In the 1930s, while her husband, Elijah Muhammad, was imprisoned, Clara Poole (later known as Clara Muhammad) quietly stepped into leadership. She wasn’t given a title. She didn’t stand at a pulpit. But she taught the children, organized the women, and held the Nation of Islam together. In a movement that promised both protection and patriarchy, Clara found a way to lead from within. Her story is not unique. Across the early years of the Nation of Islam, Black women built schools, sustained families, and shaped theology, often behind the scenes, always at the center. They navigated a religious world that asked them to submit, even as it relied on their strength.

In The Promise of Patriarchy, historian Ula Y. Taylor uncovers the lives of these women, showing how they negotiated faith, family, and gendered expectations to shape a movement that would transform Black religious and political life in America. Today, Ula joins us to talk about how power moves through families, how women lead in spaces that don’t always recognize their leadership, and how history remembers (or forgets) them.

In a quiet attic in New York, Blanche Moses carefully preserved two miniature ivory portraits. She believed they depicted her noble Jewish ancestors, that is to say, in the best light possible: refined, European, and elite. For Blanche, these portraits were more than heirlooms. They were proof of belonging, of status, of a family history that fit neatly into the story she had always been told.

But when historian Laura Arnold Leibman followed the trail, she uncovered a very different past. The portraits were not of European aristocrats, but of Sarah and Isaac Brandon, siblings born into slavery in Barbados. They would later become free, wealthy, and Jewish in New York, navigating a world where race, religion, and class collided in complex and often hidden ways.

In Once We Were Slaves, Leibman traces the extraordinary journey of the Brandon family, revealing how identity is not fixed but forged, through migration, reinvention, and the stories families choose to tell. Today, Laura joins us to explore how family history can challenge the narratives we inherit and reshape our understanding of who we are and where we come from.

In the red clay fields of Georgia, a man named Solicitor rose before dawn to tend the land he did not own. He was a sharecropper, a laborer, and a father. His name was passed down along with stories of endurance and pride. Generations later, his great-granddaughter, Blair Kelley, would begin her book Black Folk with his story, grounding the history of the Black working class in the life of one man whose labor helped build a world.

Elsewhere in the United States, Kellie Carter Jackson was tracing her own family’s legacy, stories of resistance, of quiet defiance, of choosing dignity in the face of oppression. In We Refuse, she writes not just about protest marches and speeches, but about the everyday acts of refusal that shaped Black life and freedom.

For both historians, family history is more than inspiration. It is method. It is archive. It is truth-telling. Today, Blair Kelley and Kellie Carter Jackson join us to talk about how personal memory becomes political and social history.

Welcome to Reunion, a podcast about how family history helps us understand the past and why it still matters today. This series is sponsored by the Center for Family History and Genealogy and the Family History Program at Brigham Young University, which offers the world's only undergraduate degree in family history. I’m Joey Stuart, and I’m here with my cohost and colleague Christopher Jones. We’re both assistant professors of history and faculty in BYU’s Family History Program.

SHOWNOTES:

Every two weeks, we talk with scholars, educators, and storytellers who use family history to explore big questions about history, kinship, and identity. Studying families helps us see what mattered most to people in the past and how those values shaped the world we live in now.

Family history is more than names and dates. It is a way to explore memory, emotion, power, and connection. It gives historians a flexible method for understanding everything from slavery and migration to religious conversion and cultural memory.

This is Reunion. We’re glad you’re here.