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The Stained Glass Window

A Family History as the American Story, 1790-1958

Audiobook
1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available
“At once narrative history, family chronicle and personal memoir… [a] luminous work of investigation and introspection.” -Wall Street Journal
National Humanities Medal recipient and two-time recipient of the Pulitzer Prize David Levering Lewis’s own family history that shifts our understanding of the larger American story

Sitting beneath a stained glass window dedicated to his grandmother in the Atlanta church where his family had prayed for generations, preeminent American historian David Levering Lewis was struck by the great lacunae in what he could know about his own ancestors. He vowed to excavate their past and tell their story.
There is no singular American story. Yet the Lewis family contains many defining ones. David Levering Lewis’s lineage leads him to the Kings and Belvinses, two white slaveholding families in Georgia; to the Bells, a free persons of color slaveholding family in South Carolina; and to the Lewises, an up-from-slavery black family in Georgia.
Lewis’s father, John Henry Lewis Sr., set Lewis on the path he pursues, introducing him to W. E. B. Du Bois and living by example as Thurgood Marshall’s collaborator in a key civil rights case in Little Rock. In The Stained Glass Window, Lewis reckons with his legacy in full, facing his ancestors and all that was lost, all the doors that were closed to them.
In this country, the bonds of kinship and the horrific fetters of slavery are bound up together. The fight for equity, the loud echoes of the antebellum period in our present, and narratives of exceptionalism are ever with us; in these pages, so, too, are the voices of Clarissa, Isaac, Hattie, Alice, and John. They shaped this nation, and their heir David Levering Lewis's chronicle of the antebellum project and the subsequent era of marginalization and resistance will transform our understanding of it.
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    • Publisher's Weekly

      Starred review from December 9, 2024
      In this intricate, sumptuously written account, Pulitzer winner Lewis (W.E.B. Du Bois) offers a unique version of the American rags-to-riches story that shows how Black strivers had to navigate the nearly insurmountable obstacles and moral quandaries of slavery and Jim Crow in order to prosper. Delving into his own family history, Lewis uncovers a great-grandmother who bore children to her enslaver and inherited real estate from him, and, on another branch of his family tree, a great-great-grandmother who, as a free Black woman, worked as a plantation overseer and bore children to the plantation’s owner. As he follows these women’s descendants—a line of businesspeople, ministers, and educators—from Reconstruction through the civil rights era, Lewis intertwines their story with Atlanta’s history of resistance to white supremacy, often exerted through the power of the city’s Black bourgeoisie. An exquisite stylist and wide-ranging intellect, Lewis ties in many other threads, including an illuminating study of the Black bourgeoisie’s evolving relationship to the philosophy of Booker T. Washington, who posited that separate but equal prosperity was possible through economic uplift (Lewis bears a sharp and amusing disdain for the thinker, repeatedly insinuating, in arch and ironic prose, that he was somewhat annoying: “Some of the... students probably found Booker Washington’s antebellum similes cringeworthy”). The result is a scintillating and piercing study of how the Black upper class emerged from a fraught system in which violence, family, and inheritance were intertwined.

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