Former Ku Klux Klan poster boy  reveals new trans identity: Explosive memoir details how son of KKK Grand Wizard escaped white supremacy cult and embraced ‘gender confusion’

R Derek Black, the child of former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard Don Black and once a poster boy for the white supremacist movement, has quietly come out as transgender.

DailyMail.com can now exclusively reveal that in the epilogue of Black’s new book: The Klansman’s Son: My Journey from White Nationalism to Anti-Racismthey come out for the first time as transgender using their pronouns.

Black, 35, was already a public figure at the age of 10, when they appeared on the Jenny Jones talk show alongside white power leaders from the notoriously racist and homophobic Westboro Baptist Church.

And as a boy, Black contributed to a children’s section of Stormfront.org, the neo-Nazi hate site run by his father.

But now Black writes that attending the famously liberal New College in Sarasota, Florida, starting in 2010 contributed to their “emerging understanding of my gender identity” and their disillusionment with the white supremacist movement.

‘[New College’s] culture and the people I met there helped me accept that I fit under the trans umbrella,” says Black.

Black reveals that their ideological evolution continued when they started dating a Jewish woman, despite the fact that the Black family were “some of the most famous anti-Semitic activists in the country.”

Through long, often challenging conversations with Allison Gornik – Black’s current wife – they began to take their first tentative steps away from the neo-Nazi movement. And in 2013, Black wrote a letter renouncing white nationalism.

Black also expresses his support for other transgender people’ whose rights are now being viciously and loudly attacked in Florida.

“I can’t imagine how horrible it would have been to grow up in today’s political climate as a child who was very happy to be seen as a girl until puberty, and then hid that part of myself,” they say. to write.

As children, Black says, they grew their hair long enough to “tuck behind my ears,” and relished the fact that strangers constantly mistook them for girls.

‘I loved the gender confusion, except in public toilets, where grown men always took it upon themselves to compliment my appearance before telling me I was in the wrong room.

“After puberty started, I kept my hair long, but I was able to go to the bathroom in peace and was relieved that I no longer received inappropriate comments,” says Black.

When it comes to choosing a college, Black jokes that New College has regularly ranked in the Princeton Review’s top ten for schools in the categories of “most liberal students,” “most LGBT-friendly,” “most pot-friendly” and “Birkenstock- carrying tree’. -Hugging, clove-smoking vegetarians’.

After Black was admitted, they tried to keep their white supremacist background a secret, but it only lasted a semester before they were “outed” on a college chat forum.

Black was in a study abroad program in Germany at the time and his godfather, Knights of the Ku Klux Klan founder David Duke, came to visit.

“David Duke came over from his home in Austria to visit me for the day,” Black writes. ‘I met him in a beer garden and he gave me an impromptu tour of the highlights of the early Nazi movement.

Duke assured his godson that he too had been “expelled” from college.

It would have been for the best, Black remembers Duke saying, because Duke was then free to focus on his white nationalist activism.

“Facing the outrage of your fellow students was the forge I needed to truly become the most effective activist I can be. I should really take the opportunity to learn how the enemy thinks, and how intolerant they can be, he told me,” Black wrote.

Upon their return to Sarasota, however, Black began to assimilate even more with Jewish and minority students, rather than doubling down on extremist politics, even regularly attending Shabbat dinners at a friend’s dorm room.

In 2013, Black finally apologized in a letter to the Southern Poverty Law Center for their past activism, saying they could no longer support white nationalism, “because they had outgrown my bubble, talked to the people who I had read more widely and realized the necessary impact my actions had on people I never wanted to harm.’

Black admits they rarely talk to their families now.

Black’s father – who served time in prison for plotting an invasion of the Caribbean island of Dominica in 1981 – still runs Stormfront.

Zwart and Gornik got married in 2020.

“We had doubts about what marriage symbolized,” Black writes. “It had been almost nine years since we’d met… We hadn’t had a first date because we’d so ambiguously gone from acquaintances to friends who could talk for hours to friends who stayed over in the same bed almost every night.

“During the first few months of the year, our biggest concern was how to keep a wedding small and relatively private without offending our families.”

Then the lockdown provided the excuse the couple needed.

‘At the end of April, while everything around us stood still, we knew that soon we would no longer be able to invite family or friends to an in-person wedding.

‘So we found a large cabin in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, suddenly empty during what was normally prime spring break season, and set up our own private wedding ceremonies for several days, lying on couches and chairs writing letters to each other writing our own vows, and cataloging the ways we meant so much to each other.”

Black and Gornik recorded themselves and sent an announcement to friends and family.

“Allison came into my life at a time when I least felt like someone worth being trusted or loved. I knew then that my loyalty to the community in which I was raised had led me to betray all the people who had chosen to be close to me.

‘It is impossible for me to imagine my own life story without her intervention. She showed me that I could love other people fully and fearlessly, and I showed her how big the world is and that we could experience everything together.”

The Klansman’s son: My Journey from White Nationalism to Antiracism by R. Derek Black is published by Abrams Press, May 14