In this episode, we discuss Scarlett: Slavery’s Enduring Legacy in an American Family, a work of creative nonfiction that traces one white family’s deep ties to slavery on Georgia’s coast. By linking plantation history to present-day violence in Brunswick, the book shows how the legacy of slavery continues to shape life in Georgia today.

Scarlett: Slavery’s Enduring Legacy in an American Family by Leslie Stainton

Credit: Potomac Books

 

This episode focuses on Scarlett: Slavery’s Enduring Legacy in an American Family, written by Leslie Stainton, who traces her own family’s rise as powerful slaveholders along Georgia’s coast. Using letters, genealogical research, and plantation records preserved over generations, Stainton reconstructs how the Scarlett family accumulated wealth and status through the forced labor of hundreds of enslaved people.

What makes the book especially resonant is how it brings that history into the present. Stainton connects land once owned by her family to the 2020 killing of Ahmaud Arbery in Brunswick, revealing how the language and logic of “protecting our homes” has echoed from antebellum slave patrols into modern acts of racial violence. The book challenges listeners to see these events not as isolated tragedies, but as part of a longer historical continuum.

Throughout the conversation, we examine how Scarlett dismantles myths popularized by Gone with the Wind, interrogates inherited silence within white families, and raises difficult questions about responsibility, memory, and repair. The episode explores what it means to tell the truth about family history, and why doing so matters for understanding Georgia today.