Lisa Sharon Harper – Her Story Speaks

Leading Christian activist, author and founder of the consulting group Freedom Road, Lisa Sharon Harper has spent three decades researching ten generations of her family history through DNA research, oral histories, interviews and genealogy. In her new book, Fortune: How Race Broke My Family and the World—and How to Repair It All, Harper draws on her lifelong journey to know her family’s history to recover the beauty of her heritage, expose the brokenness that race has wrought in America, and cast a vision for collective repair.

Fortune, the name of Harper’s first non-indigenous ancestor born on American soil, bore the brunt of the nation’s first race, gender and citizenship laws. As Harper traces her family’s story through succeeding generations, she shows how American ideas, customs, and laws robbed her ancestors—and the ancestors of so many others—of their humanity and flourishing.

In our conversation and her new book, Harper lights a path through national and religious history, and clarifies exactly how and when the world broke and shows the way to redemption for us all.