“Fascinating and important new book . . . The stained-glass window of Lewis’s grandmother proves to be an apt metaphor for his book. One facet of stained glass is that the rigid panes capture and project an image of permanency—but time and light shift the hues. The same is true for American history. Artisans create stained glass by first sketching a full-scale design mapping out the composition and colors. Then they outline each section of glass like a puzzle. Finally, they carefully choose colored glass sheets for their hue and texture. In the same way, Lewis has combined colorful pieces of his family’s past and Southern history into a brilliant mosaic of the American story.” —Steve Majors, The Washington Post
“At 88, Lewis brings every bit of his historian’s training and his skill as a writer to bear on this most personal story, one that ought to speak to every American.” —Kate Tuttle, The Boston Globe
“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 . . . A family history of breathtaking sweep, The Stained Glass Window 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.” —Steve Nathans-Kelly, Chicago Review of Books
“[A] personal road map gave [Lewis] 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 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.” —Los Angeles Times
“The Stained Glass Window is at once narrative history, family chronicle and personal memoir… A parade of Mr. Lewis’s relatives . . . march through his book and provide a vivid picture of the hard and heartbreaking challenges of black life in the U.S . . . But mostly there is Mr. Lewis himself—an indefatigable scholar, a double Pulitzer winner (for each of the Du Bois volumes), and a volunteer combatant in the war for historical racial justice. In a book in which he mined documents he also mined his own memory . . . The Chinese proverb has it that a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. In this luminous work of investigation and introspection, a journey of more than 300 pages begins with a single glimpse of a church window.” —David M. Shribman, The Wall Street Journal
“This is a crowning flourish to the scholar’s illustrious career . . . The Stained Glass Window encapsulates America’s original sin of slaughter and enslavement, in all its perversity and contradictions, and in its redemptive majesty.”—Michael Henry Adams, Amsterdam News
“Intricate, sumptuously written . . . An exquisite stylist and wide-ranging intellect . . . [The Stained Glass Window] is a scintillating and piercing study of how the Black upper class emerged from a fraught system in which violence, family, and inheritance were intertwined.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“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)
“Lewis’ arresting discoveries, shared in elegantly lucid prose punctuated by deftly timed, mordant wit, brings his complex family history to life, including slaveholders who were white and people of color . . . His deeply investigated American family history is profoundly illuminating on many fronts.” —Booklist (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
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