John C. Lester

John C. Lester was an American writer from Pulaski, Tennessee, best known for co-authoring Ku Klux Klan: Its Origin, Growth and Disbandment with D. L. Wilson. Project Gutenberg’s edition notes that the two authors were living in Pulaski in 1884, and that Lester was one of the six original members of the Pulaski circle where the first Klan was founded.

The book first appeared in the 1880s and was later issued in a 1905 edition edited by Walter L. Fleming. Because Lester wrote from inside the organization’s founding circle, his name remains connected to early firsthand writing about the Klan, though modern readers should approach it as a partisan and deeply problematic account rather than a neutral history.

Little reliable biographical detail beyond that role was easy to confirm from the sources reviewed here, so his public profile today rests almost entirely on this one controversial work and its place in the history of Reconstruction-era white supremacist violence.