Reclaiming a Legacy

The book sheds light on the enduring consequences of slavery and systemic racism.

When Lee Hawkins ’01 was young, he witnessed his father’s rage in response to wrongdoing. Thirty years later, Hawkins recognizes it as a product of the fear and violence that have followed his family for generations. In I Am Nobody’s Slave: How Uncovering My Family’s History Set Me Free, Hawkins identifies the brutality and oppression imposed upon each generation of his family and their undeterred pursuit of the American dream.

As a child in suburban Minnesota, Hawkins knew about the hardships his father faced growing up in Jim Crow–era Alabama. But his research uncovered the violent deaths that occurred in every generation of his family since slavery, including the murder of his great-grandfather when his grandmother was just nine years old. Using genetic testing and historical data, he saw how systemic racism and chronic stress shortened the lives of his ancestors, how the weight of these collective tragedies was passed down, and how his family forged a life in America despite it.

“It was really the ancestors, people who are now ancestors who passed away after giving these interviews, that pushed me along and said it’s important for you to do this,” Hawkins told Minnesota Public Radio in May 2024. “And mainly because of [my great-grandfather] and the fact that he was murdered 100 years ago … by a white man who was never brought to justice. Now I’m a journalist, and I have the power to tell this story.”

Hawkins is also the creator of What Happened in Alabama?, a limited-series podcast in which he examines the intergenerational effects of slavery in his family and his efforts to heal from them. He spent nearly two decades with the Wall Street Journal, where he was most recently a news editor and on-camera reporter. In 2022, he was a Pulitzer Prize finalist as the lead reporter on a story series about the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921.

Published in the Spring 2025 issue