One family’s stories prove to be a window on Black struggle and persistence in American history
LA TimesBook Review The Stained Glass Window: A Family History as the American Story, 1790-1958 By David Levering Lewis Penguin Press: 368 pages, $35 If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookstores. White people, enslaved Black people, free people of color — they all made up Levering’s familial mix, a group of individuals whose lives personified the lives of Black Americans from the late 18th to the 20th centuries. This enabled Clarissa and her family to flee rural Georgia and move to the most vital African American community in the South, one that eventually produced both Lewis’ father, a minister and college president, and his mother, a teacher, artist and social force in the community. Lewis brings to this book his passion for history and his expertise in researching little-known nuances of the African American story: Black slaveholders in South Carolina; the predicament of free people of color in the South; the way a backlash from a 19th century slave revolt choked off hard-won liberties enjoyed by free Black people.
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