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Amina Srna: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. I'm producer Amina Srna filling in for Brian today. Welcome back, everyone. Now, we continue our WNYC Centennial series, 100 Years of 100 Things with thing number 67, 100 years of David Levering Lewis's family history. David Levering Lewis is one of the most accomplished historians of our time. A two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, he has written definitive works on W.E.B. du Bois, Martin Luther King, Jr., the Harlem Renaissance, and even the early history of Islam in Europe.

Now, in his new book, The Stained Glass Window: A Family History as the American Story, he turns the historian's lens on his own family. Like any good story, it tells a much bigger story. The book begins with a church window in Atlanta dedicated to David Levering Lewis' grandmother, Alice King Bell. He writes, "I suspected that the woman whose born name was King and whose dedicated sanctuary window had fascinated me from my teens was a mystery wrapped in an antebellum conundrum of possibly outsize historical significance."

His ancestors included white slaveholders, free Black families, and those who built their lives after emancipation. Through them, he traces the contradictions and complexities of race, power, and identity in America across centuries from slavery to Reconstruction to the civil rights movement and beyond. It's a personal history, but it's also a national one. It raises some big questions. How does history live within us? How do we reconcile the contradictions of our past? What can a single family story teach us about the country as a whole? David Levering Lewis, welcome back to WNYC.

David Levering Lewis: It's a great pleasure to be here.

Amina Srna: Listeners, we want to hear from you. David Levering Lewis' new book explores the complexities of Black family histories, stories that include contradictions, resilience, and the long echoes of American history. Maybe your own family history includes an unexpected connection to slavery, Reconstruction, or the Great Migration. Maybe you have uncovered surprising details about an ancestor who defied the odds or maybe you've just heard stories passed down through generations that tell a bigger story about this country.

If you've explored your own Black American family history through oral history, genealogy, or just stories around the dinner table, give us a call now. What have you learned and how has it shaped the way that you see your place in history? 212-433-WNYC. That's 212-433-9692. You can also text that number. You're known for your work on monumental historical figures, but here, you turn the focus on your own lineage. How did you decide that this deeply personal journey was the right story for you to tell now?

David Levering Lewis: I thought there were answers to be found in my personal experience, but I had, as you say, devoted most of my professional career to bigger things, issues, but I had lost a wife of 30 years. I had decided that I had reached an inflection point in my life when I needed to settle issues that had lurked in the shadows of my past. One of them was this window, the stained glass window. My ancestor, Alice King Bell, she had passed when she was quite young in about 1901.

A few years later, my grandfather, widowed grandfather, had emplaced a memorial window at the family church, the first congregational church in Atlanta. I knew nothing really about this person, except that the stained glass window was well-illuminated, a beautiful window that was next to a number of other stained glass windows devoted to family members of that very church. I thought, "Who is she? What did she say? What would I know about her if I could know more about her?"

Of course, family lore, you first have to wade through those issues. I knew that she was supposed to be a King and that the Kings were a very prosperous, antebellum slaveholding family, and knew not much more. I spent a day in Roswell, Georgia, about 20 miles outside Atlanta, speaking with the archivist there of the Roswell historical archives. She was a delightful person. She welcomed my presence and my interrogation, but she said, "I doubt that we really have much to respond to your concerns." I left.

Then about two weeks later, it turned out that this archivist had discovered, indeed, links that were terribly important to me. Following that link, I discovered that she had been sold from her place of residence of some 17 years and that she now resided in Houston, Georgia. That led me to all sorts of discoveries and connections that astounded me. One of them being that the slaveholder in whose household she now resided was to become, through the assistance of genetics, my great-grandfather. That surprised me greatly.

Then there were other connections that illustrated. If you went back to the first ancestor I could find in 1790, in the first federal census, you would find that I had a story that began with the republic and continued until the death of my father in 1958. Through that span of time, I saw my antecedents as Black, as white, and as intermediate. I thought, "What a story one can tell of this with census tracts, with tax records, with proving the reliability of memories of family members, and so forth."

Amina Srna: First, I'm sorry for your loss. The book is called The Stained Glass Window. I wanted to ask of Alice Bell King, your grandmother. You write, "Her radiant representation in the motherhood triptych spoke of both premature bereavement and wistful immortality of a prosperous colored family's advertised devotion." You talked to us a little bit about who Alice King was, but how did her image come to be depicted in that window?

David Levering Lewis: Well, her death in 1901 was a grievous moment for her husband and my mother and my uncle. The church itself had lived through a great event in Atlanta that is perhaps repressed today. That was a terrible riot, a pogrom, you might say, in 1906, when African Americans in that state were removed from the tax rolls and from the voting rolls and subjected to a second-classness that was even new for the postbellum period.

