Lacretia Johnson Flash is swirling in a stew of emotions stirred up in the four months since a Reuters reporter told her that the ancestors of U.S. Rep. Brett Guthrie (R-Ky.) enslaved her great-great-grandparents.

That wasn't all. As conversations with reporter Nicholas P. Brown continued, Flash learned how eminent domain, the right of a government to take private property for public use, had destroyed several of her family's businesses in Tennessee. The interstate highway partly responsible for the demise helped grow a company Guthrie's father started, the reporter wrote.

Brown's report, published this week, traces the two families through generations to explore how the descendants of enslavers and those who were enslaved have fared since emancipation. It's part of Reuters' series on slavery and America's political elite, which found that 100 members of the U.S. Congress, five living presidents, two U.S. Supreme Court justices and 11 governors have direct ancestors who enslaved Black people.



In addition to the Reuters story, Flash was featured in an NBC Nightly News piece on Wednesday. The network flew her to Tennessee to film the segment.
"So it's been a whirlwind over here," Flash told Seven Days on Friday. "I'm very introverted. I'm very quiet. I come from farmers and teachers."

Flash, who splits her time between Boston and Burlington, worked at the University of Vermont for nearly 15 years, most recently as a senior adviser and chief of staff in human resources. About six years ago, she took a job at Berklee College of Music, the Boston performing arts college, where she now serves as senior vice president of diversity, equity and inclusion.

News about the history of her family, the Craigs, "came out of nowhere," she said, "so it's really taken me by surprise." Flash had known for 22 years that her great-great-grandparents had been enslaved, but she did not know of the link to Guthrie, an eight-term member of Congress. He did not agree to be interviewed by Reuters or NBC.

Flash has not talked to him, either, though she said she is open to a private conversation. "I wouldn't want it to become a spectacle or photo op," she said. "I would just want to know how he's making sense of this. How is this shaping his decisions? What his rhetoric is, has anything changed as a result of learning these things about his family?"
"I do not hold him responsible for what his ancestors have done," she said, "but I hold all of us responsible for what we do with that information."

Flash is wrestling with the questions her history has raised. "How wealth is built in this country and passed down," she said. "Where is there political influence to make policy decisions? And who benefits from those decisions? And who pays the costs for those decisions? And who even gets to make those decisions?

"You know, if I were to ever have an opportunity to talk with Brett Guthrie, how would we be able to — or could we — find a way forward that is kind of modeling for this country? How do the descendants reconcile this very painful history of slavery? And all the wealth that comes, generationally, beyond that?"

The story has reiterated for Flash the importance of land and community. The Tennessee Valley Authority used eminent domain to buy, for a virtually nonnegotiable price, 42 acres of Craig-family farmland. The same power claimed the grocery store, ice cream parlor, restaurant and church that Flash's great-aunt owned in a Black neighborhood in Nashville.

Those are "places of feeding and nourishing the community, both in body as well as spirit," Flash said. "I just feel that it's extraordinary that that's what was taken from not only her personally but from that community."