The Stained Glass Window

A Family History as the American Story, 1790-1958

De: David Levering Lewis

Narrado por: Dion Graham

“At once narrative history, family chronicle and personal memoir… [a] luminous work of investigation and introspection.”—Wall Street Journal

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 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 this book, 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.

©2025 David Levering Lewis (P)2025 Penguin Audio

Reseñas de la Crítica

“[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

“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)