Museum is being built in charleston, south carolina. Mayor, do you want to welcome once again edward ball to our classroom . Indeed, professor. Thank you very much. Im so horn honored that edward ball has been so generous with his time to the return to our class today. Slaves in the family as known as the reason for building the museum. Such a wonderful example of the power of a book, the power of a great book. Having read the book, the international africanamerican museum would not be with under construction. Its well under construction to be finished june or july of next year, and thats all because of edward balls powerful work and wonderful work. And im sure all of you have questions, comments about book, so ill, i hope youll take advantage of this to discuss with edward [inaudible] questions or comments. Hello, mayor riley. Thank you for inviting me to come visit with you all. Im happy to do a q and a if you like, and i thought it would also be appropriate just to start by reading a couple of pages from this book that you all have had in your hands. The passage that i think is resonant more than many others in the book is one about the last day of enslavement on one of the plantations in berkeley county. And i thought that id read a couple of pages describing that day, because its the day when the back of slavery was broken and people breathed the air of liberation in many ways for the first time. The plantation as you probably remember from this book, its 25 miles north of charleston on the east branch of the river. The last day of slavery came february 26, 1865. William ball, thats the master of the place, sat in the dining room, a bible in front of him, reading aloud to his family and a few of his people. There were several africanamericans in this dining room on that day, the morning, sunday, february 26th. The local clergyman had made himself scarce during the fight. It was sunday, and everyone in the room black ask white knew the end was upon them. Before long a dispatch of yankees as williams son isaac called them would arrive in the if alley of oaks outside the door. The prayer group numbered about ten seated around the table were williams mother eliza, his stir jane and his wife sister jane and his wife mary. Behind the whites in the corner and along the plasteredded walls stood an elderly black woman, the plantations black matriarch who lived nearest the family and ranked first among house shaves. And he had brought slaves. And he had brought up williams four sons by his first wife and raised her own children alongside. Next to hettie, probably, stood robert the butler as well as the Ball Brothers companion and valet during their Wartime Service is. The bible reading was from the book of lamentations. It was a mournful passage about the miserable fate of jerusalem condemned by god for its sins. She that was great among the nations and princess among the provinces, read william, she in the night and her tears were on her cheeks because the lord has afflicted her for the multitude of her transgressions. According to mary ball, the white people in the room thought the bible asage fit their predicament passage fit their predicament. Skipping down. The week after the victors a arrived this was a spur, as many of us know, from shermans army they sent raiding parties to the plantation. As william was reading from the bible, the cavalryman and his company suddenly rode up to the mansion. A man in a blue uniform dismounted, threw open the door and demanded to talk to the black village. The crowd came from behind from the cabins behind the house. Among the group was henry, a 9yearold boy with a broad face and is light skin. Years later, henry would recall this day in a letter to mary ball. A young woman name sylvia who was the plantations seem stress also came down seamstress came down. The gardener who kept the yard and flower beds, and the rest came down, and the yankee told the crowd they were free. The ball women at this time, evidently worried about rape, throughout the war the confederate press had stoked the war morale that to the southerners gave in, the yankees and is black men would ravage the crowd. When the celebration began outside, mary ball and her sisterinlaw ran upstairs, each put on two heavy dresses, loading themselves down in a way that would frustrate sexual attack. William ball had buried the family silver in a swamp near the house. Grabbing the last pieces that were still in the house, mary and jane put them in cloth bags next to their bodies under layers. The yankee soldiers a arrived and is caroused through the house. Skipping down. Commander of the black company, the yankee black company, a colonel james beecher, came from a family of antislavery activists in the north. His half brother, the reverend henry ward beech, was an abolitionist and and pastor at Plymouth Congregational Church in brooklyn. His half sister was Harriet Beecher stowe, author of uncle toms cabin. Lets see. A similar scene was repeated on all the ball places as each was raid by yankee troops. The balls feared the worst, but in the end the soldiers just snatched a few hams. The single exception came at bucks hall plantation, formerly home to william balls cousin. The bucks hall a mansion, work buildings and crop were burned to the ground by federal soldiers and freed ball slaves. Despite the slaughter of the war, no one not even on buck hall was hurt. And so it was. Its possible to look into the telescope into the past and see how slavery came to an end on specific places and at specific times, and its a fascinating story. And i told you stories just now from a diary kept by a woman who lived on this plantation. But elsewhere i spent a lot of time with a family named lucas in charleston whose predecessors great grandparents had been on that very place, on that plantation on that very day and who handed down oral tradition and ask is stories describing that very day in terms that were nearly identical to the ones