It's the Brian Lear Show on WMYC.

I'm producer Amina Serna, filling in for Brian today.

Welcome back, everyone.

Now we continue our WMYC Centennial series, 100 Years of 100 Things, with Thing

Number 67, 100 years of David Levering Lewis's family history. David Levering Lewis is one of the

most accomplished historians of our time, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, he has written definitive

works on W.E.B. Du Bois, Martin Luther King, Jr., the Harlem Renaissance, and even the early

history of Islam in Europe. Now, in his new book, The Stained Glass Window, a family history

as the American story, he turns the historian's

lens on his own family. And like any good story, it tells a much bigger story.

The book begins with a church window in Atlanta dedicated to David Levering Lewis's grandmother,

Alice King Bell. He writes,

I suspected that the woman whose born name was king

and whose dedicated sanctuary window

had fascinated me from my teens

was a mystery wrapped in an antebellum conundrum

of possibly outsize historical significance.

His ancestors included white slaveholders,

free black families, and those who built their lives after emancipation.

Through them, he traces the contradictions and complexities of race,

power, and identity in America across centuries,

from slavery to reconstruction, to the civil

...