What Pulitzer Prize-Winning David Levering Lewis Discovered About His Family & Our History (Part 1)

🎙️ Episode 10

What Pulitzer Prize-Winning David Levering Lewis Discovered About His Family & Our History (Part 1)

What happens when one of the most respected historians in America turns his lens inward?

In this powerful conversation, David Levering Lewis, Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer of W.E.B. Du Bois, shares what he uncovered when he began exploring his own family history.

This episode moves beyond scholarship into something deeply personal. What begins as a journey of grief and reflection becomes a profound discovery, one that reveals unexpected truths about lineage, identity, and the complex history woven into Black American lives.

🔍 What You’ll Hear in This Episode
The story behind David Levering Lewis’ decision to write his own family history
How personal loss led to a deeper exploration of ancestry and legacy
The surprising discovery of his connection to a Southern slaveholder
The layered realities of Black lineage in America beyond simplified narratives
Why documenting your own family history matters now more than ever
The role of historians in preserving truth in a time of erasure and misinformation
How Black history is central, not peripheral, to the American story
🧠 Key Themes
Our Truth, Our History, Our Story
Family lineage and hidden histories
Black intellectual and cultural legacy
Historical erasure and reclaiming narrative power
The intersection of personal memory and public history
Documentation as resistance
💬 A Defining Idea from This Episode

History is not just what we inherit, it is what we choose to uncover, understand, and preserve.

📣 Resources / Links

📘 Learn more about David Levering Lewis’ book
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/622811/the-stained-glass-window-by-david-levering-lewis/

🏆 Pulitzer Prize profile
https://www.pulitzer.org/winners/david-levering-lewis-0

🎬 Share the film
W.E.B. Du Bois: Rebel with a Cause premieres May 19, 2026
Watch the trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5kMsik6rDQM

📄 Transcript available here
https://www.buzzsprout.com/2598323

📺 Watch the episode
https://www.youtube.com/@ritacoburn9240

🎧 Listen on your favorite platform
https://www.buzzsprout.com/2598323/episodes

🔗 Stay connected
https://linktr.ee/ritacoburnmedia

🎬 About the Series

Our Truth, Our History, Our Story (Our THS) explores the people, ideas, and cultural forces shaping Black history and storytelling today.

👥 Production Credits

Host: Rita Coburn
Executive Producer: Andrew T. Carr
Producers: Christine Coburn Whack, H. Lee Whack

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:02

There I got my signature. It's a big deal for me. I'm here with David Levering Lewis, and I want to say that David has written twelve books. These books carry the weight of history. And that's so exciting to me because I realize that our history, our truth, and our stories have very seldom been properly told. And when you do the kind of work that you do to do two Pulitzer Prize-winning biographies of W.E.B. Du Bois, which I read not only from cover to cover, but had to reread. And I remember Tony Morrison told Oprah once, she said, your reading is kind of difficult. I have to reread. And she said, and that, my dear, is reading. I had to reread because Du Bois's life was so rich, and you captured it, and you didn't just write, but all of the research was there. That's something that I used for my work. And then you came out with a book of your own, The Stained Glass Window. And this is David's story. And it's not just a story, it is a story that takes the genealogy. It takes the I want to find this wonderful page where you show us who's connected to who. And you go, how did you come up with this? So, David, with all the work that you've done, with all the awards that you've won, why was it important for you to tell this story? Yes.