that were written down by women who were in that dining room when the yankees showed up on the launch lawn. So there is black oral tradition and white tradition, and and they came together to a fuller portrait9. Anyway, with that, have you all got anything on your mind from this book that you want to raise with me . Yes, sir. I have a couple questions. Ill stick to one for now. I was wondering if you could touch on the relationship of previously enslaved africanamericans with, like, their previous owners and how the dynamic was. I understand indentured slaves, servants, rather, but i was wondering like in your experience if you could relay more on that. Yeah. I think it was as various as people and families themselves. Their my best estimate is that onehalf of e chance painted africanamericans e chance painted africanamericans left the plantations where they had been enslaved and staked out new lives elsewhere in North Carolina or in georgia or in tennessee. They fled or they went to spartanning burg or somewhere because they wanted to get as far as they could from that home place. And onehalf remained on the plantations and became sharecrop farmers when the enslavement the plantations where many of them became sharecrop operations. And my experience talking to dozens of africanamerican families who have oral tradition about the reconstruction period is that their experiences varied. Some wanted to remain, if you like, in proximity to their former enslavers because those white families were the principal source of income and resources and not least a place to live. And the community remained, of africanamericans remained largely intact. And so they staked out relationships with the former enslavers that were in some ways had points of resemblance to the ones that they had just broken by freeing themselves. And on the other hand, there were those families who detested what they had been forced to experience and wanted to get as far away from mr. And mrs. Ball as they could. So i think it varied, taylor. Thank you. Sure. Hello, mr. Ball. I wanted to thank you for coming out once again. I appreciate, you know, your time. Well, actually, i had the pleasure to present my project to my fellow peers last week, and this research consisted of oops, we lost you, healthny. Oh, sorry. I dont know i why it muted. Anyway, so i had the pleasure to share with my fellow peers my midterm project that we had, and i wanted to touch on that, like, your research. I wanted to applaud you like last time i applauded you on how deep you are with your history9 and the accuracy of the history. I wanted to ask questions about, like, Just Research in general. I know its the, like, a very general, you know, question, but i found it difficult, you know, doing this research. And is i did, i was assigned five people, and i only had one person that i could really find more information on, so how did you go about in depth, you know, all of that research that you, you know, you did throughout the book . How would you explain that process or all of that . So you had five people from what period that you had to research . I believe the census that i looked at would be from 1840s up until 1950s because i have some sources here, like, just yeah. Ill just give you that range. Its not that accurate, but yeah. Well, i had the advantage in writing this book of three and a half years of fulltime labor, and and i was able to go to archives that hold the papers of the plantations that i wrote about as well as papers of white families who controlled hundreds of other plantations. So the key was a piece of good fortune able to identify where an africanamerican family lived in slavery. And if you can get that using oral tradition or circumstantial evidence from the year 1870 and 1865, and i can describe exactly what kind of evidence im referring to, then you can with some luck find the papers of the whites who had enslaved a given family which then might have anecdotal stories about enslaved individuals. And is thats whats, what is painstaking to accomplish. But around 1870 because, you know, melanie, the census records show for the first time the use of surnames by africanamericans, the first use of surnames by africanamericans. And using those surnames, lets say you have the name betty hampton, you could be lucky enough to find in the plantation records from five years earlier lists of enslaved people that include are betty and her children. And using the census records which has the name hampton and betty and her children, match these records to the plantation records of slave lists. That was what slave families did. There are other places where you can find the magic key. One of them is in the record of the fieldmens bureau freedmens bureau, the agency established in 1866 in order to try to help africanamericans to transition to freedom, and in the records there are administeringings that crypt administrations that list [inaudible] people used like the freedmens bank in which they document their Family History as a way of applying for a loan or applying for a bank account, and these records are also quite good. So theres a lot more to it, but those are the two, two of the magic keys that lead you back further into the past. All righty, thank you. Ill take that into consideration for the final, so thank you. Sure, sure. Edward, just for a, yeah, a little more context, so each family was assigned five or so names each student was assigned five or so names of africanamerican workers at the Cigar Factory in the new 20th century. Yeah, yeah. They were given the names and is maybe a connection to either a city directory or a census record okay. And they were charmed with building charged with building a profile based on mostly ancestor. Com research. And i think all of us struggled with it tremendously are. You know, some of when we were able to make the connections, i think there were some, you know, fabulous revelations that that, you know, that were made. But