Lesie Staintton says her family enslaved hundreds and reveals painful new findings in Scarlet

Lesie Staintton, the author of Scarlet, Slavery's Enduring Legacy in an American Family, told host Judy Davidson on The Gray Zone that archival research into her family records uncovered "a truth that can't go back underground anymore." The book, published in 2025 (publisher named in the interview), traces how Staintton's ancestors owned roughly 400 people and documents violent and exploitative practices linked to that legacy.

Staintton said she inherited boxes of family letters and records from her grandmother and later donated them to the Georgia Historical Society so descendants and scholars could access them. "I gave it all to the Georgia Historical Society," she said, describing the transfer as part of making the record available to communities affected by her family's history.

The author recounted several specific discoveries. She described a childhood memory of her grandmother's "nightmare" — a lingering fear that Staintton later connected, through newspaper reporting and trial transcripts, to local racial violence and a 1901 execution in Brunswick, Georgia. "It was chilling," Staintton said of the trial records she located, which she said helped make sense of the memory.

Staintton also described research about the Wanderer, a vessel that illegally transported enslaved Africans to the U.S. in 1858. She said one ancestor purchased an African man for approximately $1,500, initially made him an overseer and later had him rented out to other enslavers; Staintton described renting the man out "to produce children" as part of a broader pattern in which enslavers sought to grow enslaved populations after the transatlantic trade was banned. "They forced this African man to rape enslaved women in order to produce children," she said, framing the practice as part of the reproductive exploitation on some plantations.

Staintton said confronting these facts required difficult conversations with living descendants. She described meeting descendants of enslaved people from her family's plantations and developing relationships over roughly 15 years, including sharing records and, she said, returning any personal income she earned from the book to those families as a form of reparation.

The conversation also touched on the challenges of publishing such a book. Staintton said timing and larger national reckonings around race affected interest from publishers: "After George Floyd was killed... there was this brief moment when the cultural life of the country was deeply involved," she said, and that created complications for a white author writing about slavery.

Davidson closed the episode by thanking Westford Community Access Television for production support and directing listeners to the show notes for contact information and further reading.

The Gray Zone interview gives listeners a summary of Staintton's book, the archival trail that produced her findings and the reparative steps she says she has taken. Staintton said the work is intended both to acknowledge the harm done by her family and to provide material that descendants and researchers can use to pursue their own histories.

The episode ends with information for listeners to find Staintton's book and further resources in the show notes.