Steve Nathans-Kelly
One wrenching episode in the book that’s especially indicative of how the walls were closing in occurs shortly after the Atlanta Race riot in 1906 when your grandfather disinters his wife from a white cemetery in Atlanta and moves her to a Black one. Is this a part of your family history that was known to you before you started this project?
David Levering Lewis
No, actually not. My grandmother is interred today at Southview Cemetery, an African-American cemetery. But I remembered that the tombstone indicated that she had been in place there since 1906. I said, “Well, 1906 doesn’t make sense because she died five years earlier.” Then I inquired at the now-white cemetery, and they had evidence of her presence, but they couldn’t be quite clear when she left or under what circumstance. She had been interred in the white cemetery in 1901, which at that point was under the empire of Reconstruction, as it were, and so certain people [of color] had the option of burial there. It became quite clear to me that by 1906, my grandfather had realized that, as a man of color—even though he too had a kind of no-nation-ness about him—he couldn’t be buried next to her. Today, both cemeteries are clearer about what happened to our ancestor as a result of my inquiries.
Steve Nathans-Kelly
Another incident that was eye-opening for me was your account of the labor struggle at Dunbar High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, in the 1940s when your father was principal. Teachers at the Black high school were battling for pay equal to teachers at the city’s white high school and Thurgood Marshall argued their case. Everyone knows the story of the integration of Little Rock’s Central High in 1958, but we rarely if ever hear about the years of Black activism before Brown v. Board of Education to enforce the “equal” side of “separate but equal.”
David Levering Lewis
I thought that one of the benefits of the book might be if, in that period of incomplete and inconclusive citizenship, [it asked], what happened? We are waiting for the sit-ins. We’re waiting for the students to wake up. We’re waiting for the civil rights history that we know. But in all those years, from 1896 until the 1950s, people went about their business, and some of them very successfully. They held things together and they weren’t insignificant at critical moments when votes happened and issues were decided. We were still there, as doctors, as lawyers, as members of the Boulé, that exclusive professional group of successful men. That’s also a story, and I hope that our Ph.D.s will go back and rediscover that long moment of persistence.