The Slave Trader in My Family Tree

NOTE: This post was first published on Nov. 18, 2025. A lot of you are new here, and I know you haven’t read this yet. For those of you who have, I hope you’ll still give it another shot. Leave us a comment this time around! Welcome to Healing White History. I’m writing a book about confronting my ancestors’ legacy of white supremacy. This Substack is where I’m building that work – sharing research, conversations, and reckoning in real time. What you read here will shape the final manuscript. I thought I was honoring my family when I hung the poem by Charles Arden Russell, my great-great-great grandfather, in my den. My Mom found it in the family papers my Granny had preserved. Mom hired a calligrapher to copy it in elegant script, had it framed, and gave it to me as a gift. Years later, while researching our family history, I found two sentences buried on page 9 of Charley’s biography: He frequently took part of his fees for services in land, traded successfully in land, and invested his surplus earnings in negroes. Although he had few slaves working for him, he profited by hiring out the slaves to others who needed them . I read them again. And again. “Invested his surplus earnings in negroes.” I’d spent decades as an environmental lawyer, fighting corporations that treated regular folks as expendable. I’d convinced myself I was one of the good guys. And here was my ancestor – treating human beings as investments. I walked to the den. Stood in front of the framed poem. Read his words: “the line of right is the limit of a good man’s action.” What “line of right” was he thinking about when he invested in Black people? Looking at my own reflection in the glass. Years later I decided that, if Charley’s face was going to haunt me, I’d put it where everyone could see it. The photograph in my Substack avatar is him – not to honor him, but to face what he did. I’m inviting you to face it with me. Charles Arden Russell I hadn’t just inherited keepsakes – I’d inherited a story. A story that said Charley was a pioneer, a founder, a music lover, and a devoted father. A story that shrugged off what he did with his “surplus earnings.” Stories decide who gets honored and who gets erased. My family’s story honored Charley. It erased the people he bought and sold. Stories decide who gets honored and who gets erased. My family’s story honored Charley. It erased the people he bought and sold. And for years, I’d had that storyteller on my wall. Charles Arden Russell was smart, ambitious, and skilled. He helped expand the Texas frontier (at the expense of Native peoples), helped found Helena and Karnes County, practiced law, surveyed land, and built both furniture and homes. He was a devoted father who pushed for his children’s education – rare on the frontier. As a lawyer myself, I cherished the idea that I had followed in Charley’s footsteps. Until I came to grips with the fact that he bought, sold, and leased human beings. Charley grew up and was educated in New York, which abolished slavery in 1827 – when he was five years old. By the time he arrived in Texas at age 23, he had been exposed his entire life to the notion that slavery was wrong and should be illegal. Charley chose to settle his young family in the slave state of Texas anyway. He wasn’t only an enslaver and trader. He also helped lead the Knights of the Golden Circle – a secret paramilitary organization devoted to preserving and expanding slavery. As chair of the KGC’s military committee, Charley designed a “home police” to suppress “servile insurrection.” (I’ll share the receipts and deeper history in a later post.) In Texas and elsewhere, early organized policing grew from slave-patrol systems, and Charley’s “home police” sat in that lineage. When I connect those dots forward, the image that haunts me is of my great-great-great-grandfather in modern gear enforcing the same logic, with his knee on the neck of a Black man: control first, humanity last. Laws and institutions don’t appear from nowhere – they’re built from the foundation of a story. I’m writing this in 2025. Police violence against Black people remains an American epidemic. The systems Charley helped design – treating Black bodies as threats to control – echo in every viral video, every hashtag, every family’s grief. My maternal grandmother – “Happy” Wylie – loved family history. Our family is privileged to have so much preserved: biographies, letters, journals, artifacts – Charley’s included. His son Lyman (the biographer) was a devoted genealogist who traced lines back centuries, and later generations added more. Granny spent hundreds of hours sifting and arranging, and late in her life she made scrapbooks for each of her children, including my Mom, Nancy. My family has also celebrated Charles Arden Russell’s legacy by preserving his name. We’ve honored him by keeping his name alive – five generations of Russells, first names and middle names. By long tradition, my family has cherished and honored Charles Arden Russell, consciously or not. I’ve learned that love and harm can travel in the same family heirlooms. I’m writing a book, Healing White History: Courageous Conversations with My Ancestors , because I spent decades ignorant of how my family fit into slavery, genocide against Native people, and Jim Crow. I’m reckoning with that truth and asking what repair looks like now. Each week, this Substack will contain excerpts from the book, plus other related content. In this series, I hold conversations with my ancestors. Charley goes first. I’m going back to 1872 to confront Charley. I’m going to ask him to defend buying and selling human beings. I’m going to challenge his belief in the false story of white superiority. I’m going to try to understand how the man my grandmother celebrated was also the man whose story I’m dismantling. Thanks so much to everyone for reading. Welcome to the adventure! I really hope you’ll stay with me so we can explore together ways to heal white history and work toward repair. Please subscribe to follow the arc: truth → healing → transformation & repair This is white people’s work. I’m doing mine. Join the conversation : Drop a comment below: Have you ever discovered something in your family papers that made you rethink everything? What was it? What would you ask your ancestors? I read and respond to every comment. Leave a comment