By excavating generations of family trauma, Lee Hawkins found a way to unlock his own story

When Lee Hawkins was a boy, the unending trauma of his family’s past first showed up in the form of a voice crying out in the night. It was the sound of his father wrestling through another nightmare, prompting young Lee to ask him in the morning what he was dreaming about.

“Alabama,” his father replied.

Hawkins didn’t know what the cryptic response meant at the time. But it prompted a question — “What happened in Alabama?” — that would eventually lead him on a years-long journalistic archaeology of his family’s traumatic history and how it shaped his own life, culminating in a podcast and his recently published book, “I Am Nobody’s Slave: How Uncovering My Family’s History Set Me Free.” 

His deep research and oral history into his family’s past uncovered a harrowing pattern of racial violence, childhood trauma and white murderers never brought to justice. “I found out in the book that in every generation since 1837, I've had a murder in my family, including my father's father and also both of my grandparents’ fathers were murdered, when they were children,” Hawkins told Fellows while delivering the keynote address at the 2025 National Fellowship in Los Angeles this week. (Hawkins’ newly published book started as his project for the 2018 National Fellowship.)

“Their crime was entrepreneurship and land ownership, which is, once again, a very recurring theme. And so I knew that my father had dealt with trauma as a child, but I didn't understand the magnitude of that trauma, the extent to which it was tied to generations of grief” stemming from the toxic legacy of Jim Crow and slavery. 

The family’s legacy of murdered fathers and deep grief would manifest in everything from how parents physically disciplined their children to the intense fear that sprang up when their kids ran into conflict with children from white families. 

Hawkins estimates he was beaten with a belt over a 100 times growing up. “Both of my parents whipped me with inexplicable anger,” he says in one podcast episode. “You didn’t always know when their tempers would be triggered, but when they were, you couldn’t forget it.”

Growing up in Maplewood, Minnesota, Hawkins was far from alone: “(T)he belt was a very prominent part of my childhood, and many of the Black children around me, all my friends, as a matter of fact, sometimes we joked about it.” He considered such beatings part of his heritage when he was younger, but that view shifted in complex ways as he grew older. 

“Today, I do consider it abuse, but that comes with a very, very nuanced interpretation that is inextricably tied to American history and the socialization that shaped that,” he said.

Hawkins connects the violence and whipping inflicted on his ancestors, and his own experience of being beaten. In his telling, the hurt is passed down, until the cycle can be broken. For Hawkins, this book, and the difficult conversations with his father that helped him understand and heal from those experiences, are his valiant attempt to break that cycle.

“There was a very strong tie that I was able to make … that helped me understand how corporal punishment and the use of the belt was cemented into our family socialization, and the fear and the hyper-vigilance attitudes that people had to adopt with their children, in particular, in order to keep their children safe.”

Taking those early memories of being belted by his father and seeing them as the product of a long history of internalized racial violence and trauma is central to Hawkins’ practice of reading history and the generational transfer of trauma into the contours of the present. His book is less preoccupied with the direct experience of racism and more interested in the ways in which racism and violence become internalized by those subjected to it. 

“(O)ne of the most controversial aspects of this book is that it does not focus disproportionately on the external threat of racism to my family,” he said. “It talks a lot about internalized racism and the way that we internalize the rules of white supremacy, and how the rules of white supremacy flowed into my home as a kid, because we were in this Scandinavian neighborhood, raised by a father who was raised under Jim Crow and was in a very hyper-segregated community for most of his life.” 

That legacy of racial violence shaped how Hawkins’ parents responded to what might otherwise seem like harmless childhood encounters. When Hawkins got into an argument with a white girl he had a crush on and said something inopportune about her mother, the girl’s father called the Hawkins home to voice his displeasure. After the call, Hawkins’ father was livid. Only later did Hawkins fully grasp how his father’s own life experience had taught him to fear such conflicts as if his life depended on it — it often did. 

“My dad went into this whole thing about how her dad could come and kill the whole family, and that we could all be hung from trees and crosses could be burned on our lawns, because I upset this white girl,” Hawkins said. “I was 11 or 12 at the time, and I had no comprehension of any of that.” 

Hawkins is careful to avoid describing his own traumas and adversity in fatalistic ways, instead emphasizing the ways in which they can be offset by positive experiences and relationships and nurturing communities. These are crucial in promoting resilience and buffering the worst effects of adversity, according to early childhood researchers. That emphasis on resilience also opens space for crafting an identity over time that is not simply a product of your history, of what happened to you. 

“(W)hen I talk about childhood trauma, it’s critical again to know that it is not a death sentence,” Hawkins told fellows. “There were many things that I did go through, but I also had a very, very, very supportive and loving community, the Rondo community in Minnesota.”