The Stained Glass Window

Praise

“Epic . . . Rich in family lore and historical fact, and a thoughtful addition to the literature of Black life in the American South.” —Kirkus (starred review)

“An elegantly crafted discovery of your own people throughout American history! David Levering Lewis’s usual sly eloquence braids history, politics, and genealogy, taking his family from slavery to freedom, from the erection of segregation to glimmers of its demise. An American story told with sophistication, warmth, and intimacy.” —Professor Nell Irvin Painter, author of I Just Keep Talking
 
“Poignant and shocking. A graceful memoir cum history by an acclaimed biographer who finally turns his exceptional talents inward to explore a past he ‘barely knew’—his own family history—and it turns out to be a riveting multi-generational American story.” —Kai Bird, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of American Prometheus
 
“David Levering Lewis’s latest volume is an extraordinary addition to his remarkable list of accomplishments as an American historian. The old story of the South and our tragic national history of race relations is wonderfully reinvigorated by his unflagging autobiographical presence in a way that reminds us consistently of nothing less than the most memorable writings of W.E.B. Du Bois. Precise and exacting standards of historiography are fortified by Lewis’s honorable explorations of his own complex identity as a child or grandchild of the privileged Talented Tenth called upon once to lead embattled black Americans in a dangerous world.” —Professor Arnold Rampersad, author of Ralph Ellison

“In The Stained Glass Window, this self-described ‘tenacious historian,’ already a national treasure, offers historians, memoirists, genealogists, story-tellers, and family chroniclers a primer on what can be found when one goes looking and keeps looking for one’s roots. With wit and wisdom, he demonstrates how and why the American story is an unstable, ever-changing, never fully blended amalgam of family histories.” —David Nasaw, author of The Last Million
 
“With his latest book, The Stained Glass Window, David Levering Lewis again confirms why he is one of the greatest historians of our times. Lewis takes himself and his familial genealogy as subject matter, narrating a multigenerational saga of Black life, in all of its twists, turns, contradictions and complexities. The book is revelatory for what it unveils about the author, but, just as powerfully, for what it unveils about America. Demonstrating a magisterial contextual grasp of United States history from the seventeenth-century to the 1950s, Lewis wrestles with how the tangled legacies of slavery, the peculiar logics of race, and the cruelty of white supremacy have fundamentally shaped the nation. But at its heart, the book is a deeply personal and profoundly human story of exploration and discovery, of survival and striving, and of reckoning with the past at its deepest most intimate levels. Exhaustively researched and written with trademark elegance and grace, The Stained Glass Window is a remarkable achievement and one of David Levering Lewis’s finest works.” —Professor Chad Williams, author of The Wounded World

“A singular, surprising book. In unearthing the roots of his own unlikely family tree, Lewis reveals a much larger story about slavery, freedom, and the continuing convolutions of race in America.” —Professor James T. Campbell, author of Middle Passages

“With the acumen of an award-winning historian, Lewis writes about his remarkable family’s story of white enslavers and Black strivers as the nation’s own.” —Paula J. Giddings, E.A. Woodson Professor, emerita, Smith College and author of IDA, A Sword Among Lions
 
“There is a magisterial quality to all of David Levering Lewis’s work. His two scintillating volumes on W.E.B. Du Bois offer a master class in the art of biography. Now in The Stained Glass Window, Lewis produces a meditation about race and family in America, chronicling his own family’s rise from slavery. It’s a genealogical tour de force and—no surprise!—it’s magisterial, too.” —Gary M. Pomerantz, author of Where Peachtree Meets Sweet Auburn

“An epic narrative history, written with characteristic grace and insight, of a nation vainly obsessed with its supposed perfection but horribly disfigured by its contradictions—and of the singular, profoundly sympathetic family which emerged, against the odds, from the knee-buckling ironies and contingencies of American life. The Stained Glass Window left me breathless.” —Matthew Guterl, author of Skinfolk

“In this arresting and highly original book, David Levering Lewis weaves together family saga, layers of personal memory, Southern history from the Colonial era to the mid-twentieth century, and the Black experience of trials and some notable triumphs. The book will impress readers not only for its meticulous research and elegant prose, but also by its clarity of thought and reckoning with the moral ambiguities and injuries of the American past. That past was implicit in W. E. B. Du Bois’s 1935 statement, ‘Nations reel and stagger on their way; they make hideous mistakes; they commit frightful wrongs; they do great and beautiful things.’ The task, said Du Bois, was to tell ‘the truth about all this.’ In excavating one Black family’s tale, David Levering Lewis compels close scrutiny of the contradiction of America’s promise of freedom for all and the reality of slavery, Jim Crow, and racial harms since, reaching deep even into our own time. Yet the fight for ‘the truth’ and genuine equality has persisted and, judging by the chronicle of this distinguished African-American family, will continue for however long the United States needs to fulfill its better self.” —Professor David Mayers, author of America and the Postwar World

“The Stained Glass Window is a miraculous gift. David Levering Lewis’s eloquent chronicle of his family’s generational struggle to achieve dignity and citizenship reads like an epic multigenerational saga of African American hope, heartbreak, and flourishing. A remarkable achievement.” —Peniel Joseph, author of The Sword and the Shield