May 27, 2026
Ben Jealous
Stories this photo appears in:
The Shackles Our Founders Warned Us About
My grandmother was born in 1916 on the same red Virginia ground where her grandfather was born enslaved. She lived to one hundred and five. She carried the weight of what her family had been to my family, and what her family had been to itself, the way you carry a stone you cannot put down. When she died, the stone passed to me.