Scalawag

A White Southerner's Journey through Segregation to Human Rights Activism

Edward H. Peeples, Nancy MacLean, Nancy MacLean

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780813935409
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Scalawag tells the surprising story of a white working-class boy who became an unlikely civil rights activist. Born in 1935 in Richmond, where he was sent to segregated churches and schools, Ed Peeples was taught the ethos and lore of white supremacy by every adult in his young life. That message came with an equally cruel one—that, as the child of a wage-earning single mother, he was destined for failure.

But by age nineteen Peeples became what the whites in his world called a "traitor to the race." Pushed by a lone teacher to think critically, Peeples found his way to the black freedom struggle and began a long life of activism. He challenged racism in his U.S. Navy unit and engaged in sit-ins and community organizing. Later, as a university professor, he agitated for good jobs, health care, and decent housing for all, pushed for the creation of African American studies courses at his university, and worked toward equal treatment for women, prison reform, and more. Peeples did most of his human rights work in his native Virginia, and his story reveals how institutional racism pervaded the Upper South as much as the Deep South.

Covering fifty years' participation in the long civil rights movement, Peeples's gripping story brings to life an unsung activist culture to which countless forgotten individuals contributed, over time expanding their commitment from civil rights to other causes. This engrossing, witty tale of escape from what once seemed certain fate invites readers to reflect on how moral courage can transform a life.

PART ONE

Learning Whiteness

1

The Arrival of Another Birthright Segregationist

MY MOTHER PICKED a helluva day for me to arrive on this earth: April 20, 1935, the same birthday as Adolf Hitler, who at that very moment was engaged in the violent creation of his Aryan empire. This proved to be a strange coincidence, because I contended all my adult life with some of the ideas that Hitler and the German Nazi regime had borrowed from America’s white supremacist ideology, especially as it was applied in my native Virginia.

One such dose of poison came to the Old Dominion from the eugenics movement. In 1922 Dr. H. H. Laughlin, a preacher’s son from Iowa, published a model sterilization law known as the Eugenical Sterilization Act, which he promulgated all across the country as a standard for maintaining “racial integrity” to keep America’s white population “pure.” In 1924 Laughlin was asked by the Virginia General Assembly to help them draft their own Racial Integrity Act, which defined who was “white,” made it illegal for whites to marry outside their race, and declared it a felony to fail to report one’s “correct” officially designated race on state documents. An accompanying law, the Virginia Eugenical Sterilization Act, unleashed state-imposed sterilization on thousands of poor whites, blacks, and others presumed to be mentally or physically defective by the Commonwealth’s ruling whites. In a troubling similarity, after gaining power in Germany in 1933, the Nazi Party used Harry Laughlin’s model act to draft its own “Law for Protection against Genetically Defective Off spring.” The Nazis also looked with interest on my state’s racial laws and the eugenics program initiated by Dr. Walter Ashby Plecker, Virginia’s first vital statistics registrar. *

So white supremacists had already convinced Virginia’s voting public of their ideological justification for segregation— it was just “what everybody knew”— when I let out my very first screech. No one who heard it that day could have predicted that the evils promoted by racial supremacists like Dr. Plecker and Adolf Hitler would become the central preoccupation in the life of this white boy delivered at the segregated St. Luke’s Hospital in Richmond.

AT THE TIME of my birth my father, Edward Harden Peeples IV, was the grocery clerk and butcher in a one-clerk store on Hull Street owned by the Norfolk-based Pender Grocery Company.

My father got the job because a relative was in management there. While Pender was a large grocery chain covering much of Virginia, its stores were all very small, as supermarkets had not yet been introduced in our part of the country. In this store around the corner from my first home on Bainbridge Street, my father stood behind the counter and fetched each item a shopper requested from the floor-to-ceiling shelves behind him.

In the late thirties, about the time I was three, my father got a promotion and we moved to Charlottesville. In the middle of the Great Depression, we were very lucky that my father had landed a coveted job as a supervisor of several one-and two-clerk Pender stores scattered up and down the Valley of Virginia. Shortly thereafter, we welcomed my only sibling, Stephen Hill Peeples, into the world. Things looked bright for us, even as many others were struggling mightily to keep food on their tables and shelter above their heads.

But the bliss for us was short-lived. Owing to my father’s inability to work with people, he began to be progressively demoted. Before long he was fired altogether. With World War II beginning, we found ourselves back in Richmond experiencing our belated share of the Great Depression. Soon my father began to drink heavily and lose jobs. Turning sullen, he socially isolated himself and became psychologically abusive to my mother and occasionally physically abusive to me. I still have vivid early childhood memories of occasions when he humiliated me in front of other adults, apparently attempting to impress them with his paternal authority. Looking back, he appeared to have an inordinate need to dominate my will. Living under his rule no doubt sowed the seeds of my future contempt for immoral or abusive authority. I stopped thinking of him as a father and started seeing him only as an authority figure.

