Author uncovers 400 years of family's slave history to understand recent traumas

Former Wall Street Journal reporter Lee Hawkins' memoir, "I Am Nobody's Slave: How Uncovering My Family's History Set Me Free," explores the lingering effects of enslavement and Jim Crow on his family today.

Hawkins was a 2022 Pulitzer Prize finalist for his role as the lead reporter on a series about the Tulsa Massacre of 1921 at the Wall Street Journal.

I Am Nobody's Slave tells the story of a Black family's pursuit of the American Dream amid systemic racism and racial violence.

ABC News sat down with Hawkins as he explained how trauma from enslavement influenced each generation.

ABC NEWS: "Prime" will highlight stories during Black History Month that not only honor the past, but challenge us to rethink the present. Our next guest, Lee Hawkins, was a 2022 Pulitzer Prize finalist as lead reporter for the Wall Street Journal series on the Tulsa Massacre of 1921.

He's now written an investigative memoir titled, "I Am Nobody's Slave How Uncovering My Family's History Set Me Free," Uncovering how traumas during enslavement and Jim Crow still permeate through his family's life today. Lee Hawkins kind enough to join us in studio. So good to have you.

LEE HAWKINS: Good to see you.

ABC NEWS: So give us a sense of how these family traumas, as you talk about, can go unspoken yet still be passed down and and how that was actually applicable in your own family? 

HAWKINS: My father was raised in Greenville, Alabama; in 1948 he was born. And I knew that he had been born into Jim Crow, but he had never really talked about his experiences there. When I was a kid he had nightmares sometimes, and I would ask him in the morning what he was dreaming about, and he would say, "Alabama."

I was a kid in Minnesota and I had nothing, no reason to think that he would want to take us back there, but he never wanted to. And I think that what it taught me, Linsey, was that I needed to investigate my family's story to find out why there were so many things held over from the past. For instance, things like the strict use of the belt and different things about not being able to make mistakes and being very hyper cautious and aware for us and fearful for us. And I didn't know what it was based on. So I went 400 years back into my family history to find out.

ABC NEWS: You've traced your DNA. You said 20% goes back to a white family. How is that both hurtful and helpful at the same time?

HAWKINS: Well, I think it's hurtful because those are, that's just a truth of what happened to our matriarchs. And also, we have a lot to be proud of in our country.

But some of the dark moments are just hard to visit. But I think the powerful thing was when I reached out to my cousins, who are on the other side of slavery, they were very open to actually doing this journey with me, and they opened up their archives and it turned out that one of the people who was related to me was a guy who I've known for 30 years, who I used to work with, in one of my first jobs as a cub reporter.

And he helped me by introducing me to the family historian and together we did this research and we're friends. We're friends today and we feel like family because we can't change the past, but we can change the present and shape the future.

ABC NEWS: When we're talking about the past, it does feel like, in particular, now with this anti-DEI sentiment that we're starting to see throughout the government and touching with schools and beyond that, there is, for some people, a difficulty in separating the history of the past with the shame of it; that you almost have to ignore it or we're not going to talk about that because there's some kind of shame that's attached to that. How can we do both at the same time?

HAWKINS: Well, I think we can learn to be better American citizens and more civic-minded and understanding that we have to adopt a more complicated and honest and complex form of patriotism and expect that we're going to have critical conversations and dialog and not shy away from that and understand that the dark parts of our American story are things that we have to confront.

But the censorship that we're seeing in schools and everything, it hurts our children. And I think it hurts white children the most because they're going into a world that is not homogeneous and that is different than the world that their grandparents were in. It's also a lot more competitive, right?

And, so, if you believed that there was a meritocracy the whole time from 1619 to 1964, there's a rude awakening that our children are going into. And I think that informs a lot of the resentment that we're seeing towards the DEI, because equality is starting to feel like oppression because people were lied to from the beginning about what the country was and what the country wasn't.

ABC NEWS: Equality is starting to feel like oppression. Deep. Lee Hawkins, we thank you so much for your time. Really appreciate your insight. I want to let our viewers know Lee Hawkins' page-turner, "I Am Nobody's Slave: How Uncovering My Family's History Set Me Free," is available right now.