Except perhaps the Negroes.”īall’s earlier excavation of family history, the National Book Award–winning Slaves in the Family (1998), concentrated on his father’s side, “one of America’s oldest and largest slaveholding clans,” and in researching it he tracked down descendants of those his ancestors had enslaved. The book is part memoir (exploring family lore of how Lecorgne became a Klansman), part history (conjuring the antebellum South, the Civil War, and Reconstruction), and part discursive essay (with reflections, for example, on the invention of whiteness).īall recognizes that Lecorgne, a French-speaking Creole who lived most of his life (1832–1886) in New Orleans and fought to maintain the primacy of whites, was a “family hero of sorts…before standards changed, and his memory became too hot.” Nonetheless, he was still considered by some, like Ball’s aunt Maud, to have been a “Redeemer helped to end Reconstruction,” and “for a long time, nobody said that was a bad thing. In Life of a Klansman, Ball presents the story of his ancestor as a case study in the enduring legacy of slavery. For in the years following the release of The Birth of a Nation, membership in the Ku Klux Klan soared and there were several hundred lynchings, for which the Klan had been known since its first appearance in the 1860s.Īmong those implicated in the fledgling Klan’s earliest atrocities was a Louisiana carpenter and former Confederate soldier, Polycarp Constant Lecorgne, a great-great-grandfather of the writer Edward Ball. Two years later, when Wilson took America into World War I “to make the world safe for democracy,” black leaders such as Marcus Garvey argued that while the president’s global ambitions were admirable, perhaps he’d like to start closer to home and make America safe for democracy first. The vexed included President Woodrow Wilson, who, after a private screening in the White House, is alleged to have said, “It is like writing history with lightning, and my only regret is that it is all so terribly true.” Notwithstanding The Birth of a Nation’s cinematic innovations, it was the film’s emotional and racial incitements that fired up audiences when it was shown across the US in 1915. By the film’s end the Ku Klux Klan, in theatrically grotesque hoods, their white robes flapping with terrifying certainty, track Gus down and lynch him. Rather than submit to the rape that he surely intends, she edges onto a mountainous ridge and leaps to her death. Flora recoils in horror and scrambles into the woods with Gus in pursuit.
The “black brute,” with “his yellow teeth grinning through his thick lips,” as Dixon describes him, proposes marriage. Gus, one of the liberated enslaved, in the uniform of the Union Army, loiters outside the house of the virginal southern belle Flora and follows her to the woods.
With the defeat of the Confederacy, the southern white population is now kept in subjugation by white northern “carpetbaggers” in league with newly appointed black legislators.Įarly on in the film (based on Thomas Dixon’s novel The Clansman), a black face appears on the screen. Griffith’s film The Birth of a Nation, the American Civil War ends.
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