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Washington Post
31-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Washington Post
Delving into his ancestry, a historian finds uncomfortable realities
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 Lewis traces his lineage using historical documents and eventually discovers an enslaved woman named Clarissa King, his maternal great-grandmother.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
Yahoo
08-02-2025
- General
- Yahoo
One family's stories prove to be a window on Black struggle and persistence in American history
Anyone who has embarked on a search for their ancestors knows the feeling of just wanting more — more knowledge, more insight, more proof of lives lived. Who were these long-gone people, beyond a paper trail of census records, wills and marriage licenses? What did they care about? What forces of history shaped them? Author and historian David Levering Lewis, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner for his biographies of Black intellectual pioneer W.E.B. DuBois, has spent his life mining the past, but his knowledge of his own family line was incomplete. With more than a dozen books and most of a lifetime behind him, Levering, 88, resolved to change that, setting out on a journey to both reclaim his family history and anchor it in the story of African Americans in this country. He got more than he bargained for. The story Lewis tells in 'The Stained Glass Window' was inspired by an antique window in an Atlanta church, a portrait of a mother and child modeled on the features of his maternal grandmother. That grandmother, Alice King Bell, was raised in the vital and historically significant Black community of Atlanta and was known and remembered by her family. But as Lewis went further back in time, he found forebears whose stories had never been fully told. His task tested the limits of his expertise, so he got further help from an expert genealogist, who assisted him with interpreting results from genetic testing. With that newly available information came a surprise. Lewis, an African American, discovered that he had at least three white ancestors, the legacy of the slave era, when white enslavers coerced Black women into sexual relations. In a revelation that 'reduced me to several days of incoherence,' he learned that one of his great-grandfathers, James W. Belvin, was white, and that despite having a white wife and children, Belvin had fathered five children with the author's enslaved great-grandmother Clarissa King. White people, enslaved Black people, free people of color — they all made up Levering's familial mix, a group of individuals whose lives personified the lives of Black Americans from the late 18th to the 20th centuries. This personal road map gave him a framework for telling the story of African Americans of all social classes and skin tones, from pre-Colonial times to the 1950s. In many ways it's a brutal account — the terrors of slavery, the violence and injustice of Reconstruction, the post-Reconstruction throttling of Black rights and opportunities that caused many of Lewis' ancestors to flee the South. It's also a story of immense courage, grit and determination. The most revealing thread, in terms of what Black citizens have both endured and achieved, concerns his Atlanta-based family. In the late 1800s Lewis' white great-grandfather Belvin, in declining health, bought Clarissa King a property in Atlanta and stipulated that it should remain in her family. This enabled Clarissa and her family to flee rural Georgia and move to the most vital African American community in the South, one that eventually produced both Lewis' father, a minister and college president, and his mother, a teacher, artist and social force in the community. Atlanta liked to call itself the 'city too busy to hate,' but its power structure challenged even the most resolute of its African American citizens. Black Atlantans were continually denied pathways to opportunity and achievement. The history of the willful neglect and underfunding of Black education, which Lewis chronicles in excruciating detail, is shocking and painful. A divide between the Black professional class and the Black working class hampered the community's ability to unite and form a political force. Lewis is astute about the way middle- and upper-class Black residents, many of them mixed-race, guarded their own resources and failed to agitate for full rights for all Black people until they were swept along by the unstoppable tide of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. But in the main, this is a story of strength and endurance and unselfishness. Following Lewis' father's struggles to raise money for the cash-starved institutions he led, I wondered at the source of his courage and tenacity. Perhaps he was paying forward the unselfishness of Levering's two aunts, who worked long hours and daunting jobs to help fund his father's and uncle's education. The horrific violence unleashed on Black Americans in the South — whippings, beatings, burnings, shootings, lynchings — in the name of denying them participation in the American democratic experiment shows how essential voting rights are, and how easily they can be taken away. Lewis brings to this book his passion for history and his expertise in researching little-known nuances of the African American story: Black slaveholders in South Carolina; the predicament of free people of color in the South; the way a backlash from a 19th century slave revolt choked off hard-won liberties enjoyed by free Black people. As is often the case, Levering's strengths are also his weaknesses. He can tell a riveting story, but at times the narrative is bogged down by citations and attributions. As the story moves forward to that of his immediate family members, it becomes a kind of testament that mentions everyone who touched them: fellow ministers, sorority sisters, institutional colleagues. It comes to resemble a family history written for a limited audience, rather than the more broadly based American saga of the book's earlier sections. Despite these limitations, 'The Stained Glass Window' is a major accomplishment in its reach and scope and reconnection with the past. Perhaps only an 88-year old two-time Pulitzer winner could have brought the necessary skills and perspective to the task. If Lewis felt that he owed a debt to his family in writing this book, consider that debt repaid — with interest. Mary Ann Gwinn, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who lives in Seattle, writes about books and authors. If it's in the news right now, the L.A. Times' Opinion section covers it. Sign up for our weekly opinion newsletter. This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
