W. E. B. Du Bois, the eminent African-American sociologist and America’s foremost public intellectual for more than half a century, declared in The Souls of Black Folk in 1903 that “The problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color line.” Seven years earlier, the US Supreme Court had upheld the “one-drop rule” of racial classification and codified a restrictive social and legal caste system that tied rights of citizenship to skin color and a simple, rigid racial binary.
Du Bois’s Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer David Levering Lewis has authored a new book that examines the long history of race relations in the United States through the lens of a multi-generational family whose composition demonstrates how absurd and illusory the notion of racial binaries have always been in this country. The story also examines the African-American community’s internal pigmentocracy from the perspective of a family often marooned between the antipodes of narrowly defined racial categories.
A family history of breathtaking sweep, The Stained Glass Window: A Family History as the American Story, 1790–1958 not only tells the captivating story of an American family but situates it in the context of 170 years in the life of a nation that has repeatedly redefined race and its privileges, along with the burdens, deprivations, and terrors that have attended life on the wrong side of the color line.
I spoke with Professor Lewis in January about what impelled him to explore his family’s story more than six decades into a monumental scholarly career that has yielded incisive biographies of Du Bois, Martin Luther King Jr., and 1940 Republican presidential nominee Wendell Willkie, as well as the definitive study of the Harlem Renaissance, When Harlem Was in Vogue. We touched on the origins and methods of his research from the time he found himself gazing with wonder and curiosity at his grandmother’s depiction in a stained glass window in Atlanta’s First Congregational Church many years ago, and recognizing how much about her and their family history remained “unrevealed to me.” We also discussed his many unexpected discoveries about his own ancestors and their impact on the world they inhabited.
In addition, we delved into some of the critical but lesser known chapters in the long struggle for African-American citizenship that the book brings to light.
This interview was edited for length and clarity.
Steve Nathans-Kelly
Early on in The Stained Glass Window you introduce the term “no-nation people” as one that a woman in Atlanta used in reference to your own “race-proud, middle-class family.” Could you talk a bit about what that phrase means, and what it meant to hear your family described in that manner?
David Levering Lewis
It was a complete shock. It happened in the early days of my Du Bois research. I wanted to find friends of my family and indeed colleagues of my mother who had sat at Du Bois’s feet, as it were, in the early days at Atlanta University. This woman I found spoke in a very, very complimentary way of my mother, but as she went along, she said, “She was one of the best of the ‘no-nation people.’” I said, “Excuse me?” And she said, “They didn’t quite fit in between us and them.”
I thought that was really quite curious, and I said, “Did you think that she was part of a large group of people befitting that description?” And she said, “Oh yes, there were lots of them at that church that she belonged to, First Congregational Church.”
I put it in the back of my memory code. And when I was doing Du Bois, I had it in mind. But now it seems to be, as I look back, particularly fitting because it describes people who were being forced to make choices as the “one-drop” rule that came from the Supreme Court’s [Plessy vs. Ferguson] decision in 1896 prevailed.
I thought, “What a bind to be in—you’ve grown up in a community, you are respected, and yet the world is shifting. The plates under your ethnic and ontological feet are shifting, and you’ve got to decide.” Many people decided to out-migrate to California. And others proudly said—as [NAACP leader] Walter White is often quoted—“I have never been so sure that I am a Negro as when the riot of 1906 befell Atlanta.” Then I remembered that my mother, who was a teenager in 1906, had said, “Walter White knew exactly who we were and where we were. And so we were not ashamed, we were leaders, but some people thought of us as having a fitness problem.”
Steve Nathans-Kelly
Your mother speaks powerfully in The Stained Glass Window when the narrative reaches her generation, but in the early parts of the book, when you’re writing about your enslaved great-grandmother, Clarissa King, you lament that you can’t hear her voice. Yet you have copious material from Barrington King and James Wiley Belvin and other slave-owning white men in your bloodline. I think there’s a natural inclination to think of those men as more peripheral to the story of your family if only because of the way that they imposed themselves on it. How do you strike a balance between peripheral characters who speak voluminously in the historical record, and more central characters like your great-grandmother who left only traces, and keep white ancestors from dominating the narrative?
David Levering Lewis
The American Historical Association just finished meeting here in Manhattan, and when the president of the association [Thavolia Glymph] delivered her address, it was a remarkable one because it addressed just this issue of silence. I was not quite aware of the degree to which many African-American scholars and perhaps many scholars do regard the archive as not very useful because it’s their archive—it’s the master class’s memory written down, and who is going to say anything that’s very useful to us as their subordinates? But she said, “Not so, if we know how to read between the lines. If we know how to listen to the echoes that are still there in that whole superstructure of dominion and subordination, then we can use the archives and we must do so.”