SPEAKER_01 2:10

And that our success and our significance is from the beginning straight through the main line of American significance, really. I got a phone call from the president of the Society of American Historians, uh, David Nassau, a good friend, and he said, David, uh hold your breath. Uh we want to offer you, to award you the Arthur Schlesinger Prize for significant historical writing. And I said, Oh, well, boy, that's something, isn't it? Uh I think I'll take it. And he said, well, yep, and you know, we'll meet on the 11th of May or something like that. But uh why write a family history? Well, uh, to keep the story personal, I had just lost my partner uh of 30 years, uh, and um I had decided that I needed to go to Atlanta because Atlanta is uh in many ways uh the the origins of my family and my my people. Uh and I did. Uh before I went, I had some memories that my mother had said that uh that part of her ancestry came from a town outside Atlanta, the Kings, and that there I would find, if I ever got round to it, some significance about our origins. And I'm I phoned this woman, and uh uh she said, oh, she said, you know, we just celebrated black history, and uh, oh my goodness gracious, do come, Professor. We'd love to show you about, and so on. Off to Atlanta I went. We were kind of split, my family, between Methodists and Congregationalists. My father was a Methodist, the good old AME church had done him proud. My mother was a congregationalist, and they had a kind of color-struck affectation that was very much a part of the way they went about the world. And I thought, well, why don't I just go to the first congregational church in Atlanta and kind of take a good breath and get some of the history of it, and at the same time go to this little town outside Atlanta, do that as well, and then come back and say something about uh Arthur Schlesinger and the prize that I was to uh articulate. I left uh that town with uh the appreciation of the good archivist, and I came back and I delivered my message uh at the Century Club, uh, the Arthur Schlesinger Prize. And what I said was that American exceptionalism uh is the paradigm that we uh uh are represented by. But the curious thing about it is that the exceptionalist paradigm is exceptional in not saying much about the most exceptional people, we African Americans, and that it was that uh illusion that was so insufficient that we now realize is was a great mistake, and that the exceptionalist paradigm is exceptional because there was from the beginning throughout our many decades a group of people who were denied all of the articulated values and advantages promised in the founding of the country. Denied those things, we took them more seriously. We had not the luxury of being casual about them, and it was our insistence down through the years that made the difference between an articulated idea of equality and the essential validation of it hard fought by millions and millions of people of color. That I think led me to write this book. But then I had all sorts of surprises once I began to get into it. And I found that, curiously, that I was descended from a slaveholder. I had no knowledge of, that I commissioned uh a geneticist uh to examine the lore that I brought to him, that my mother thought that I was a consequence of this or that and so on. Uh and uh this gentleman, an African-American geneticist, uh, took what I had to say, disappeared, and came back, and he said, uh, no, there's no connection at Rosswell. There's nothing at all that I can see. But I do have a surprise, and it is that you are descended from one of the largest slaveholders of Georgia, Houston County. And I said, Well, that's a that's a surprise. Uh who is he? And they said, it's uh James Wiley Belvin. I got to know more about James Wiley Belvin. And in getting to know more about James Wiley Belvin, I found that he had, in fact, two families. He had his white family, and he had his concubine family. As the years went by, the similarities in their experiences grew so that when the Civil War came, that uh uh slaveholder walked into Atlanta with his concubine, whose name was Clarissa King, and he purchased a property on Wheat Street, and Wheat Street soon became Auburn Avenue. And Auburn Avenue is, as most, I think, people would know, was one of the spine of the commercial activity that made African American prosperity quite significant. Uh, he purchased that property uh from a Jewish gentleman named Moses Frank. And Moses Frank, who was obviously moving to a different part of town, was the ancestor of Leo Frank, the first Jew to be lynched in the South to the great disgrace of Atlanta and one of the great moments of antisemitism beginning to take hold in this country. Along comes my father, uh, who uh meets my mother, having had a family earlier, and uh she had uh only gotten at Atlanta University uh a teacher's diploma. She had not gotten a bachelor's degree. And then she decided, and I don't know when they met, and I don't know quite how that all took place, but uh she knew that uh they were probably going to uh uh marry soon. And so she went to Morehouse as the only woman to be a Morehouse man, as it were, uh, because why? Spellman uh had a kind of domestic program uh that did not appeal to her. She was a uh very feisty uh feminist. Uh she belonged to an organization called uh uh Women's, the Women's Club in Atlanta. Uh they had indeed uh uh been responsible for uh uh boycotting the Atlanta Constitution, uh, so much so that uh the white part of Atlanta uh conceded that uh there needed to be more high schools in uh Atlanta and that sort of thing. And so she went to Morehouse, she took the uh courses that she wanted, she had gone to Harvard as well, the summer school, and so she and my father marry in 1930, and he moves with her to Dunbar High School, which becomes the most significant Rosenball school of the South. And he is fortunate in that uh he had been, since he also went to Yale, divinity, he also had had the good luck of becoming the president of Morris Brown College, the Methodist flagship college.

SPEAKER_00 12:06

So you came from a family of educators, and that filters into your work because your work educates all of us. I want to ask you, at this particular time in our country, while people are taking away our history, and while some of us may not be embracing it for the value that it has, what would you tell people to do to document their own history? What is important about that for people? You maybe they can't do all the research you did, but what is important for black people to do about history, their own personal history in this moment, what they can give to their children?

SPEAKER_01 13:00

We have to begin to laser-like focus on what we know of our past. Because we all have history, we all have insults, we all have moments when we could have uh assembled and uh ascended, and why didn't we do so? And we must learn to put these things into context.

SPEAKER_00 13:22

In a time where we hear fake news and where we're told what we see isn't what we see. Is there a particular truth that you hold on to that centers you that you could tell people this is what you can hold on to during this time?

SPEAKER_01 13:42

You can hold on to the fight that we've conducted in its many uh iterations. You can hold on to the fact that when there's division in a society, and soon one group of people becomes xenophobic and says we've got to get rid of a third of the population because it's brown and it's come across the New Aces River and that sort of thing, when another uh bunch of people say, well, uh your history, your woke history, uh demeans us in that it doesn't say that our values are really what they were, that uh the prosperity of this country is such that only the weak, the lame, the uneducated uh complain. Uh we're on a roll now, and uh you just have to get on board. And you can say, it seems to me, that this is because the selfishness of those who have the advantage of the levers of power will use those levers to divide us all.

SPEAKER_00 15:07

I want to thank you for all the work that you do, for all the books, for telling us it's important to document our own families, for looking at King, for looking at Du Bois, for encouraging us to read a deeper story, and for your friendship. Uh, you've helped me throughout the documentary for W.E.B. Du Bois. The rereading and the reading and the research let me know how much I don't know. And so if we don't have historians like you giving us the food in order to grow, then I don't think we really have a chance at understanding our future, even this present day. I wonder if do we have a chance?

SPEAKER_01 16:17

That's the fundamental and existential question.

SPEAKER_00 16:25

I am the producer, director, and writer of W.E.B. Du Bois Rebel with a Cause, a PBS documentary that will air on American Masters PBS, May 19th of this year, 2026. Please search for the YouTube trailer and share it today.