To replace that church after the riot of 1906, its minister went raising funds for a replacement. Andrew Carnegie generously bestowed a pipe organ for the church. The new church arose in about 1910. Du Bois was present. Booker T. Washington came to turn a spade of earth. The families of that church then commissioned stained glass windows to honor their legacies. Alice King Bell emplaced as a glorious window in the church in 1909.

Amina Srna: Could you talk about the significance of that image and why it became your starting point or maybe you want to describe the image itself a little bit more for us?

David Levering Lewis: Well, the image itself is a template, really. She's represented as a virgin holding a child, but she represents a legacy of striving really of determination of a family of modest means to be fully active in the society of the day. What was happening, though, was that 1906, the terrible riot, represented a dynamic change in the standing of people of color. For example, my grandmother was emplaced in a cemetery in the city reserved for leading citizens in 1901.

In 1906, my grandfather realized that because of the changes in race relations, he himself, when he passed, could not be buried next to her. They were indeed selling the acreage that had once been available to people of color of some distinction. He disinterred her and re-emplaced her in a cemetery in the city called South-View Cemetery. That seemed to me to be so instructive of the sense of racial identity that, at one point, one could move into a category of citizenship unproblematic, you might say. The other represented a position of subordination, of exclusion.

That was an important story, I thought, that I could tease out of that particular story itself. There's much more to be said, though, I think about what I was trying to do. I really wanted to do a canvas of our experience as Americans from about the 1790s until the 1950s, and that I could see that both ancestors from one line of my past and another line of my past and a third line of my past would describe, in fact, what had happened to us as whites, as Blacks, as others. That instigated a lot more research. I hope I have told the story invitingly.

Amina Srna: We have some great callers calling in right now. Let's go to Alan in Queens. Hi, Alan, you're on WNYC.

Alan: Yes, good morning and thanks so much for taking my call. Professor Lewis, your work precedes you. I love the show. I had a question related to a comment about trauma and researching your ancestors. I think in some ways, trauma becomes a cliché. When you start talking about Black history, I think there's a reduction or dismissal of the history. Then as individuals, even in my own family and looking at my own history, I found some information, Professor Lewis. She was a host, was quite disturbing.

A member of my family was murdered and ended up discovering the actual police report and subsequently realizing that no one in the family had talked about it. When you see all these commercials about discover your history, discover your history, when it comes to the history of African Americans, I think there's not enough attention being paid to what one may encounter and also the struggles it may have in terms of even having that discussion within your family. I appreciate you doing your work and the monumental courage it takes to look. Let me get your thoughts about that.

Amina Srna: Thank you, Alan. Thanks for your call.

David Levering Lewis: Well, indeed, Alan, trauma is an apt word for this kind of research. I had an experience that seems to mimic your own. I regret what misery you were able to ascertain. I received a telephone call from a student at Northeastern University. She asked me, "Professor Lewis, do you know anything about the death of your first cousin?" I did not. I knew that he had passed. I knew that he had been buried soon after any visit, but really not much.

Well, it turned out that the Civil Rights Act of 1957, the first since Reconstruction time, had emplaced a civil rights unit within the Civil Rights Act. It was to look back at events that may have had great racial significance. I discovered that my first cousin had, in fact, been brutalized by the police because he was with several others guilty of stealing cigarettes at a country club. He died three days later from the blow to his brain.

What was significant about that, though, was that the citizens of Atlanta, African American, thought that this was an opportunity to make a good civic change. That was to have Black policemen on the Atlanta police force. The mayor had said, "If you vote for me in significant numbers, that's a possibility." The local newspaper advertised the trauma of my first cousin's death, a blow to the head, a racial insult that resulted in an aneurysm and his death three days later after his arrest.

It turned out that had my family ancestors made an issue of this, it would have enhanced the possibility of a revolution in the police force of the municipality. Indeed, that is what happened. From 1948, Atlanta had an integrated police force. Trauma of that sort is, I think, as you found out, Alan, a commonplace as we look back at the deserved experiences of our relatives.

Amina Srna: If you're just joining us, this is The Brian Lehrer Show. I'm Amina Srna filling in for Brian today. My guest is David Levering Lewis, one of the most respected historians in America. He's here with us to talk about his new book, which turns the historian's lens on his own family tree. It's called The Stained Glass Window: A Family History as the American Story. Let's take another call. Lisa in Manhattan, you're on WNYC.