AT FIRST GLANCE one might have assumed that Richmond was relatively cosmopolitan for a southern city. On U.S. Route 1, then the nation’s main north-south highway, it was the capital of Virginia, the site of one of the regional Federal Reserve Banks, a significant financial trading center with a respectable industrial base, and the home for a number of international tobacco interests. Yet, even with these features of modern urbanity, our town was a showcase of regional provincialism, filled with monuments to its Confederate past. Richmond was really a sleepy southern town of overwhelmingly native-born people, still steeped in the nostalgia of the “War Between the States”— as so many white Virginians liked to remember it. So in my generation the city groomed more than its share of ethnocentric and creed-bound whites. Few could escape the ubiquitous white supremacy and cultural insularity. It was in the natural order of things to be satisfied with knowing little of other worlds.

For example, the way that white people in Richmond thought of Washington, DC, only 110 miles north, was a good measure of our social isolation at the time. Most folks I knew would never think to travel to DC because they considered it “up north” and presumed that they would not feel comfortable there because “Yankees” did not understand “our way of life.” Never mind that the nation’s capital was nearly as segregated as the old capital of the Confederacy. Richmond was an apt locale for learning the malevolent etiquette of white supremacy.

BUT THE SOURCES of my socialization were not confined to mandates from the living; my ancestors also imparted a legacy. My grandfather, Edward Harden Peeples III, was eleven years old at the end of the Civil War. Like his father before him, he grew up in Barnwell and Hampton Counties in South Carolina, witnessing the master-slave relationship and enjoying the privileges afforded the family by the many slaves on his grandfather’s plantation at Peeplesville. His own father, a Confederate Army officer who later held the positions of postmaster and sheriff in Barnwell County, appears to have owned no more than a few slaves— but quite enough to provide my grandfather with many advantages as a child.

As a young adult my grandfather poured his anger and humiliation from the South’s loss of the war into the Redeemer movement, which aimed to restore white power and run all the “aliens” out of South Carolina. He became a lieutenant in the Hampton Redshirts during the post-Reconstruction era. Along with hundreds of other local whites, at election time he stormed on horseback through local polling places in order to intimidate and turn away black and pro-Union voters. He was later much taken by the populist racism of “Pitchfork” Ben Tillman. Living well into the twentieth century, my grandfather remained active in white supremacist politics until his health failed.

My grandfather and his worldview had an enormous impact on my father’s perceptions of race, class, and gender issues, which he, in turn, brought into my early life. After all, in 1905 when my father was born there was little or no access to national news through radio or television, there were no telephones for common use, and there were no motor vehicles, no airplanes, and virtually no paved roads in his corner of the world. The South Carolina Low Country set the boundaries of the world my father knew growing up.

Much later, he revealed how that upbringing had also shrunk his emotional universe. In the early eighties he told me that his father had taken him to witness the lynching of Walter Best, a black man, in the nearby town of Fairfax. * My father showed not a scintilla of feeling as he described it. That drove home to me that his capacity to identify with the plight of black people was severely obstructed. The lifelong subjugation of his mental and emotional development by his father and the cultural remnants of antebellum South Carolina arrested his growth as an empathetic person. Much of what my father brought to my young life arose out of this internal barrenness and the Lost Cause cult of indignation and melancholy.

As my father entered his twenties, having been nurtured in the promise of being a lord of a manor, he was faced with becoming a serf. By the twenties agriculture began to wane as the primary focus of southern life. Rural areas and small towns in the South began to slip into economic decline and cities became attractive to young men looking for employment alternatives. So to find jobs my father had to make his way to Charleston, Jacksonville, and other southern cities where he discovered that he had to work alongside and in competition with people he had been led to believe were below him. He was bewildered by these conditions so unfamiliar to his youth of guaranteed class and race privileges. By the late thirties when he began drinking heavily and losing one job after another, he had hit rock bottom and plunged my mother, me, and my brother into what could have been a dismal future.

Fortunately, our mother, Lula Jane Stephens, stepped up as the breadwinner and our only real parent. She was a capable, decisive, hardworking, and resourceful woman, who at about age fourteen had to leave school and her family’s isolated and hardscrabble farm for the promise of a better future in the small town of Bradenton, Florida. She went there to work as a live-in servant to a prosperous family. Yet after seeing her potential, they began to introduce her to the tastes and ambitions of the comfortable classes and then helped her become a hairdresser. Our mother never let poverty, a lack of formal education, or her marital problems stand in her way. She was a good and steady parent and a proud model for survival in hard times to both my brother and me. It was our mother’s strong and loving hand and her income as a hairdresser that saved us. The fact that my brother and I became the first generation on either side of our family to grow up mostly in a city, an environment of more alternatives, may also have helped.