That is what I found, as I had the good fortune of having a private family history of one of the Belvin descendants who’s writing just to clear his own head about where they came from, what they did. He’s unashamed of this whole experience that he’s recording. And so I did hear voices of the subordinates. And finally, even, when at the very end of James Wiley Belvin’s will, it says, “Don’t forget Clarissy,” they’ve known all along that this special [procreative] relationship [between Belvin and my great-grandmother] obtains. Of course, it cannot be vouchsafed, it cannot be admitted. But at the end, when he was talking about money, he said, “Just don’t forget Clarissy.”
Steve Nathans-Kelly
There are a number of points in the book where you are able to locate precisely where members of your family were at critical historical moments, which underscores how they move through the “American Story” you reference in the book’s subtitle. But at times you can only make educated guesses as to what they were thinking or how they would’ve reacted in the moment. One of those instances comes during the Cotton States Exposition in 1895 and Booker T. Washington’s pivotal Atlanta Compromise speech. This is a moment in history when all African Americans—including relatively privileged Black elites—were quickly losing ground. On the one hand, you make it sound as if your Bell grandparents would have considered themselves exempt from Washington’s prescription of common labor as the proper path to racial progress, while at the same time applauding the proto-respectability politics that he was advocating. And then you say they would have winced when he said they had no business visiting the opera house. Would you consider this ambivalence a condition of no-nationhood?
David Levering Lewis
I think now the one-drop rule has accomplished its design—that is to say, I think people are unambiguous in their sense of themselves. We are African Americans. We have a term that honors our origins at the same time it places us firmly in the swim of American history. So I think that is true, although you may recall that recently the business of census flexibility concerned African Americans because we might be underrepresented: who’s Hispanic, who’s Black, and what are we? And that’s a serious concern, I suppose. But I think there’s a kind of clarity that African Americans now are going to support a progressive momentum in the country, even though already the victory of President Trump shows an ambiguity which is already beginning: African Americans are perhaps not so certain that they’re ready for a female presidency. African-American men who believe that the price of gas and the price of eggs is as important to them as it is to Mr. Trump’s MAGA group and so on. And all of that, I guess, is to be applauded in the sense that if we can just hold on long enough to get through all of these contradictions, it may come out in ten years with a kind of commonality and community that would benefit us all. That’s rather optimistic. I hope it’s not wildly visionary.
But 1896 to 1900 is a time of flux, and I thought it was important to remember just what was happening in the neighboring state as Booker T. Washington delivered that remarkably cogent and plausible Compromise speech. Next door—that very day—all African Americans are eliminated from the voting rolls by the South Carolina governor. And so a compromise that seemed plausible enough to evoke from even William Edward Burghardt Du Bois an applause to say, “This may be a viable solution,” certainly beckons more peace and understanding of the roles of each of us. Of course, the truth is that already the Mississippi constitutional revisions indicated the future of race relations, at least below the Mason-Dixon line. And so Du Bois, of course, would regret his optimistic judgment of the wisdom of Booker T. Washington.
Steve Nathans-Kelly
One wrenching episode in the book that’s especially indicative of how the walls were closing in occurs shortly after the Atlanta Race riot in 1906 when your grandfather disinters his wife from a white cemetery in Atlanta and moves her to a Black one. Is this a part of your family history that was known to you before you started this project?
David Levering Lewis
No, actually not. My grandmother is interred today at Southview Cemetery, an African-American cemetery. But I remembered that the tombstone indicated that she had been in place there since 1906. I said, “Well, 1906 doesn’t make sense because she died five years earlier.” Then I inquired at the now-white cemetery, and they had evidence of her presence, but they couldn’t be quite clear when she left or under what circumstance. She had been interred in the white cemetery in 1901, which at that point was under the empire of Reconstruction, as it were, and so certain people [of color] had the option of burial there. It became quite clear to me that by 1906, my grandfather had realized that, as a man of color—even though he too had a kind of no-nation-ness about him—he couldn’t be buried next to her. Today, both cemeteries are clearer about what happened to our ancestor as a result of my inquiries.
Steve Nathans-Kelly
Another incident that was eye-opening for me was your account of the labor struggle at Dunbar High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, in the 1940s when your father was principal. Teachers at the Black high school were battling for pay equal to teachers at the city’s white high school and Thurgood Marshall argued their case. Everyone knows the story of the integration of Little Rock’s Central High in 1958, but we rarely if ever hear about the years of Black activism before Brown v. Board of Education to enforce the “equal” side of “separate but equal.”
