David Levering Lewis — The Stained Glass Window: A Family History as the American Story, 1790-1958 - with Steve Inskeep

David Levering Lewis — The Stained Glass Window: A Family History as the American Story, 1790-1958 - with Steve Inskeep — at Conn AveSitting beneath a stained glass window dedicated to his grandmother in the Atlanta church where his family had prayed for generations, preeminent American historian David Levering Lewis was struck by the great lacunae in what he could know about his own ancestors. He vowed to excavate their past and tell their story.There is no singular American story. Yet the Lewis family contains many defining ones. David Levering Lewis's lineage leads him to the Kings and Belvinses, two white slaveholding families in Georgia; to the Bells, a free persons of color slaveholding family in South Carolina; and to the Lewises, an up-from-slavery black family in Georgia.Lewis's father, John Henry Lewis Sr., set Lewis on the path he pursues, introducing him to W. E. B. Du Bois and living by example as Thurgood Marshall's collaborator in a key civil rights case in Little Rock. In The Stained Glass Window, Lewis reckons with his legacy in full, facing his ancestors and all that was lost, all the doors that were closed to them.In this country, the bonds of kinship and the horrific fetters of slavery are bound up together. The fight for equity, the loud echoes of the antebellum period in our present, and narratives of exceptionalism are ever with us; in these pages, so, too, are the voices of Clarissa, Isaac, Hattie, Alice, and John. They shaped this nation, and their heir David Levering Lewis's chronicle of the antebellum project and the subsequent era of marginalization and resistance will transform our understanding of it.PURCHASE BOOK HERE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9781984879905?ic_referral=8jecE--JOvK5YWZMsjMJ300BET5JB3h4xzR-EPlqjyQwMw8Mj64wJfkJ9z1x4ejSnn-pyXKj70NmBT2SYk84mRxS_epGasaqq8jps5w2LhJqKSTNlNJy-aRfYZIfDdfXBR9NnwDavid Levering Lewis is professor emeritus of history at New York University. A recipient of the National Humanities Medal, Lewis received the Pulitzer Prize for each volume of his W. E. B. Du Bois biography. He is the author of ten books. Lewis has received fellowships from the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, the National Humanities Center, the Wilson Center, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the American Philosophical Society, and the MacArthur Foundation. He lives in New York City.Lewis is in conversation with Steve Inskeep. Inskeep is a cohost of Morning Edition, the most widely heard radio program in the United States, and of NPR’s Up First, one of the nation’s most popular podcasts. His reporting has taken him across the United States, the Middle East, Latin America, Africa, Pakistan, and China. His search for the full story behind the news has led him to history; he is the author of Instant City, Jacksonland, and Imperfect Union, and now Differ We Must.*recorded 2/19/2025