Book & Author: I Am Nobody’s Slave: Uncovering the Past, Freeing the Future | An Exclusive Evening with Lee Hawkins and Jonathan Eig

In an Alabama courthouse archive, 2022 Pulitzer Prize finalist Lee Hawkins found the names of his own ancestors listed as property. The discovery set him on a five-generation investigation—one that culminated in I Am Nobody’s Slave, a memoir that is both personal and national in its stakes. 

Hawkins traces his family’s Black roots in slavery and his white roots in the enslaver line—including the enslaver who owned his great-great-grandmother and from whom he also descends. The son of a Jim Crow survivor, he follows what that inherited history does inside a family: the silence, fear, discipline, damage—and the possibility of repair. The book speaks to Black American descendants of enslavement and Jim Crow, and to readers of every background whose families have lived through state-imposed atrocities. Hawkins argues that the principles of nonviolent social change belong not only in movements, but in families and communities as a path toward intergenerational healing. 

For this exclusive program, Hawkins will be joined by Jonathan Eig, the 2024 Pulitzer Prize winner for King: A Life, his landmark biography of Martin Luther King Jr. A Chicago native and one of the most respected historical writers of his generation, Eig brings rigor, clarity, and deep knowledge of how private lives become public history. 

Together, they will discuss how the past asserts itself in the present, how family stories reshape national memory, and what it takes—for individuals and a country—to tell the truth and move forward. 

Free to the public. Reservations required.