As a child, Black came out to the world as a white nationalist on the syndicated daytime talk program “The Jenny Jones Show” in 1999. Then, while trying to hide their white nationalist credentials as a college student roughly a decade later, Black was outed in a student-run online forum.
Now, in the memoir “The Klansman’s Son,” the 35-year-old child of former Ku Klux Klan leader Don Black and a close family friend of the notorious former KKK grand wizard David Duke is coming out as transgender.
Black learned not to talk about their gender identity, or anything private for that matter, from a young age.
They write in their memoir, released earlier this month, that their father — who founded what is thought to be the internet’s first neo-Nazi website, Stormfront — taught them that the notion of privacy was “absurd.”
“One of the earliest and most consistent pieces of advice that my dad ever gave me was, ‘never say anything that you wouldn’t be willing to see published in the New York Times the next day,’” they write.
Much of what Black said would in fact go on to be published in The New York Times.
Black made international headlines in 2008 for winning a seat on the Republican executive committee for Florida’s Palm Beach County at age 19.
Given Black’s family history, the press regularly compared Black to Duke, who also held political office as a member of the Louisiana House of Representatives from 1982 to 1999.
In the weeks after Black’s win, Duke publicly referred to Black as “the heir” to the white nationalist movement, Black writes in his book.
In an interview with NBC News, however, Duke denied calling Black his heir.
“I’ve never, ever said publicly that I saw him as the heir to my work or the successor to my work,” Duke said in a phone call. “I would never even think about that.”
But after the Palm Beach County committee refused to seat Black, they left their home in West Palm Beach, Florida, to pursue their bachelor’s degree at New College of Florida in Sarasota. There, they describe living something of a double life.
As a college student, they continued to host their morning neo-Nazi radio show, “The Derek Black Show,” in secrecy from their peers.
Simultaneously, Black formed close friendships with the same groups of people they regularly targeted on the radio: Jewish people and people of color.
“It just became intolerable,” they said.
“I couldn’t manage this sort of split that was going on, and I couldn’t even imagine coming back to campus and having to keep doing it, wondering when the shoe is going to drop, when people were going to find out about me.”
