The most recommended books about the Ku Klux Klan

I read a lot of mysteries. Grisham’s are dependable—I’ll be caught up and lose myself in it. This one was really hard, the death penalty, a Klansman, 676 pages on a person you know you’d hate, but dammit, no! Not the gas chamber!

I almost didn’t want to keep reading because I knew where we were going. But yeah, cliché or not, I couldn’t stop. The grandson lawyer, the rotten convict, the evil system…I’d open it up and promise myself just one or two chapters, but somehow, I kept going. 

The book did what I want these mysteries to do—pull me out of my life, out of my work, out of my worries, and plop me down somewhere new to me. Yup, the gas chamber—a break from my real world.

An outstanding history book of Denver filled with interesting details. Short enough not to bore me. Detailed enough to grasp the significant events, people, buildings, and aspects of Denver that give it a well-rounded and thorough view. Well organized and researched. This book is a treasure for Denver's history. I applaud and appreciate the authors for putting their knowledge and research into the hands of the public is such an easy-to-read book form.

The term “Scalawag” was pretty close to a curse word in the Reconstruction era South, meant to smear native whites who became Republicans and allied themselves politically with freedmen.

Baggett explodes the tenacious myth that the “scalawags” were no more than a gang of disreputable, self-serving louts who “shamed” the South by working with Blacks. Drawing on a wide range of sources, he shows that far from being sleazy opportunists they were often remarkably brave men the roots of whose political activism lay in clandestine Unionist resistance to the wartime Confederacy.

After the war, most of them embraced the Republican party from patriotic conviction and support for its expansion of democracy, as well as—if less frequently—the cause of extending civil rights to Blacks. Along with Black activists, they were frequent targets of the Ku Klux Klan; many died for their beliefs.

I found this an extraordinarily enlightening book… show more.

To understand white supremacy today, it’s vital to understand how it changed from a set of ideas embedded in law as well as society to a fringe belief scorned by right-thinking people. Klansville, USA is set in the Civil Rights era deep inside the Klan in North Carolina, probably the most important state for the Klan at the time. Sociologist David Cunningham explains why the Klan was so strong in North Carolina and why it was weaker in many states where racism was also deeply entrenched. Cunningham shows how ordinary and embedded the Klan was in many parts of North Carolina and also reveals the tough, and incredibly effective, FBI campaign to crush the Klan, which included an array of dirty tricks against various Klan chapters that ultimately devastated many white supremacist organizations.

I used to teach this book in Civil War classes. Although billed as fiction, the book is a thinly veiled account of Albion Tourgée’s actual experiences with terrorism. Tourgée refers to the protagonist as “The Fool,” a dig at himself in the third person. An Ohioan, he relocated to North Carolina after the Civil War, became involved in Radical politics (advocating African American voting), and was elected a superior court judge. Tourgée battled the Ku Klux Klan. He faced death threats and provided accounts of lynchings of prominent Republican leaders—acts of political violence. The “Fool” started out as an idealist who tried to encourage equality under the law and then found himself, along with others, ground down by the violence around him, causing him to return to the North. The book allows readers to feel the problems of Reconstruction through the eyes of someone who lived through them.

As a writer, this book enabled me to get inside the mindset of Eastern Oregon Klan members in the 1920s. The heart of the book is the weekly meeting minutes of a local KKK chapter, which allowed me to see through the eyes of the men who made up this organization from May 1922 through April 1924. Their concerns included recruiting new members, supporting Klan-friendly political leaders at all levels of government, preventing Catholics from employment in teaching and other positions, and supporting a state bill that would ban Catholic schools. All this helped me create realistic characters with social and political views that are very different from my own.

When you live in Columbus, Georgia, this one takes on special meaning. During an eight-month period in 1977 and 1978, Columbus was terrorized by a mysterious serial killer who raped and ritualistically strangled seven elderly women in one of the community’s finer neighborhoods.

Despite intensive efforts on the part of the police, who proved to be incompetent, the Stocking Strangler, as he came to be known, managed to elude capture. After the last murder in April 1978, the case went cold. In the spring of 1984, a series of fortuitous events connected to an unrelated murder and a stolen pistol led to the capture of Carlton Gary, who had recently escaped from a South Carolina prison.

Following a dramatic trial in August 1986, Gary was convicted of three of the seven Columbus murders and sentenced to death, a penalty that would not be carried out until March 2018.

This convoluted… show more.

This is a sweeping epic of a book and should be required reading for any student of film history.

Told in a manner that is at once intimate and authoritative, it reads like both a textbook and a biography, detailing the lives of a series of historical figures as a means of relating the history of the Black image in film.

In doing so, Haygood contextualizes the cinematic developments of the past by placing them alongside the social and political developments of the time, showing that you can never truly separate fact from fiction. 

This book gave me shivers, both from the monsters and the evil that humans are capable of.

This novella from P. Djeli Clark manages to be action-packed while still dealing with heavy topics like racism and slavery. It’s the 1920s, and Maryse Boudreaux is a Black woman living in the deep south of the United States. Maryse and her friends have formed a militia to fight the ‘Ku Kluxes,’ monsters who take the form of Ku Klux Klan members to spread hate further.

There are points in this book where it seems like all is lost, which makes it all the more satisfying when the heroes rally. 

I always describe this as “the book I wish I’d written,” and was completely formative in defining the kind of nonfiction writing I do. Ronson hangs out with conspiracy-minded groups who on the outset would likely hate each other (neo-Nazis and Jihadists, for example) but all believe the same thing: a cabal of powerful people run the world. It shows that Qanon and its ilk are nothing new, and somehow Ronson walks the line of being with repugnant people yet also reveling in their inherent ridiculousness.