The journalist arrived on a bright autumn afternoon nearly two years after the anniversary celebration, a thoughtful, careful young woman named Priya Okafor who’d been commissioned to write a retrospective piece on the Elena Ashford Foundation’s first quarter-century of work, and who had requested, with evident nervousness, the rare privilege of interviewing Lucien directly about the foundation’s origins.

“I understand this touches on considerably personal family history,” she said, settling into the same study that had witnessed so much of the family’s difficult, hopeful past, notebook and recorder both arranged carefully on the small table between them. “Please tell me if any of my questions cross a line you’d rather...