His DNA Solved A Century-Old Jailhouse Rape. The Victim: His Grandmother.

As a black teenager in Compton, California, in the 1970s, Hiram Johnson began to wonder about his father’s fine curly hair, and the light-brown skin that strangers sometimes thought was white.

Hiram knew only a few things about his father’s childhood. Fred Johnson was raised in Jackson, Mississippi, by his mother, Bernice. Fred said that Bernice was a “beautiful black woman,” but he never said a word about his father. All Hiram knew was that his grandfather probably wasn’t black.

He often pestered his dad for more details. Do we have a mixed heritage? Who was this man? What did your mom ever say about it? But Fred wouldn’t budge.

Over the next three decades, Hiram got married, had two daughters, and went into law enforcement, climbing the ranks at the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. On a visit to Fred’s house one day in 2008, Hiram asked the usual questions about their roots. This time, the 79-year-old finally opened up.

Fred said his mother, Bernice, had been convicted of killing a neighbor and served two years in the infamous Mississippi State Penitentiary, better known as Parchman Farm. She gave birth to him shortly after her release. So his father could have been anyone — another inmate, a guard, the warden, even the governor.

Hiram was floored. That day, he launched what would turn into a decadelong hunt to identify his grandfather. After years of poring over state archives, court transcripts, and prison records, a genetic test last year finally gave him a definitive answer.

Like millions of Americans mailing tubes of spit off to DNA testing companies, Hiram followed his genetic results to distant cousins and discomfiting family secrets. But unlike most of today’s amateur genealogists, Hiram also dug up evidence of two horrific crimes: one committed by his grandmother, the other by his grandfather.

Both were deeply entangled in the racism and sexism of the 1920s American South. Both caused trauma that soaked down through generations. That pain, in subtle but real ways, is still spreading today.

Read more at BuzzFeed News, June 2019.