As part of our ongoing Summer of Social Justice programming, author Henry Wiencek discusses his book The Hairstons: An American Family in Black and White. Q&A to follow.
The Hairstons tells the extraordinary story of an extended family's complex and compelling journey from slavery time until today. The white Hairstons once owned a network of plantations stretching from Virginia to Mississippi; and they may have held more people in slavery than any other family in the South. That empire has all but vanished. From old documents and oral histories, the author pieced together the rise of the enslaved and their descendants, who struggled to overcome a legacy of legal and psychological servitude. A vast panorama of history unfolds in a narrative epic in scale, with no easy answers to the struggles the family, and the country, continue to endure.
Henry Wiencek is an American journalist, historian and editor whose work has encompassed historically significant architecture, the Founding Fathers, various topics relating to slavery, and the Lego company. In 1999, The Hairstons: An American Family in Black and White won the National Book Critics Circle Award for biography.