i think it also just gave us a little window into, you know, it was an edward ballinspired project, frankly, and it gave us a little window into the work that, you know, that you did so long ago. Right. I see. I understand. Yeah. Well, ancestry is a marvelous resource. And, yes, the public records that youre able to retrieve at your fingertips now are sometimes inadequate to instructing family narratives. They are very partial. They are a first step. Constructing a family narrative with some flesh on it does require talking face to face with folks and finding folks that 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. If its okay, id like to ask another question. Of course. So through my reading, i kept referencing back to earlier in the story whenever you mentioned a little about [inaudible] i was wondering if, like, you could remember, like, just had anything off the top of your head significant that happened or was, like, out stood out to you. Like, just about [inaudible] yeah. Well, monks corner was a cross roads, and it was a place where mr. Monk had a general store at the corner ofs what is now corner of what is now, what, 51 and highway 52 and the [inaudible] yeah. Theres thats where it was, yeah. [laughter] 250 years ago. A lot of black folks leaving the plantation on cooper river to the east of monks corner 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 of the cooper. You mow the geography as well know the geography as well as anybody, so you can picture what im talking about. One of the things that is exceptional about this history along the cooper 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 cooper river, and they did not burn. They only burned one, which was the one i described in this little reading, buck hall. And almost all the others survive ised. And is as a consequence survived. And as a consequence, i think that the outcome was actually somewhat more stable on the cooper river than it was on the ashley river after the civil war. So i dont have a, you know, a hairraising anecdote that i can toss to you, taylor. And i, im not inclined to make one up. [laughter] so, but its interesting that, you know, monks corner was one thing 150 years ago, and it is now something else. But is monks corner predominantly africanamerican or half and half africanamerican, half white . Id probably say, like, probably about 5050. It has, like, larger sections of the city now that are predominantly africanamerican. Yeah. Right. Yeah. And i think that a fact dates from, you know, right after, right after the civil war when africanamericans left the plantations and established new lives. Some of the white folks who owned the plantations on the west branch bordering monks corner were not eager to sell little parcels of land to africanamericans and some were. And that was, again request, a matter of chance, a matter of family disposition, how this white family experienced their loss of status is and how the next white family experienced their loss of status, whether they wanted to help some of the africanamerican families that they had enslaved or not. So, yeah, those are just some, some thoughts here and there about monks corner. Thank you. Yeah, i was whenever i was reading it, i was reading about all the plantations that didnt get burned. And i dont know if you know gideon plantation . Its a huge one right there are on the corner. I didnt know if anything had affected them just because its so large. I would have assumed they would have had some kind of backlash this a sense. Yeah, yeah. I dont know the specifics on that plantation, what how many were there, you know . There were 50 plantations, you know, up and and down the cooper river and on the other side of it. So each one was a 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 africanamerican 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 theres 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 africanamerican family after africanamerican 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 hes 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 africanamericans 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 im 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 africanamerican Carlson Family and a lot of detail, so dont like the subject of another book. It does, doesnt 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 africanamericans 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 husbands perhaps hes 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, 17yearold 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 africanamerican women are often the mothers of children. The story of strom thurmond, strong thurmond resembles the template almost to me, is an 18yearold 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 nittygritty. 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 didnt 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 africanamericans 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 dont 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 africanamericans carry the names of their former enslavers but i dont 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 africanamericans 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 africanamerican genealogy center, what will happen to the africanamerican family . Good question and im 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 africanamericans 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 whats. Im describing the experience of africanamericans 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, theres 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 innocents 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 familys antiblack 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. Im in connecticut where i live. My heart is with you and i wish i could be with you. When the epidemic finally lifts, i will make my reservations immediately to come spend some time once again. I want to talk