Lisa: Hi, good morning. Professor Lewis, thank you so much for your work. This conversation makes me think about my great-grandparents, Alonzo and Althea Brown Edmiston. They were missionaries in the Belgian Congo during the time that they had civil unrest. The Presbyterians sent them there. They met there. They fell in love there. The thing that was an amazing experience for me is when me and my family went to the Presbyterian Historical Society.

We were able to see the documents that both Alonzo and Althea Brown had kept. It was after many years that they had helped build this community and had a church and a school and cultivated cassava. The head of the community loved their work so much that when my great-grandmother was pregnant, he asked for her to name my grandfather after him, Kuete. That's a family name that has carried on from my brother to my brother's son.

When we were at the Presbyterian Historical Society, I read a letter that Alonzo had written to, I guess, the Presbyterian Church pleading his case about why they should stay in the Congo versus having this white dude come in and take over all the great work that they had done. My grandmother went to Fisk and asked for money to continue to write her books. This is like the greatest love story of all time.

The letter was so well-written because he was not diminishing his work, but also you could hear the tone of the letter where he knew his place if you know what I mean. He was just like, "I'm smart. I went to seminary school. My father sent me." We got the sense that his father was a white man through that letter, but it was so powerful. They did allow him and my great-grandmother subsequently to stay. She ended up dying there of malaria and then he moved back.

He had already sent my grandfather and my uncle back to the United States to live because it was off and on in terms of safety. Just having that experience for me, I felt like I can do so much more with my life. What more can I do? It was breathtaking. I had to sit down. Even just describing it to you now, I'm getting a little emotional. Because when you think about what we had to go through and for them to plead their case, two very educated people, and for my great-grandmother to go to the Belgian Congo, that's what it was called back then, as a woman alone--

David Levering Lewis: That's quite remarkable really.

Amina Srna: Lisa, thank you so much for sharing that powerful story. Professor?

David Levering Lewis: Ditto. Well, I think the story of people competing, incentivized to participate as fully in enterprises of charity, of education, of business, you name it, is a remarkable story. Since we think these days that after Reconstruction came a nadir that maybe by the late '50s and '60s, things changed radically and the upswing of progress of people of color recommenced.

In that period of the nadir, that period when we were subordinated, when we were excluded, when our best efforts were condescended to in that period is still a story like the story of your ancestor in the Belgian Congo, of people who strove, people who accumulated resources. It was not all a veil of tears. No, but it certainly did represent an unfortunate period of time.

You could date it, if I might say so, about 1896 with a famous Supreme Court decision of Plessy v. Ferguson, in which from 1896 until perhaps the time of Kennedy and Johnson, African Americans were remaindered, were excluded, were ghettoized as it were from the point of view of the mainstream. That period needs to be written about and honored because although that Plessy v. Ferguson era was not an enviable one, it was contested. People survived. People even throve.

Amina Srna: Professor, we were going to wrap up this segment shortly and move on to the next, but we have so much more to get through with you, an entire family history, and a couple of more callers. I hope it's okay with you, but we'd like to keep you for a few more minutes.

David Levering Lewis: Certainly.

Amina Srna: Also, we did do our producer's due diligence and approved it with your publicist, so thank you so much. Lisa was talking a lot about her family's role in faith, so I wanted to ask you. It seems that faith also plays a major role in your family's journey. What do you think has made religion such a lasting source of resilience in Black communities?

David Levering Lewis: Yes, you would expect that people who were denied literacy, denied the usufruct of what they built to have thought that there must be a benign force somewhere that promised that at some point in some way, better times would come either here below or there beyond. The church for African Americans became, in many ways, a surrogate for other successes. The Methodist Church, founded in the beginning of the 1700s, the African Methodist Episcopal Church was a great force for organized resistance and organized progress. The Baptist Church, indeed.

However, there also were those who felt that the religiosity of the group perhaps sometimes needed restraint, that the focus should be on the here and now, the secular rather than the divine. You have then a movement back and forth between the progress promised by the churches and the actual political and secular changes that came about by others who, using the church, made differences in terms of politics and civic success.

Amina Srna: We are going to have to take a brief break. Since David Levering Lewis has so graciously agreed to extend his time with us today, we can take a few more of your calls. Maybe your own family history includes an unexpected connection to slavery, Reconstruction, or the Great Migration. How has it shaped the way that you see your place in history? 212-433-WNYC. That's 212-433-9692. Stay with us.

