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, it struck Lewis that he knew very little about those ancestors. And so, in his mid-80s, the esteemed historian began to excavate their past and his own.

We know that there is no singular, quintessential American story. Yet, the Lewis family contains many defining ones. His lineage leads him to the Kings and Belvinses, two white slaveholding families in Georgia; to the Bells, a mulatto slaveholding family in South Carolina; and to the Lewises, an up-from-slavery black family in Georgia. In The Stained-Glass Window, Lewis is heir and chronicler of them all.   

His father, John Henry Lewis, Sr. set Lewis on the path he would doggedly pursue, introducing him to W.E.B. Du Bois and living by example as an aid to Thurgood Marshall in a key civil rights case in Little Rock. In The Stained-Glass Widow, 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 themselves bound up together. The fight for equity, the loud echoes of the antebellum project 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 who have shaped this nation and will transform the way we see it.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Memoir, Biography, Biography Memoir

384 pages, Hardcover

First published February 11, 2025

About the author

David Levering Lewis is the Julius Silver University Professor and Professor of History Emeritus at New York University.

Reviews

[Joseph Zairo · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's interesting to see how a professional would go about learning the history of his ancestors in America. You can imagine traveling around the South and visiting museums, libraries and historical societies with the author.

The story of the his family is told alongside what was going on in America and the states and local areas where the members were living at the time. I was aware of slavery, Reconstruction, Jim Crow laws and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., but this book taught me a lot more about important events in Georgia, South Carolina and the U.S. from the 1700s to 20th century.

[Rose]

Only got through the first couple chapters. Reads like a history book—so many details and names that I’ll never remember took away from getting the main message of the paragraph. Reminded me of reading Hidden Figures. Could’ve made his point with a lot less words.

[Mary · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this book for a non-fiction group at a local library. If I hadn't been reading it for the book group, I probably wouldn't have finished it. This book reads more like a textbook than a novel. I know that it isn't a novel, it's non-fiction, but an author can add a more storylike spin to a fact-based book. At times, it felt like I was listening to a family tree recitation. I realize that due to the subject matter and time period, first-person accounts, like diaries and newspaper articles, are rare, but aside from a few references to the stained glass window, there is hardly any material that helps you connect with the family members or learn about their personalities.

This is the type of book that makes one wonder who the true audience is. The book is marketed as a look at American history through the lens of a family, which is an opportunity to draw people in and help them learn more about salavery, civil rights, and social justice. However, the author's style and vocabulary make it seem like he is writing for his contemporaries, who are most likely well-versed in the subject matter

A few things stood out for me in this book. I thought the treatment of Blacks had strong parallels to the current treatment of immigrants in the United States today. When he described the concern that Black men wanted to take advantage of white women, I immediately thought, what about all of those Southern "gentlemen" who raped their slaves? In the same chapter, it was mentioned that they wanted to make mullatos illigal. I couldn't help but think that most of the mullatos were created by the sexual abuse of white men on black women, powerless ones, like slaves or employees, rather than by consensual sexual relations between two people of different races.

The W.E.B. Du Bois quote, "In all things purely social we can be as separate as the five fingers, and yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress", also stood out to me as a lesson many still need to learn, over 100 years after it was first printed.

In summary, this book has valualbe information, but you really need to be interested in the topic to trudge through the book. The language is very elegant and the material was well researched, however, I does not hold the attention of the average reader.

[Caroline · Rating 4 out of 5]

As I read this book, I kept thinking Surely this is the kind of book the MAGAts are thinking of when they seek to ban books that "disparage Americans," and by that they mean white people. Dr Lewis's history follows closely the fortunes of his parents' southern families, beginning with black women and their children fathered by the white men who enslaved them, and continuing through the tragedy of the failure of Reconstruction, the creation of Jim Crow, and the deferred promise of Brown v. Board. For readers who don't already know this history, it is told here with constant reference to the actual people in the author's family, so there is nothing abstract about it.

The Lewises and Bells managed to establish themselves as educated and successful black people before Plessy v. Ferguson, and I wonder if the same could have happened after the turn of the century. Lewis mentions in passing the possibility that many of these successful people might have felt segregation was just as well because they were fully able to make better schools and churches and so on for themselves than white power structures would have created for them. You can't blame them.

The book ends in 1958 when Lewis heads off to study in London, so in a way it's a chronological prequel to Spell Freedom, ending as it does right before the big civil rights activity of the late 50s and early 60s.

Lewis's writing style is a little bit ornate, which I mostly enjoyed but which very occasionally left me lost among his subordinate clauses. He and his family did not think much of Booker T. Washington and instead believed with W.E.B. Du Bois that black people should be able to study literature and classics and anything else white people could. His father's career leading black academic institutions was dedicated to that proposition.

[Linda Andrews · Rating 5 out of 5]

It was excellent

[Diane · Rating 4 out of 5]

History written by a Pulitzer Prize-winning professor emeritus of history at NYU is too deep for me, but I appreciate the scholarship involved in Lewis’s family saga.

[Krista · Rating 4 out of 5]

Extremely detailed account of Lewis's journey of discovering his roots mixed in with the history of Black America from slavery to Civil Rights to now.

[Terry Tessar · Rating 1 out of 5]

Quit

[Linda · Rating 1 out of 5]

Did not finish. Listened for 35 minutes. Very dry and boring.