Journalist Lee Hawkins finds freedom in exploring traumatic family history
Jose Zepeda/Illinois Public Media and Image courtesy of HarperCollins Publishers
Lee Hawkins is a journalist, who has spent most of his career at The Wall Street Journal, where he was on a team that was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for a series on the Tulsa race massacre in 1921.More recently, he turned his journalistic expertise on his own family story, resulting in the new book: “I Am Nobody’s Slave: How Uncovering My Family’s History Set Me Free.”
It’s a memoir that explores 400 years of family history through enslavement, the Jim Crow era, and the intergenerational trauma that followed. It argues that some of the core experiences of contemporary Black Americans have been shaped by what their ancestors experienced over the generations. Hawkins will be appearing at Barnes & Nobles in Champaign tonight.
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Author, "I Am Nobody’s Slave: How Uncovering My Family’s History Set Me Free"
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