“The ink of the scholar is more holy than the blood of the martyr.” — the Prophet Muhammad. Muhammad decried ignorance as “humanity’s greatest poverty,” stressing how irrespective of circumstance, knowledge brings us “into the highest rank of human accomplishment.”
Like many, it was David Levering Lewis’ marvelous tale of the advent of the world’s Black cultural capital in 1981, “When Harlem was in Vogue,” that first brought him to my attention. In terms of my discovery of the extent of an aesthetic contribution Black people had made to our country, it changed my life. Now, just in time for America’s resurgent racism, to confront and refute lies posited as “freedom of speech,” comes “The Stained Glass Window.” It is the newest of Lewis’s 11 books, and counting. This is a crowning flourish to the scholar’s illustrious career.
Enrolling in Fisk University at 15 years old, to become in time an NYU Professor emeritus, he was the first biographer of Martin Luther King, Jr. Lewis, for his two-volume life of W.E.B. Du Bois, became the first and second Black recipient of a Pulitzer Prize for Biography. Awarded an early MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship, in 2009 President Obama bestowed on him the National Humanities Medal. Some might mock and scorn diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) as “reverse racism,” favoring race over qualifications, or sexuality and disability over talent and character. But like so many African American athletes, artists, and professionals with meritorious distinction beyond question, Lewis’ record shows otherwise.
One could hardly maintain that Lewis’s praise and prizes have been unwarranted. Moreover, “The Stained Glass Window” encapsulates America’s original sin of slaughter and enslavement, in all its perversity and contradictions, and in its redemptive majesty, too.
The duality of this careful narrative of Lewis’s life and ancestry is not unlike George Herbert’s paradoxical poem “Easter Wings”:
Let me combine,
And feel thy victorie:
For, if I imp my wing on thine,
Affliction shall advance the flight in me.
In the parlance of poet Caroline Randall Williams, Lewis has the same “rape colored skin” of his kinsman Walter White, whose fair complexion, light hair, and blue eyes made him especially useful investigating lynchings and other outrages during a decades-long tenure leading the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. As a blessing and a curse, white-adjacent proximity, eliciting opportunity as well as disdain, is a leitmotif of “The Stained Glass Window.”
And from the very start of relating his family history, Lewis makes its significance, and his purpose, clear. Recapping an unexpected unpleasant encounter with an Uber driver, he underlines how casual, enduring, and pervasive white supremacy is. His hapless driver suggested that having descended from unskilled Poles, exploited and oppressed late-nineteenth century immigrants, “that must absolve him?” “Surely,” he reasoned, there was no possibility of his having either enjoyed white privilege or engendered “discrimination against Black people?”
Moreover, he enumerated his “hardworking grandfather’s successful tannery,” his father’s unionized labor, and a property portfolio obtained because of “good credit and the GI Bill.” In less time than it took to travel the length of a block, beyond Black indolence or apathy, he swept aside any cause of inequality and disparate outcomes. For the white driver, the contrast of people of color who have made it, people like Lewis or Mellon Foundation director, Elizabeth Alexander, are only the exception that proves the rule of “trifling Ni**ers” demanding a government handout and unwilling to work as diligently as whites, a libel widely accepted as gospel.
Neither organized labor membership and education slots denied to Black people, nor Elon Musk’s emerald mine or even Donald Trump’s $500,000,000 inheritance are deemed advantageous shortcuts to the finish line in a race that’s rigged. No, only the absence of motivation and a willingness to try harder, account for a 100-1 wealth gap encumbering the descendants of kidnapped Africans, enslaved to work, to build the wealth of a nation, for free, so that whites didn’t have to.
Either listening to or observing David Lewis, it’s curious. How, before beginning this book, could he have been uncertain, as to his mother’s stories about their white ancestry, or of his family including prominent Confederates? Lewis’ command of classical English is as deliberative, precise, and punctilious as William F. Buckley’s or James Baldwin’s.
If African Americans bear a rainbow of tints and shades, between Black and white, his color is near the spectrum’s start. “Non-nation people, contrasted with the ebony darkness of West Africans, are a living, long-lasting testament, an indictment, that loudly says ‘Black history is American history!’”
All too familiar with how this came to be, Thomas Jefferson’s solution to race relations was rooted in an understanding of race as rabid and ill-conceived as Adolf Hitler’s. For both, the only way to deny or defame difference, was to overlook commonality. Ignoring contradictory evidence offered by Benjamin Banneker and others, for Jefferson, the only satisfactory answer was eliminating blackness. Ignoring science and history, he came up with an algebraic equation, with a schedule of selective breeding, whereby all America could be “bleached clean.”
“Once Upon a Time When We Were Colored,” “The Other Madisons,” and particularly Margo Jefferson’s “Negroland,” are among a host of memoirs presaging “The Stained Glass Window.” They artfully portray what might be said to represent the evolution of an intermediate, all-American race, one with African, European, and Native ancestors. If Du Bois wrote compellingly of a requisite “double consciousness,” these works document a caste apart, reliant for survival and preeminence, on both academic excellence and, at least, a triple consciousness.
Exemplifying a meritocracy of erudition, they strove as much to help uplift the Black masses, as to defy and confound their other relations, those who were white. More than anything, starting with DEI, Lewis’s book is a call for reparation and recompense. He makes his case by noting, “American slavery functioned as a vast concentration camp from which flowed the enormous wealth that made … a national success story … inconceivable without the enforced indispensability of four million Black lives that mattered.”
This argument concerns our past. As taking to the streets becomes a new imperative, speaking of today, he says, “if ever an era belonged to a single people, the racial, abortion, gender, immigration, gay, and disabled rights won in the sixties and seventies were … Black people’s gifts to the nation.”
Even so, yet another great American deception for people of color…[was that] after the ideology and economics of Reaganism nullified what survived of Great Society progressivism … dominated by wealth outrageously maldistributed, health care and education unaffordable, paying jobs a memory, and middle-class impoverishment in a Great Recession … the electorate wagered … it could ignore race by affirming its nonimportance and thereby reinvigorate the vaunted exceptionalist narrative.”
Ever more information to examine made researching “The Stained Glass Window” a fraught business at times. To elude making his story theirs, some of Lewis’ long-lost cousins sought to ignore and obscure their connection.
Fortunately, his genealogist was expert about such subterfuge. Thanks to “The Stained Glass Window,” like it or not, today, it’s that much more difficult to ignore America’s “transracial” truths.
On March 13 at 7 p.m., Lewis will be discussing his new memoir with renowned historian Annette Gordon-Reed at 92NY in Manhattan. For more info and for tickets, visit 92ny.org.