about the q clocks ku klux klan, referring to the group, the militias which show a familiarity the only people who knew actual marauders in the white supremacist moment would use. Members of the ku klux klan from 150 years ago when they first came together did not see themselves as founders of a movement. They would have not thought their greatgreatgrandchildren would be talking about that and yet not only are we talking about the ku klux klan, the angry and ignorant and vicious a gangs of reconstruction men who disguised themselves and hurt and killed people, not only are we talking about them. We are circulating ideas today that recall those of the Ku Klux Klans perpetrating acts the resemble those carried out by the first clans. I hope you can see some pictures on the screen. Let me take you to el paso, texas in august of 2019, a marauder, a white terrorist killed 22 people, ruining the lives of hundreds. This marauder rights a manifesto that talks about White Supremacy as his guiding idea. I will take you to charlottesville, virginia, august of 2017, White Supremacists took over the city, beat up a lot of people, killed one person, these people used language the klansman once coined and symbol that announced white racial identity, the number 14 is an apparently new symbol or sign the refers to a creed that is housed in a sentence, the 14 word manifesto by david lane, founder of a supremacist cell in the 19 eighties called the order, 14 word sentence, we must secure the existence of our people in the future for white children. We are all familiar with the events of june of 2015 at a manual a. M. E on calhoun street, the 11 people there had the books open at the prayer meeting to the parable as the seller, as you so so shall you reap. The killer in that massacre also wrote a manifesto calling for a separate white nation. Lets go to january 6th, 2021, in the us fred fiumano where a marauding mob carried white supremacist symbols during the storming of the capital. The assault on the capital was not a clan operation but it drew energies from the barely submerged river of white supremacist thought and action that originated 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 in white supremacist violence that announces itself is racial vengeance and that does not include Police Killings of unarmed africanamericans, the status of those killings in the discussion of racial identity can be argued. In recent years it seemed to me like a return, remembrance of things past that seem familiar despite the grotesque 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 live for a lot of years in louisiana, in new orleans. Thats the home of my mothers family my mothers people have lived in new orleans for about 200 years. My fathers family are all from charleston and they have been there for about 300 years. Ive lived with my family in charleston for a different part of my childhood. In new orleans, my mothers family have been and remain to this day plead people. Clerks, tradesmen, school teachers, salesman, 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, i was about ten, we moved in with my grandmother into her bungalow which was raised at the against the floods that played new orleans which is raised against the it was near floods Tulane University, if you know the city. In. The carroll district. Test, and living with my test grandmother also was a woman named mod. A woman name, my grandmother sister mod the quran. Mod. It was with and mod as we called her that i first learned about our klansmen. In the south, in many families, whether white or black or mixed race, theres often a family historian. And mud was that person among my mothers people, about 75 when i first paid attention. She was a schoolteacher, unmarried. Never married, she wore horn rimmed glasses and she had a closet of gingham dresses. Come here, boy, let me tell you about our people. My people. They came from brittany on the west coast of france. The first man was called yves lecorgne, and he was a sailor napoleons navy. And as you will learn in school, napoleon was involved in war, and yves was one of his junior officers. So the Emperor Napoleon sent a flotilla of ships, for an uprising in san domingue, the place they now call haiti. He put down his roots here. He found himself a bride, about 19, her name was margaret. And margaret was at yves lecorgnes grave and signature. Shortly after he arrived in new orleans. After this man married marguerite he found himself in a fine creole family, which had a plantation at the mississippi river. He married one of the daughters, from a branch that was less wealthy than the other branch. And her branch of the family was in decline. And so yves and marguerite moved into a cottage on rue dauphin in the french quarter. And my aunt mod continue this story. Among them was my friends fathers constan, constan lecorgne. He was a redeemer. This was after had taken over the state. They were voting. It was after that time that they called reconstruction, that awful tone. We construction was not when it it was when they were put in the seat of power. We dimension for the people who resisted that. But my grandfather constan was redeemer and he wanted to restore White Supremacy. , and the white lead the only difference between the white lead the ku klux klan was that the ku klux klan was secretive and that the white league was not. Thank god for the white league, because they put out of the seat of power. And so it was as a historian that i first learned about the klan. Years later, mod having died, my parents having died, and seeing the family house, i found a batch of files labeled lecorgne. I began reading and i make a decision. I go back and forth from my home in connecticut to new orleans, to look in the archives and i hair researchers and the story take shape. Constant lecorgne hes won in 1832 to a French Family in new orleans and he is the second of three sons. The parents, with his older brother, of education, and