Uncle George and Me: Two Southern Families Confront a Shared Legacy of Slavery

by Bill Sizemore

Overview

In Uncle George and Me, author Bill Sizemore tells the story of his slave-owning Virginia ancestors, their slaves, and those slaves’ descendants—a story that lay buried by a century of denial and historical amnesia. Its threads run through the Civil War, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, the Great Migration, the struggle for civil rights, and the crippling legacy of slavery that still plagues the nation today. In microcosm, it is the story of Virginia and the South. In telling it, Sizemore hopes to advance an essential, if painful, national conversation about race.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781947860100
Publisher:	Brandylane Publishers, Incorporated
Publication date:	09/05/2018
Pages:	158
Sales rank:	1,131,088
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.43(d)

About the Author

Bill Sizemore grew up in segregated small-town Virginia and spent forty-three years as a journalist, with most of that time spent at the Virginian-Pilot, the state's largest newspaper, where he was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2007. He wrote about topics as varied as state government and politics, televangelist Pat Robertson, the private military company Blackwater, and Virginia's prison-building boom. He has also written for The Associated Press, Ms. magazine, and Virginia Quarterly Review. Since his retirement in 2014, he has focused on his two highest priorities: playing with his grandchildren and writing books. He lives in Williamsburg, Virginia.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction
2. The Land of Eden
3. Original Sin
4. The Lost Cause
5. Uncle George
6. The Fragility of Freedom
7. The Great Migration
8. Rose and Charles
9. Daffodil and Me
10. Howard
11. Truth and Reconciliation

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Endnotes

Editorial Reviews

★ 07/23/2018
A man comes to terms with his family’s slave-owning past in this probing account. Journalist Sizemore was horrified to learn from a quick check of the 1860 United States census that his great-great-great grandfather, Daniel Sizemore of Mecklenburg County, Va., had owned 16 slaves, and he became obsessed with learning all he could about them and their descendants. Convinced that “the story of race is the story of America,” he pored over government documents to learn about the men and women who took the Sizemore name after Emancipation, sought them out, and had many conversations with 91-year-old “Uncle George” Sizemore, whose father was born a slave just before the Civil War. By tracing the experiences of these black Sizemores over a century and a half, through slavery, freedom, Jim Crow, the Great Migration, and the civil rights movement, and contrasting their lives with those of several generations of his own family, Sizemore presents “the story of American apartheid in microcosm.” While he has clearly relished getting to know several generations of African-American Sizemores, his main aim is to emphasize the immense debt that he sees white Americans as owing African-Americans, who helped build the nation but have received little or no reward for their labors. This short but powerful book represents the attempts of one ordinary American to bridge historic and contemporary racial divides, and it deserves a wide readership; it is a labor of love in the truest sense. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

“In Uncle George and Me, Bill Sizemore has focused his well-honed investigative skills on his own family—and those of the slaves they once owned. The result is a compelling, honest, and sometimes heartbreaking narrative that illuminates the fraught and fragile ties that yoke those on both sides of America’s founding racial divide.”

~ Margaret Edds, author of We Face the Dawn: Oliver Hill, Spottswood Robinson, and the Legal Team That Dismantled Jim Crow

“Bill Sizemore brings a keen mind, an eloquent pen and a gentle but courageous heart to this painful, clear-eyed tale of his family’s—and our nation’s—shameful past.”

~ Karen Branan, author of The Family Tree: A Lynching in Georgia

From the Publisher