A historian of race descended from slaveholders confronts his own family’s legacy

There is a conversation about race that white families are just not having. This is mine.

I am a historian of race and labor in the American South. I study slavery and its aftermaths for working people—particularly African Americans—and the ways in which those in power—usually wealthy whites—exploited and abused them.

As part of a personal project, I recently began going through my family’s historical papers. I had initially asked for the papers when, at a recent holiday party, one of my friends told me that his great-great-grandfather had been on Sherman’s march. Mine, I replied, had died in 1865 fighting Sherman. In the awkward silence that followed, I conceded, “they had it coming.” I meant it. You cannot exploit and abuse millions of people for profit without consequences.

That conversation reminded me of the ominous-looking box that held miscellaneous documents from my family’s past. Having advised other families to donate their historical collections to archives, it seemed only right that I should find an appropriate home for my own. With permission from my father, I started cataloging our papers with the goal of eventually donating it to an archive in Georgia.

Seeing that box again reminded me of the family lore, passed down from my grandparents, that animated my childhood. Their stories revolved, like clockwork, around themes of extreme poverty, unscrupulous Yankees, and victimized white Southerners. Desperate for food after the war, my great-grandfather had apparently killed their last remaining cow and brought the meat in a wheelbarrow to share with neighbors. Decades later, one of those families paid an artist to paint my father’s portrait. These were, as the story went, hard-working victims of an unnecessary poverty brought on by greedy Northerners.

Absent from this family lore, though, was any mention of enslaved men and women, their struggles, or my ancestors’ crimes against them. ...