constant goes into a trade. He grows up a small, thin man, nervous and alert, with sharp features, skin, nose, and beautiful hands, an under bite and a frail brow. His parents were of the white class, a historic high, from there they had a vantage in new orleans, where the one quarter of whites who enslaved people however, they in slaved five people. Not 55. One was a man named ovid. Ovid, who constant war began, before the civil war began, and he wanted to build a house. Constants father dies at age 54, when he is eight and his mother cannot make the family work. She has five minor children aside from the five enslaved people that they own. She rents them out to whites more prosperous than she is in that becomes the family income. At age 24, constant marries a woman named gabrielle, age 19, an orphan of the caribbean island of martinique. Steamboats on the mississippi. As the civil war approaches in 1860, constant and his wife gabrielle live in a rented house with their two children. Their parents are dead, and his mother, when she died, gave him two of their enslaved people, ovid and dinah. He sales ovid and hold on to dinah and then the war begins. Constant goes to fight with the confederacy, as did 50,000 other wife white men in new orleans. He and his wife by confederate bonds and they lose all their money. When he comes home, they are exhausted and bitter and they arrive in a city that is, as maude called it, full of carpetbaggers, and with twice as numerous. And the enslaved woman, dinah, is gone. Louisiana is occupied by the army, and new orleans is crowded by black freed people, who have left the sugar and cotton plantations north of there. About 350,000 African Americans in louisiana are emancipated. Many thousand moved to new orleans, and constant the carpenter now competes with black craftsman to make a living. Lecorgne, this is my great, great grandfather, and i will call him by his surname now, lecorgne felt himself a victim and he saw the new world as anathema. He descended into resentment. The government, the occupation government, was pro and they held office, which seems to be a genuine perversion to him. We construction, as we called it, the first attempt to make the United States as racially mixed democracy. And to some, not least to 4 million back slaves, it meant power sharing with whites, perhaps wealth sharing, and in somewhere distant, perhaps shared humanity. Millions of white opponents met with mass obstruction and violent defiance. Thats one of constants houses. The ku klux klan avoids 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 political and economic authority. The name ku klux derives from a greek word for circle. Their members made a cult of disguise. Klansmen also knew their victims personally and referred to taunt them anonymously. In louisiana, the klan used other names. The nights of the white was one. The white league, another. The innocent, a third. In mississippi, there is the white line. In North Carolina, the red shirt. The ku klux klan reasons why does the south for about eight years. And alongside that were all the parallel militias i just named. An early disguise of the brigade was the ranks of volunteer Fire Companies. Violent tear Fire Companies joined in great numbers. In great numbers, confederate veterans, join volunteer Fire Companies, which became overstaffed and armed and were like a kind of for the white supremacist movement. Constant lecorgne fire company was called hook and ladder, which was made up of his former companies seed the 14th regiment of louisiana infantry. Constant lecorgne took the extreme step and join this armed resistance. He became a guerrilla fighter who wanted to return the south to white rule and became a foot soldier in the campaign. First major explosion in new orleans of parlor occurred in july 1866 and evidence that constant lecorgne was there at the Mechanics Institute meeting hall during a convention to agitate for the black vote. Home hook and ladder was among the Fire Companies on the scene sent by the mere, the white mere to break up this political meeting. The shooting star ticked, an assault on the klan, on a salt of the klan. Consisting of Fire Companies and ranks of unnamed gangs left 200 back people dead, according to one newspaper editor who is witness to the event. And it was a massacre about voting rights. Its relevant to observe that much of that 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 shoes lecorgne and perhaps 5000 others in the states, all of them known as ku klux in the newspapers, redid, marched and beat people. Seems lecorgne to have joined a group called nights of the white camilla, led by a family friend. The nights of the white familiar were costumes and herded the conducted night reads and carried out individual killings. In the nighttime attacks an armed gang of 20 surrounded a police depot in new orleans. A second group stormed the citys main artery but failed to overcome its u. S. Army defenders. Lecorgnes held its position and the standoff ensued for days with the military camped nearby. The klan could bring down the louisiana government for even for a week then the u. S. Army was short up at the new precarious civil rights could be forced to withdraw from the states and white rule might be taken back. The army stormed the building and one man was killed. Lecorgne and the others were charged with treason and violating the ku klux klan act in washington, congress had hoped the 1871 ku klux klan act would send stamp out the way to change. The klan penalty was five years. The treason penalty was hanging. Constant lecorgne was not the only one in the family who fought for white rule. His cousins, his nephews, his brotherinlaw joined him in the coup attempt. In addition to several of his french cousins, who played greater or lesser roles in the militia with the medieval name the knights of the white camelia. In the trees in case, the gallows were being argued when a sympathetic white