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On April 2, we had the privilege of hosting the 6th annual McGaffey Lecture with speaker Nathan Connolly of Johns Hopkins University. The lecture, “Letters from the Ancestors: Family History and our Capitalist Future.” Draws from four generations of family archives, Connolly explores how Caribbean family histories reveal the lived realities of racialized capitalism, economic precarity and structural inequality. 

At the heart of the lecture was Connolly’s great-grandfather, William “Smiley” Connolly, a multilingual Caribbean intellectual. writer and activist whose life unfolded across the British Empire and the United States in the early twentieth century. Although widely respected in community and intellectual circle, Smiley Connolly never held a formal academic position, noting how many Black scholars and thinkers existed historically outside traditional institutions. By tracing Smiley’s life through scattered documents, letters, and family stories, Connolly demonstrates how personal archives can help to explain larger histories of colonialism, migration and economic struggle.  

Connolly described the process of reconstructing these histories as working through what he calls a “demented archive” a mix of official documents, fragmented letters, oral histories and family memories shaped by illness, migration and generational storytelling. These materials, he argued, reveal how families navigate systems that often deny them stability or recognition. 

As Connolly explained during the lecture, 

“What we need is not men who will make the world safe for democracy, but men who will make the world unsafe for autocracy.” 

The lecture highlighted several key themes, including how family archives can help us understand the development of racial capitalism, the ways working-class families navigated racism and financial instability and how family narrative, particularly those surrounding women, can obscure the structural causes of economic hardship. Connolly challenged audiences to rethink how inherited stories shape our understanding of responsibility, success and failure within capitalist systems. 

“Letters from the Ancestors” invited attendees to reflect on how personal histories intersect with larger political and economic structures. By connecting his family’s experiences in the Caribbean and the United States to contemporary inequalities, Connolly encouraged listeners to consider how we engage with institutions today and how the stories we tell about our past influence the futures we imagine.