The Stained Glass Window

Starred review from December 15, 2024
Peering into the past--his own and ours. In this epic telling, Lewis, the distinguished historian, examines the intersection of history with his ancestors in the South of slavery, Jim Crow, and the dawn of the Civil Rights Movement. The titular window stands in an Atlanta church whose pictorial rendering of the Gospels was "twinned with illustrations of the Negro's emancipation and rise." That rise, Lewis demonstrates, was long in coming. In his graceful narrative, interwoven with historical detail, Lewis pores over old census records to locate lost ancestors hidden away in the rolls of "one of the South's grandest slaveholding dynasties," one of the outposts of a system of enslavement that "functioned as a vast concentration camp from which flowed the enormous wealth that made the industrial North possible." In that setting, Lewis relates meaningful stories of resistance, such as the mass suicide of a shipload of kidnapped Ibo warriors in 1803, an event sealed in the memory of the Gullah people in the Georgia isles but "quickly forgotten by white people at the time for its bizarreness." The event speaks to the terrible irony of Georgia's one-time, short-lived stance as the only Southern colony without slavery, thanks to the abolitionist views of Gov. James Edward Oglethorpe: after him, Georgia jumped full tilt into slavery, developing a culture in which racial mixing was prevalent but unspoken, even as the "one-drop rule" was enshrined. "The antebellum South kept its sexual history secret by enforcing the illiteracy of all but 3 or 4 percent of its almost four million enslaved people," Lewis writes, but many of the photographs herein break that silence. Elsewhere, Lewis writes of his family's pioneering roles in education and commerce, always requiring resistance to white supremacist power and "apartheid reality" that, Lewis makes clear, is ongoing. Rich in family lore and historical fact, and a thoughtful addition to the literature of Black life in the American South.

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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.

Starred review from February 1, 2025
Highly honored historian Lewis found himself back in Atlanta's First Congregational Church, gazing at a restored stained glass window, the Motherhood Triptych, which portrays his maternal grandmother as the Madonna. This promoted reflections on the long-obscured role of enslaved African Americans in building America's wealth, and inspired Lewis to learn all that he could about his ancestors--"an amalgam of Black Belt peasants mixed with free people of color"--and chronicle the challenging times in which they lived. Lewis' arresting discoveries, shared in elegantly lucid prose punctuated by deftly timed, mordant wit, brings his complex family history to life, including slaveholders who were white and people of color. Lewis uses the portraits and stories he recounts to underline social progress and perils within the greater historical context. For example, his mother's parents identified as mulatto in the 1900 federal census, but after the court case, Plessy v. Ferguson, and subsequent Jim Crow laws, both were considered African American and excluded from white society. Lewis drives home just how cruelly invasive Jim Crow laws were when he writes that his grandfather had to "remove his wife from Oakwood Cemetery, a resting place that would no longer be available to him." Lewis' deeply investigated American family history is profoundly illuminating on many fronts.

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