judge dismissed all of the counts, free lecorgne and his coconspirators. And he returned to the streets 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 500,000 members, white and christian. Its likely for publicity reasons that this number was exaggerated. Lets assume that actual clan membership stood near 4 million the descendants of 4 million clansmen 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 for 50 of the white population of the United States. Seen another week, that means that one of two 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 member. Now, why retrieved from obscurity, this bitter and bloody story about constant lecorgne . A foot soldier in the first white militia. I have a personal motive and that is, that it bothers me. It feels like finding a corpse in the bedroom. Im disgusted and ashamed. I had an inkling that my great, great grandfather was a violent supremacists, by did not see until Research Just what this family had gotten up to. He was not a thoughtful maam. He could write and enforce for his carpentry work, but thats about it. And he did not develop the idea of white intel talent that still circulates. But god knows, he put poison in that idea and he damaged the lives of hundreds. Still, for public reasons and personal reasons, why revive this filthy story and bring it back . One reason is to try to harness the tale of lecorgne and to repurpose it in some hope of shining a light on the steps forward. Its 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 the race. We dislike acknowledging that races power. And that is because in part, the ku klux and people like lecorgne succeeded in the redemption making whiteness a norm. Part of the atmosphere. If you think that im 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 conscious. 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 . One answer i think is uncomfortable and that is, to see it not as an alien phenomenon, that something familiar. Perhaps in my case, something familial. Familial. I wrote this book in life of a klansman order to see whiteness as something familial and for other reasons. I do not think that were in the midst of a return to 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 streets, four weeks. Sometimes four months. Among the marchers were perhaps one third of the white people. This was without precedence during the civil rights campaigns of the high years of 1966, 67, 60, when they involved the participation of whites it was at a ratio of one in ten. Last summer, the way to marched were 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 lecorgne was a redeemer. Redemption was a return to order. We have had, since january, as me 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 hope that the white militias and their silence supporters, their many fellow travelers, are going to be turned back and the guys are pushed back underground. Thank you all very much for taking this walk with me. Thank you very much mayor riley for inviting me to talk. And that story i just told is in this book, which is about i dont know, six months old now Something Like that. And its better told then its the wait strolled in that book. By this book by this book. Edward did it make that clear. Life of a klansman. Edward, thank you so much. Youve generally agreed to answer questions and at this point, id like to invite any of our guests to put questions into the chat and ill do my best to really those two edward. Maybe while were waiting here, edward, can you talk a little bit about the relationship between slaves in the family and this current project . And on any level, in terms of the research or in terms of what those two Major Projects met to you personally. Yes, sure my book slaves in the family was published 22, 23 years ago and tells the story of ball, ball. When i wrote that book, i practically swim in a river of source material, some 10,000 pages of records that survive from this sleeve 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 mothers family in new orleans. My mothers family in new orleans, louisiana. And like 99 of society, his family left very few paper records that chronicled their experiences. There was no archives. And i only had a few scraps of paper that he had written on. , this man, constant lecorgne. And i want to write his story. I decided to write it first as an awful. I was struck by what you might call the silence of the archive. And i had to write it as fiction. I wrote about 100 pages. Not only were they not very good 100 pages. But at a certain point, i realized that this story has more grip as nonfiction, as history. Because people crave the real. I decided i would have to try to write it as nonfiction, in order to do justice to the extraordinary things that i was beginning to uncover. In writing a piece of history. And this is a biography, if you like, the way it is sold. It sold as a biography. To do it was to spend hundreds of hours in public records of the state of louisiana into in an archive called the historic new orleans connection collection. In what i call the sacramento records of the Catholic Church diocese of new orleans, an archive collected and hailed by the new orleans public library. In court records, in criminal records, in newspaper archives that can retain some of the very fragile papers published chronicling the events of the klan. It took five years of research with the help of hired Research Assistant to put together small pieces of narrative content. This is a mosaic, like tiles you can craft into a picture, hundreds of bits of narrative information that i could assemble gradually and painstakingly into narrative content. So it was a totally Different Research experience. And the result is a different kind of story. Its still history but it has different routes to it. A couple of friends, i edward, Margaret Chapman were curious about your Research Assistant, how you went about finding a good Research Assistant. 