One family’s stories prove to be a window on Black struggle and persistence in American history

Anybody who has launched into a seek for their ancestors is aware of the sensation of simply wanting extra — extra data, extra perception, extra proof of lives lived. Who had been these long-gone individuals, past a paper path of census data, wills and marriage licenses? What did they care about? What forces of historical past formed them?

Creator and historian David Levering Lewis, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner for his biographies of Black mental pioneer W.E.B. DuBois, has spent his life mining the previous, however his data of his family line was incomplete. With greater than a dozen books and most of a lifetime behind him, Levering, 88, resolved to alter that, setting out on a journey to each reclaim his household historical past and anchor it within the story of African Individuals on this nation. He obtained greater than he bargained for.

The story Lewis tells in “The Stained Glass Window” was impressed by an vintage window in an Atlanta church, a portrait of a mom and little one modeled on the options of his maternal grandmother. That grandmother, Alice King Bell, was raised within the important and traditionally important Black neighborhood of Atlanta and was identified and remembered by her household. However as Lewis went additional again in time, he discovered forebears whose tales had by no means been totally informed. His activity examined the boundaries of his experience, so he obtained additional assist from an skilled genealogist, who assisted him with decoding outcomes from genetic testing.

With that newly out there data got here a shock. Lewis, an African American, found that he had no less than three white ancestors, the legacy of the slave period, when white enslavers coerced Black girls into sexual relations. In a revelation that “decreased me to a number of days of incoherence,” he realized that one in every of his great-grandfathers, James W. Belvin, was white, and that regardless of having a white spouse and youngsters, Belvin had fathered 5 kids with the writer’s enslaved great-grandmother Clarissa King. White individuals, enslaved Black individuals, free individuals of shade — all of them made up Levering’s familial combine, a bunch of people whose lives personified the lives of Black Individuals from the late 18th to the twentieth centuries. This private street map gave him a framework for telling the story of African Individuals of all social lessons and pores and skin tones, from pre-Colonial instances to the Nineteen Fifties.

In some ways it’s a brutal account — the terrors of slavery, the violence and injustice of Reconstruction, the post-Reconstruction throttling of Black rights and alternatives that brought about lots of Lewis’ ancestors to flee the South. It’s additionally a narrative of immense braveness, grit and willpower. Probably the most revealing thread, by way of what Black residents have each endured and achieved, considerations his Atlanta-based household.

Within the late 1800s Lewis’ white great-grandfather Belvin, in declining well being, purchased Clarissa King a property in Atlanta and stipulated that it ought to stay in her household. This enabled Clarissa and her household to flee rural Georgia and transfer to probably the most important African American neighborhood within the South, one which finally produced each Lewis’ father, a minister and school president, and his mom, a instructor, artist and social pressure locally.

Atlanta preferred to name itself the “metropolis too busy to hate,” however its energy construction challenged even probably the most resolute of its African Americans. Black Atlantans had been regularly denied pathways to alternative and achievement. The historical past of the willful neglect and underfunding of Black schooling, which Lewis chronicles in excruciating element, is surprising and painful. A divide between the Black skilled class and the Black working class hampered the neighborhood’s capability to unite and type a political pressure. Lewis is astute about the way in which middle- and upper-class Black residents, lots of them mixed-race, guarded their very own sources and didn’t agitate for full rights for all Black individuals till they had been swept alongside by the unstoppable tide of the civil rights motion of the Nineteen Fifties and Sixties.

However in the primary, this can be a story of energy and endurance and unselfishness. Following Lewis’ father’s struggles to lift cash for the cash-starved establishments he led, I puzzled on the supply of his braveness and tenacity. Maybe he was paying ahead the unselfishness of Levering’s two aunts, who labored lengthy hours and daunting jobs to assist fund his father’s and uncle’s schooling. The horrific violence unleashed on Black Individuals within the South — whippings, beatings, burnings, shootings, lynchings — within the identify of denying them participation within the American democratic experiment reveals how important voting rights are, and the way simply they are often taken away.

Lewis brings to this ebook his ardour for historical past and his experience in researching little-known nuances of the African American story: Black slaveholders in South Carolina; the predicament of free individuals of shade within the South; the way in which a backlash from a nineteenth century slave revolt choked off hard-won liberties loved by free Black individuals.

As is usually the case, Levering’s strengths are additionally his weaknesses. He can inform a riveting story, however at instances the narrative is slowed down by citations and attributions. Because the story strikes ahead to that of his fast relations, it turns into a sort of testomony that mentions everybody who touched them: fellow ministers, sorority sisters, institutional colleagues. It involves resemble a household historical past written for a restricted viewers, quite than the extra broadly based mostly American saga of the ebook’s earlier sections.

Regardless of these limitations, “The Stained Glass Window” is a serious accomplishment in its attain and scope and reconnection with the previous. Maybe solely an 88-year outdated two-time Pulitzer winner may have introduced the required expertise and perspective to the duty. If Lewis felt that he owed a debt to his household in scripting this ebook, take into account that debt repaid — with curiosity.

Mary Ann Gwinn, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who lives in Seattle, writes about books and authors.