but at a certain point, i realized that the story had more grip as nonfiction, as history, because people crave the real, and i decided i would have to try to write it as nonfiction in order to do justice to the extraordinary things that were -- that i was beginning to uncover. so i switched to writing a piece of history. and this is a biography, if you like, the way it's sold, sold as a biography. to do it was to spend hundreds of hours in the public records of the state of louisiana, in an archive called a historic new orleans collection, in an archive called the sacramental records of the catholic church diocese of new orleans, in an archive collected and held by the new orleans public library, in court records, in criminal records, in newspaper archives that had retained some of the very fragile papers published chronicling the events of the klan. and it took five years of research with the help of hired research assistants to put together small pieces of narrative content like bits of a mosaic, like broken tiles that you can craft into a picture. hundreds of bits of narrative information that i would assemble gradually and painstakingly into narrative content. so it was a totally different research experience. and the result is a different kind of story. it's still history. but it's -- it has different roots to it. >> a couple friends, edward, margaret sidler and howard chatman were curious about your research assistants and wanted to know how you went about finding good research assistants? >> well, i went to a friend of mine at tulane university in new orleans. who teaches in the history department, and i said, do you have any graduate students who would like to earn a little money? and spend a few hundred hours in a library? and fortunately, one exceptional, exceptional researcher, his name is john bardess, a 25-year-old new orleans signed on to the task. i'm living in connecticut. i'm coming back and forth from connecticut to new orleans every month or so. but he was without this man's work, without his work, i couldn't have written this book. he now teaches at lsu. his first job as a historian, he's been hired by louisiana state university. and so i have much gratitude for his work in excavating the remote parts of this story. >> i think these are a couple of related questions here. sherry k. asks, does mr. ball believe racism and violent whiteness can be rooted out and healed rather than just pushed back into the geyser? and i think somewhat overlapping is our good friend ann kill patrick's question about what we might do to address polarization and extreme racism that was reflected in the january 6th events? >> yeah. gosh, those are hard questions, man. you got me. and you got me on that metaphor, the geyser, the underground river metaphor with the geyser. it's a nice image. but it does sort of trap us into seeing white supremacy as a state of nature. which it may not be. it may be an acquired ideology. in fact, white supremacy had to be invented. i have this theory that white supremacy as a kind of coherent system of entitlement was invented after the civil war when whiteness, the white racial identity was under threat for the first time and reconstruction in a kind of reaction generated this set of ideas, this ideology of white superiority that previously had not been