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 undrafted hours in the library . Fortunately, one exceptional, exceptional researcher named john bartus, a 25 year old new orleanian went on to the task. And im living in connecticut, im coming back and forth from connecticut to new orleans every month or so. But he is without this mans work, without his work, i couldnt have done this book. He now teaches at lsu. His first job as a historian, hired by Louisiana State university. So i had much gratitude for his work in excavating the remote parts of this story. I think these are a couple of related questions here. Mary kay asks, does mr. Believe ball believe racism and violent whiteness can be rooted out and heal rather than just pushed back into the geyser . I think somewhat overlapping is related to patricks question about what we might do to address polarization, and racism reflected in the january 6th event. Yeah. Gosh, those are hard questions. Youve got me. And you got me on that metaphor, the underground river, the geyser metaphor. Its 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, it may be invented. I have this theory that White Supremacy is a coherent system of entitlement invented after the civil war, when white racial identity was under threat for the first time. And reconstruction, a kind of reaction, it generated this set of ideas, this ideology of white superiority that previously had not been necessary for ruling families to articulate. And it is this idea of white entitlement and overlordship that becomes this kind of caustic, caustic poison in public life in the United States for generation after generation. And it does i believe it does surface and then disappear, surface said then disappear. When jim crow segregation is established, comes to a crescendo and the Eugenics Movement of the teens and20s has another fulsome surge of it i think that we are in the first and interesting stages of a self Awareness Among white people, growing numbers of white people of our white racial identity. In a state of awareness that many whites have previously been unwilling to engage in. And i really think thats, up to mystically, there is a new understanding that racial identity is not something possessed only by people of color. But it is possessed also by white people and that part of that identity exists in the notion, unconscious, principally unconscious but with actual social effects of the authority to rule. White folk says the how can i say . The natural place of duty and authority and a number of things that we think about ourselves that have been placed there. Place there, ideas placed there by history. They can be and learned. I think we are in the early stages of that unlearning. And i have hope that it is going to continue. This is from our good students. Taylor is wondering if you might speak to this project. The challenges of this project, they partly come from the Research Challenges. The fact of the absent archives, as has been called, i think its the normal experience of the family, the family im writing about in this book, my mothers family, 150 years ago, in working across the family. We are called in the french speaking worlds, petit blanc, meaning little whites there was an understanding that the population was made up of big whites, the landowning whites. But the petit blanc the majority from the absent archives there was Research Challenge there. There is another Research Challenge. You asked me. And you talked about this book, the klansman, and the slave and the family, 20 are years ago. And one thing this book does that has an echo, it echoes the template of slaves in the family. I find in louisiana and in a couple of the northern states, African Americans living today, the ancestors, they were victimized by the marauders of the ku klux that migrate, great grandfather joined. And with their consent, i tell their family stories as well. Why happened to their family under , this nightmare, this massacre. Where they are now. And so that was another research problem. Finding and then actually gaining the trust of several who would allow me to come visit them, as a representative, someone who represents one of the family members who violated and abuse their people, their ancestors, decades and generations ago. That was hard. That was hard. So those are two answers to your question. Thank you all for your questions. Theres also been a number of favorable comments for you, edward, we will get those to you so you can read some mail from your many fans. I would like you to send me the ones that are throwing tomatoes [laughs] would you please send those . Because, you know i know sometimes the stories get under people skins. And thats okay. Thank you again, edward. Mayor, can you close this out . I had a book in local booksellers. Looking at us and talking, learning about the state of the country, its a wonderful book. , as was slaves in the family. And the relationship between this book and life of a important to our country and unearthed. And optimistic. Im optimistic im optimistic about the fact that and the country is becoming more diverse and celebrating. But we have to be on alert. Things that can happen. That people with ideas are in charge and edward, you have given great gifts to our country, and certainly, here looking over where the museum is where i can see it, its under construction. It would not be an idea under construction new york, slaves in the family. It will open in june or july 2022, edward will have a front row seat there. All of you coming, and those who would like to continue to contribute to the museum, we welcome it as well. These two stories are linked, the linkage is important. We want to make this a better country. The way we do that, is celebrating diversity and coming together. We thank you edward for the treasure, value, and your friendship, wonderful scholarship. Blessings on you and your work. Im grateful to be with you and i feel like we are arm in arm. Locking arm in arm