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Amina Srna: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. I'm Amina Srna filling in for Brian today. Oh, and my script went away. One moment. My guest is David Levering Lewis, one of the most respected historians in America, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, known best for his groundbreaking biographies of W.E.B. du Bois, as well as books on Martin Luther King, Jr., the civil rights movement, and the broader arc of Black history. He's here to talk to us about his new book, The Stained Glass Window: A Family History as the American Story. America has always been a country of contradictions founded on ideals of freedom while built on slavery. How does your family's story reflect that broader tension in American history?

David Levering Lewis: Yes. Well, the full title of the book is The Stained Glass Window: A Family History as the American Story, 1790-1958. In that compass of time, I discovered that I was descended from a major slaveholder in Georgia. I discovered that I had a plausible connection with one of the most successful planters of the Antebellum South. I discovered that also, I was descended from people of color who had never been enslaved in South Carolina.

I discovered that I was also descended from a family of people up from slavery who were determined to make the post-Reconstruction era still a promise that could be fulfilled. From that, I thought, "This is really a fascinating compass and tapestry of various experiences that illustrate the Jeffersonian promise as it were and, at the same time, the Jeffersonian reality as it were."

What do I mean by that? I mean that if all men are created equal in Jefferson's prose, it is also Jefferson who as president inherited the deal signed by one of his representatives in Paris with Napoleon Bonaparte, ceding the territory that will become the next part of the United States. Jefferson justified what was an extraordinary venture on the part of his presidency by saying it would be an empire of liberty.

It would be where his white yeomanry would thrive as independent, as vigorous, as committed to the promise of equality. Indeed, though, Mississippi and Alabama and Kansas and all the rest of the accessions of real estate that came from the Napoleonic decision were to be occupied by slaveholders and African Americans enslaved, not his yeomanry, not his free white people.

That decision transformed the opportunities of this republic in that it was to be built by, enslaved by people denied the usufruct of their wages and their labors, but with the result that a surplus capital engendered by cotton economy and the sugar economy were to make possible, the industrial and commercial might of the North. That slavery story then is a story in which the first immigrants were, in fact, the people of Africa who built the country unacknowledged and still, of course, researching their reparation argument rights today.

Amina Srna: Let's take a few more personal family histories. We have Joan in Manhattan calling in. Hi, Joan, you're on WNYC.

Joan: Good morning.

Amina Srna: Good morning.

Joan: I've researched two lines of my maternal grandmother's family. One led to an enslaved ancestor in Newbury, Mass in the late 1680s. The second was to an ancestor in Windham, Connecticut, who was free also in the 1680s. This led me to discover at least six ancestors who served in the American Revolution. I feel that American history has not acknowledged that part of African-American contributions to this country and we've been overlooked. I'm fearful for what's going on now with our current situation in Washington, which they might just completely disregard all of the contributions that African Americans have made.

David Levering Lewis: That's a frightening prospect, is it not? You're quite wise to be concerned. Illustrative indeed of the mentality of the new regime, as it were, were the remarks made by our current president about the Reagan National Airport disaster in which he, it seemed, blamed that accident, that great mistake closing down the airport on what he called diversity, equity, and inclusion. It will be proven that this was absolutely nonsensical. It seems to indicate that, once again, in a society in which DEI has been trashed, we all will take a major step back whose consequences will be quite tragic and reprehensible.

Amina Srna: You are relating history and the present right here in your answer. When we talk about history shaping the present, it's not just in broad policy terms. It's also in family traditions, expectations, and even names. How do you see the weight of history in your own life and any advice for listeners?

David Levering Lewis: Well, history does repeat itself if it's not understood. That's certainly true. We are at an inflection point in our national experience. Where we go from here is not predictable, but it certainly is concerning. It may be tragic. It may, in fact, be terminable in that the ideals of this country unfulfilled in our long experience, nonetheless worthwhile, will be extinguished by an omnivorous capitalism that you might describe as a thievery of the resources of the rest of us that it seems we must oppose. It's hard to see the efficacy of opposition at this moment. Be of good cheer. Historians always see that we can predict the past, but we can be optimistic about the future.

Amina Srna: It's a wonderful place to end and we will have to leave it there for now. David Levering Lewis, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and the author of The Stained Glass Window: A Family History as the American Story, 1790-1958. Thank you so much for speaking with us.

David Levering Lewis: Thank you so much for the opportunity.

Amina Srna: David Levering Lewis will be in conversation with fellow historian Annette Gordon-Reed at 92NY on Thursday, March 13th at 7:00 PM. You can find more details about that at the 92ny.org/events.

David Levering Lewis: The book is published tomorrow.

Amina Srna: The book is published tomorrow. I'm Amina Srna and this is The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Stay tuned for All Of It.

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