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

Anyone who has embarked on a search for their ancestors knows the feeling of just wanting more — more knowledge, more insight, more proof of lives lived. Who were these long-gone people, beyond a paper trail of census records, wills and marriage licenses? What did they care about? What forces of history shaped them?

Author and historian David Levering Lewis, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner for his biographies of Black intellectual pioneer W.E.B. DuBois, has spent his life mining the past, but his knowledge of his own family line was incomplete. With more than a dozen books and most of a lifetime behind him, Levering, 88, resolved to change that, setting out on a journey to both reclaim his family history and anchor it in the story of African Americans in this country. He got more than he bargained for.

The story Lewis tells in “The Stained Glass Window” was inspired by an antique window in an Atlanta church, a portrait of a mother and child modeled on the features of his maternal grandmother. That grandmother, Alice King Bell, was raised in the vital and historically significant Black community of Atlanta and was known and remembered by her family. But as Lewis went further back in time, he found forebears whose stories had never been fully told. His task tested the limits of his expertise, so he got further help from an expert genealogist, who assisted him with interpreting results from genetic testing.

With that newly available information came a surprise. Lewis, an African American, discovered that he had at least three white ancestors, the legacy of the slave era, when white enslavers coerced Black women into sexual relations. In a revelation that “reduced me to several days of incoherence,” he learned that one of his great-grandfathers, James W. Belvin, was white, and that despite having a white wife and children, Belvin had fathered five children with the author’s enslaved great-grandmother Clarissa King. White people, enslaved Black people, free people of color — they all made up Levering’s familial mix, a group of individuals whose lives personified the lives of Black Americans from the late 18th to the 20th centuries. This personal road map gave him a framework for telling the story of African Americans of all social classes and skin tones, from pre-Colonial times to the 1950s.

In many ways it’s a brutal account — the terrors of slavery, the violence and injustice of Reconstruction, the post-Reconstruction throttling of Black rights and opportunities that caused many of Lewis’ ancestors to flee the South. It’s also a story of immense courage, grit and determination. The most revealing thread, in terms of what Black citizens have both endured and achieved, concerns his Atlanta-based family.

In the late 1800s Lewis’ white great-grandfather Belvin, in declining health, bought Clarissa King a property in Atlanta and stipulated that it should remain in her family. This enabled Clarissa and her family to flee rural Georgia and move to the most vital African American community in the South, one that eventually produced both Lewis’ father, a minister and college president, and his mother, a teacher, artist and social force in the community.

Atlanta liked to call itself the “city too busy to hate,” but its power structure challenged even the most resolute of its African American citizens. Black Atlantans were continually denied pathways to opportunity and achievement. The history of the willful neglect and underfunding of Black education, which Lewis chronicles in excruciating detail, is shocking and painful. A divide between the Black professional class and the Black working class hampered the community’s ability to unite and form a political force. Lewis is astute about the way middle- and upper-class Black residents, many of them mixed-race, guarded their own resources and failed to agitate for full rights for all Black people until they were swept along by the unstoppable tide of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s.

But in the main, this is a story of strength and endurance and unselfishness. Following Lewis’ father’s struggles to raise money for the cash-starved institutions he led, I wondered at the source of his courage and tenacity. Perhaps he was paying forward the unselfishness of Levering’s two aunts, who worked long hours and daunting jobs to help fund his father’s and uncle’s education. The horrific violence unleashed on Black Americans in the South — whippings, beatings, burnings, shootings, lynchings — in the name of denying them participation in the American democratic experiment shows how essential voting rights are, and how easily they can be taken away.

Lewis brings to this book his passion for history and his expertise in researching little-known nuances of the African American story: Black slaveholders in South Carolina; the predicament of free people of color in the South; the way a backlash from a 19th century slave revolt choked off hard-won liberties enjoyed by free Black people.

As is often the case, Levering’s strengths are also his weaknesses. He can tell a riveting story, but at times the narrative is bogged down by citations and attributions. As the story moves forward to that of his immediate family members, it becomes a kind of testament that mentions everyone who touched them: fellow ministers, sorority sisters, institutional colleagues. It comes to resemble a family history written for a limited audience, rather than the more broadly based American saga of the book’s earlier sections.

Despite these limitations, “The Stained Glass Window” is a major accomplishment in its reach and scope and reconnection with the past. Perhaps only an 88-year old two-time Pulitzer winner could have brought the necessary skills and perspective to the task. If Lewis felt that he owed a debt to his family in writing this book, consider that debt repaid — with interest.

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