SERENA and Venus Williams’s father, Richard, has released an autobiography in which he recounts a savage beating he received by members of the Ku Klux Klan while his father watched.

In the book Black and White: The Way I See It, Richard Williams is telling his own story, describing a childhood of abject poverty, physical abuse, and racism, growing up in Shreveport, Louisiana.

In the book, Williams describes how he started stealing to keep his mother and four sisters fed after his father had abandoned the family.

“I became fascinated with stealing at the age of eight. I don’t know if the thrill was being able to get away with a crime, or that the crime was against the white man,” said Williams.

Aged 12 he started a garden and sold his fruit and vegetables at a farm stand, and whatever he couldn’t grow, he says he would steal from white people.

As his business thrived, Williams was able to move his family into a better house.

Williams also writes about his run-ins with the Ku Klux Klan, who controlled the area.

“The Klan rampaged through the South, confident it could violate us with impunity,” he writes.

Williams recalled how a friend of his was caught by the Klan for stealing and his body was found days later hanging from a tree with his hands cut off. The murder was never investigated by the local police.

Williams also had a run-in with Klan members and recalls a crowd — including his own father — looking on and watching while three white men beat him in the street.

“It is a terrible thing to be so unloved, to know your father would rather let you die than lift a finger to help you, to watch him run off and leave you all alone,” writes Williams.

“It was a rejection so cold it remains burnt in my memory and, in the end, it did what even white people could never do, hurt me so deep in my soul that I have never forgot or forgiven.”

Such was his anger, Williams describes in the book how he dressed up and went to a nearby white neighbourhood where he viciously attacked a white farmer and his teenage son with a stick

“My hatred was up, and so was my longing to pay back somebody, anybody, for everything that ever happened to me,” he said.