David Levering Lewis
I thought that one of the benefits of the book might be if, in that period of incomplete and inconclusive citizenship, [it asked], what happened? We are waiting for the sit-ins. We’re waiting for the students to wake up. We’re waiting for the civil rights history that we know. But in all those years, from 1896 until the 1950s, people went about their business, and some of them very successfully. They held things together and they weren’t insignificant at critical moments when votes happened and issues were decided. We were still there, as doctors, as lawyers, as members of the Boulé, that exclusive professional group of successful men. That’s also a story, and I hope that our Ph.D.s will go back and rediscover that long moment of persistence.
Steve Nathans-Kelly
Do you think that there was a sort of shame or embarrassment that crept in after desegregation about once-strong African-American institutions that people just didn’t want to talk about anymore?
David Levering Lewis
Yes, I think so. Similarly, with many families whose descent from slavery was elided. I, for example, wondered what happened to Clarissa. It’s her existence that resulted in the relative prosperity of the people I know. And then I discovered that people said, “No, we are not descended from slaves. Those are other people.” And we don’t talk about that. We talk about what was positive and possible after Appomattox. And so many African Americans now look back and are accommodating that descent with greater clarity, I would hope. I think that’s one of the benefits, perhaps, of a book like this.
Steve Nathans-Kelly
I think the relationship of Black institutions to the white power structure in Atlanta is another little-understood topic that comes through in the book, along with the sense that the leaders of those institutions believed they had reached a level of accommodation that worked, and that they thought would endure.
David Levering Lewis
The two power structures were complementary as long as everybody understood the possible. The appearance seemed to be that segregation was really working. And indeed, when Forbes visited Atlanta after Brown v. Board, the author of a very thorough investigation of class and economics there said, “[The solution] won’t be more Brown vs. Board decisions by the Supreme Court. It won’t be legislation. It will be the unsegregated dollar that will advance Atlanta and make all the problems go away, because people are getting richer and richer in this divided world.”
That was an illusory resolution, but it seemed to make sense. All of that now is a memory, and with it is some regret on the part of people who think, “Well, we did lose. The cost of our losses was severe and large.” The flight from Black institutions after the second decision of the Supreme Court [“Brown II” (1955), which failed to apply a firm timetable to school desegregation] was robust and undermining, people thought. And I suppose sociologically, it made sense until Nixon and then Reagan, when the reversal became really quite sharp and long-lived.
Steve Nathans-Kelly
One story that will fascinate readers of your Du Bois biographies is when you describe meeting him at Wilberforce University. But what really makes the story resonate in this book is that it happened at such a pivotal moment—after a devastating speech to the Boulé in which Du Bois told proud members of the Talented Tenth that their time for racial leadership had passed—and also because of your parents’ very different reactions to the speech. Was that something you remember them discussing at the time, or is this something you’ve intuited over the years?
David Levering Lewis
It was intuition and the silence in the aftermath. My mother venerated and idolized Du Bois. She had been a student of his, and she was assigned some research to do for the famous Atlanta University Studies about religion and race and business. My father appreciated the dilemma that the [Atlanta] Compromise presented. He was, by pigment, a man who knew exactly his allegiance, as it were, in descent. And my mother, I think, represented a kind of bourgeois pretentiousness that can be forgiven today if we understand why. My father was stunned by what was being said. He’s going to catch up with Du Bois later. My mother just forgave him: “It’s quite alright that he offended the high and mighty group. They’ll get over it because we have to listen to new ideas.” But really it was the most provocative asseveration that the Talented Tenth was useless. It hadn’t lived up to its obligations.
Steve Nathans-Kelly
An episode that comes up twice in the book and bookends a lot of the story is the dedication of John Lewis High School in Georgia in 1958, which was named in honor of your father. Built as a Black high school four years after Brown v. Board as a way for Georgia to skirt the desegregation law, it’s almost a segregation academy, which must have rankled your father.
David Levering Lewis
Yes, exactly. That day, when I accompanied my father, I thought, “Oh, well, this is quite something.” But my father’s response was ambiguous. I could detect that this was an obligation, that there were people there to honor his achievements, and he had to return to his origins. He was impatient to accept the honor, the homage, and leave. And I only realized much later that, of course, the South had created these “equity schools” throughout the [region] as a delayed response to the obligations of the Warren Court. And they were really simulacrums of what integration should have been. That brought me to a rather severe judgment of the Eisenhower years at the end, because I thought that, if you could explain the loss of momentum out of the Warren Court, it would’ve been the Eisenhower administration’s absolute abandonment of its moral obligation to say, “This is right.”
NONFICTION
The Stained Glass Window: A Family History as the American Story, 1790–1958
By David Levering Lewis
Penguin Press
Published February 11, 2025
