Delving into his ancestry, a historian finds uncomfortable realities

Washington Post

31-03-2025

In the opening pages of his fascinating and important new book, historian David Levering Lewis sits in an Atlanta church beneath a stained-glass window that depicts his maternal grandmother as the Madonna. 'Her radiant representation in the Motherhood Triptych spoke of both premature bereavement and wistful immortality — of a prosperous colored family's advertised devotion,' he writes. His grandmother had died in childbirth in 1901 at age 29 and was clearly revered, and yet Lewis, for all his years as an eminent scholar of American history, had little information about her — or, for that matter, his ancestry at all.
So Lewis, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of a two-volume biography of W.E.B. Du Bois, decided to delve into the historical record to place his family in the larger story of America. 'My challenge,' he writes, 'was simply to begin to find myself in a past I barely knew.'
The result, 'The Stained Glass Window,' is a book that is part family biography and part African American history. As he traces his family's story from the 1700s to the 1950s, Lewis explores important moments in history — slavery, Reconstruction, Jim Crow and the civil rights movement — from a personal as well as an academic perspective.
Lewis traces his lineage using historical documents and eventually discovers an enslaved woman named Clarissa King, his maternal great-grandmother. Along with several others, she was sold by a man named Barrington King to another enslaver, James Wiley Belvin. 'Reading an actual bill of sale for seven human beings was a nauseating novelty,' Lewis writes.
His researcher eventually discovers the uncomfortable truth that Lewis's forebears include White enslavers. Piecing together clues left behind by receipts for sales of enslaved people, Lewis learns that Belvin had children with Clarissa; one of those children was Alice King Bell, the woman immortalized in the stained-glass window. The exact nature of Belvin and Clarissa's relationship is unclear, but what Lewis does know with certainty is that Belvin gifted Clarissa and her lighter-complexioned children a piece of Atlanta property. The ownership of that land ultimately resulted in them moving up the social and economic ladder after the Civil War.
Lewis's father's side provides an equally complex story. Among his ancestors are free people of color and mixed-race people who at various points in history may have enslaved people or managed enslaved people themselves. If true, Lewis convincingly makes the case that their support of the existing social order was only to safeguard their lives or ensure their limited agency within that order. In doing so, Lewis indicts the system but not his ancestors as individuals. 'What distinguished these ancestors was hardly that they were close observers of their times, or that they concerned themselves much with slavery's systemic injustices, or that they had any sense of a great impending crisis,' he writes, 'but that they were ordinary practical folks whose situations — liberty, literacy, pigment — were unusual and advantageous.'
The two sides of the family come together in the marriage of Alice to John Henry Bell, a prominent deacon. In that moment, Lewis shows readers how the familial combination of grit, grace and occasional good luck propelled his relatives forward.
Woven through the narrative of Lewis's family are the stories behind the history, including the tensions Black Americans have navigated for generations — sometimes within their own ranks — around the issue of how far and fast to push for full integration into American society, for fear of backlash. (At times it can be hard to follow all the various names in the Lewis family tree and their intersection with American history, but chapter headings help to pull together the threads.)
Lewis also looks at the personalities and politics that helped build and shape the first schools for freed Black people, the early Black church, and some of the nation's first historically Black colleges and universities, which collectively created pathways to education and economic mobility for generations of Black Americans, including Lewis's family. His father, John Henry Lewis Sr., was a graduate of Yale Divinity School and a college president. Lewis writes with pride about his father's achievements, which included working with a young Thurgood Marshall on a pivotal civil rights case in Little Rock.
In describing his family's accomplishments, Lewis points not only to innate talent and a great education but also to the hard work and sacrifices of the ancestors who helped pave the way. They include sharecroppers and free landowners who sowed the seeds of generational wealth, as well as women like Lewis's Aunt Susie, who delayed her own dreams while she helped finance the education of Lewis's father and his uncle, who became a prominent physician. Other relatives joined the African Methodist Episcopal Church, which, Lewis writes, would serve as 'the family's educational and social stepladder to local and in time wider professional notice.'
Lewis is honest and self-aware of the privilege of skin color and class, even within his own academically accomplished family, and how those factors shaped the story of Black America. Of his lighter-skinned mother and uncle, he writes: 'Their degrees of whiteness sometimes advantaged them among their own people. Professional accomplishments, privileged leadership roles, and biracial cousinage compensated a class of colored people, most of whom indeed were too proud to demean themselves by 'passing.'' His family's struggle to sometimes balance the privilege that a race- or color-conscious society afforded them, with their own obligation to be true to their Black identity, adds another fascinating subtext to this book.
For all the accomplishments of his family, his compatriots and himself, Lewis reminds us of what might have been if not for slavery and its painful legacy. Lewis explains that the exceptional American society many boast of today was built on the backs and brainpower of Black Americans who could have gone faster and further if not for slavery, racism and discrimination. As just one example, he cites Black bishops, who occupied a place of power and privilege in the influential African Methodist Episcopal Church. He writes, 'These bishops were the CEOs of corporations, captains of industry, kingpins of finance, and above all the mayors and governors many could have become in a color-blind American society.'
The stained-glass window of Lewis's grandmother proves to be an apt metaphor for his book. One facet of stained glass is that the rigid panes capture and project an image of permanency — but time and light shift the hues. The same is true for American history. Artisans create stained glass by first sketching a full-scale design mapping out the composition and colors. Then they outline each section of glass like a puzzle. Finally, they carefully choose colored glass sheets for their hue and texture. In the same way, Lewis has combined colorful pieces of his family's past and Southern history into a brilliant mosaic of the American story.
Steve Majors is author of 'High Yella: A Modern Family Memoir' and the forthcoming essay collection 'Man Made.'
A Family History as the American Story, 1790-1958
By David Levering Lewis.
Penguin Press. 384 pp. $35