The Stained Glass Window: A Family History as the American Story, 1790-1958 by David Levering Lewis

National Humanities Medal recipient and two-time recipient of the Pulitzer Prize David Levering Lewis’s own family history that shifts our understanding of the larger American story Sitting 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 collabo