Los Angeles Times
08-02-2025
- General
- Los Angeles Times
One family's stories prove to be a window on Black struggle and persistence in American history
Anyone who has embarked on a search for their ancestors knows the feeling of just wanting more — more knowledge, more insight, more proof of lives lived. Who were these long-gone people, beyond a paper trail of census records, wills and marriage licenses? What did they care about? What forces of history shaped them? Author and historian David Levering Lewis, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner for his biographies of Black intellectual pioneer W.E.B. DuBois, has spent his life mining the past, but his knowledge of his own family line was incomplete. With more than a dozen books and most of a lifetime behind him, Levering, 88, resolved to change that, setting out on a journey to both reclaim his family history and anchor it in the story of African Americans in this country. He got more than he bargained for. The story Lewis tells in 'The Stained Glass Window' was inspired by an antique window in an Atlanta church, a portrait of a mother and child modeled on the features of his maternal grandmother. That grandmother, Alice King Bell, was raised in the vital and historically significant Black community of Atlanta and was known and remembered by her family. But as Lewis went further back in time, he found forebears whose stories had never been fully told. His task tested the limits of his expertise, so he got further help from an expert genealogist, who assisted him with interpreting results from genetic testing. With that newly available information came a surprise. Lewis, an African American, discovered that he had at least three white ancestors, the legacy of the slave era, when white enslavers coerced Black women into sexual relations. In a revelation that 'reduced me to several days of incoherence,' he learned that one of his great-grandfathers, James W. Belvin, was white, and that despite having a white wife and children, Belvin had fathered five children with the author's enslaved great-grandmother Clarissa King. White people, enslaved Black people, free people of color — they all made up Levering's familial mix, a group of individuals whose lives personified the lives of Black Americans from the late 18th to the 20th centuries. This personal road map gave him a framework for telling the story of African Americans of all social classes and skin tones, from pre-Colonial times to the 1950s. In many ways it's a brutal account — the terrors of slavery, the violence and injustice of Reconstruction, the post-Reconstruction throttling of Black rights and opportunities that caused many of Lewis' ancestors to flee the South. It's also a story of immense courage, grit and determination. The most revealing thread, in terms of what Black citizens have both endured and achieved, concerns his Atlanta-based family. In the late 1800s Lewis' white great-grandfather Belvin, in declining health, bought Clarissa King a property in Atlanta and stipulated that it should remain in her family. This enabled Clarissa and her family to flee rural Georgia and move to the most vital African American community in the South, one that eventually produced both Lewis' father, a minister and college president, and his mother, a teacher, artist and social force in the community. Atlanta liked to call itself the 'city too busy to hate,' but its power structure challenged even the most resolute of its African American citizens. Black Atlantans were continually denied pathways to opportunity and achievement. The history of the willful neglect and underfunding of Black education, which Lewis chronicles in excruciating detail, is shocking and painful. A divide between the Black professional class and the Black working class hampered the community's ability to unite and form a political force. Lewis is astute about the way middle- and upper-class Black residents, many of them mixed-race, guarded their own resources and failed to agitate for full rights for all Black people until they were swept along by the unstoppable tide of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. But in the main, this is a story of strength and endurance and unselfishness. Following Lewis' father's struggles to raise money for the cash-starved institutions he led, I wondered at the source of his courage and tenacity. Perhaps he was paying forward the unselfishness of Levering's two aunts, who worked long hours and daunting jobs to help fund his father's and uncle's education. The horrific violence unleashed on Black Americans in the South — whippings, beatings, burnings, shootings, lynchings — in the name of denying them participation in the American democratic experiment shows how essential voting rights are, and how easily they can be taken away. Lewis brings to this book his passion for history and his expertise in researching little-known nuances of the African American story: Black slaveholders in South Carolina; the predicament of free people of color in the South; the way a backlash from a 19th century slave revolt choked off hard-won liberties enjoyed by free Black people. As is often the case, Levering's strengths are also his weaknesses. He can tell a riveting story, but at times the narrative is bogged down by citations and attributions. As the story moves forward to that of his immediate family members, it becomes a kind of testament that mentions everyone who touched them: fellow ministers, sorority sisters, institutional colleagues. It comes to resemble a family history written for a limited audience, rather than the more broadly based American saga of the book's earlier sections. Despite these limitations, 'The Stained Glass Window' is a major accomplishment in its reach and scope and reconnection with the past. Perhaps only an 88-year old two-time Pulitzer winner could have brought the necessary skills and perspective to the task. If Lewis felt that he owed a debt to his family in writing this book, consider that debt repaid — with interest. Mary Ann Gwinn, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who lives in Seattle, writes about books and authors.