Like my father, my mother was a racist who tutored me in “our way of life.” But she was a gentle and affectionate woman whose attitudes toward blacks were less filled with hubris. Blacks to her were just different from us because God made us both this way. Her brand of racism did not countenance deliberate cruelty toward black people, though she lacked the confidence to challenge those who perpetrated it. She came from a different southern tradition, one where there was little pretense or affectation. She was born in 1908 in what today would be called a shack at Myakka Head in sparsely populated back-country Florida. In fact, there was nothing much for her to be superior about. So, although the sense of racial and elitist entitlement of Virginia’s and South Carolina’s landed gentry may have been in our background from my father’s side, it was not the prevailing influence in our upbringing. My mother’s humility told her that when there were “racial troubles” we must trust the sheriff and God to sort them out.

In my early years, the shrinking capabilities of my father did not diminish his influence on me. I had far too little experience with the outside world to compare him to others or see him critically. “Normality” was whatever was up close. And it was my father who was up close: the first and foremost authority I knew on how we were to regard blacks under Jim Crow. One might imagine that I am describing one of those blustering bigots from the Deep South once commonly seen on television and in movies. But, no, my father did not brandish that kind of hate. His racism was the more common version practiced by the guarded types who later were mislabeled “moderates.”

In keeping with his accustomed class protocol, my father did not often engage in the obstreperous racial taunts his people associated with “white trash” or “po’ whites.” Like many white southerners he maintained a softer edge in his use of such words as nigra and nigger. It was as if he was trying to make the words acceptable in polite company without losing any of their white supremacist punch, all the while hoping to differentiate himself from the “common” people.

OF COURSE, my grounding in how to become a “good” white person went beyond my father, my mother, and the Richmond milieu. There was also instruction coming from other people and places in my southern experience. My father’s mother commanded her own whiteness training camp in South Carolina. Martha “Mattie” Wood Peeples had a large presence in my growing up. She lived in a propped-up dream of the nineteenth-century landed gentry and petty aristocracy of the Old South. My grandmother’s home and town were museum exhibits of that time and place, imparting a contorted memory of slavery and Reconstruction fused with Jim Crow. When we went to visit her in the small black-belt town of Allendale, in the upper reaches of the South Carolina Low Country, she always portrayed herself and the Peeples family as part of the community’s upper class, even as her only remaining possessions were her modest house and its quaint furnishings. Her cash flow might not have been impressive, but her membership in the United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Daughters of the American Revolution assured her high standing in the town. My father apparently feared awakening her from her dream. Defying the reckoning promised in Proverbs 16:18 (“Pride goeth before destruction, and haughty spirit before a fall”), he ordered my mother to never reveal to my grandmother that she was a hairdresser, even as that job provided his children with the sustenance he could not give us.

Since more than 80 percent of folks in Allendale County were black, racial segregation entered the warp and woof of everything we did. Visits to my grandmother in Allendale provided prime examples of this. Our daily and weekly rituals appeared innocent enough but somehow always became celebrations of “our way of life.” Sundays we spent all day at church, a white Southern Baptist church. We were back at church every Wednesday evening and on many other occasions, especially for funerals— lots of funerals. Then there was the ladies bridge game and luncheon. My grandmother’s friends came “calling” at least once each day. And there was a weekly visit by an old black gentleman, somehow linked to past servants or farmhands for the Peepleses, who brought beautiful fresh vegetables from his garden. She gave him a dollar and thanked him, addressing him by his first name, while he replied, “Thank you, Miz Mattie” or “Thank you, Miz Peeples.” Later my grandmother would seize the stage to remind us all of how the “negra people of Allendale loved Mr. Peeples,” my grandfather, and “would do anything for us.”

But the premier rituals on Memorial Avenue were the repasts served in the dining room on a long table laid out with an heirloom linen-and-lace tablecloth with matching napkins, set with the treasured family china and silverware dating back to the mid-nineteenth century. Two of our meals each day were treated as grand productions, breakfast about seven or eight in the morning and “dinnah” around two in the afternoon. My grandmother’s daughter Vivia, a school teacher, provided her with the miserly few dollars a week necessary to keep a black servant, Carrie. Carrie performed the bulk of the hard work of preparing meals and maintaining the household. My grandmother spoke often of how we all “loved” Carrie and, in return, how steadfast was her loyalty to the Peeples family. My grandmother frequently boasted in her distinctive Low Country accent, “We have had Cay-ree for more than foh-ty ye-ahs.”

Carrie was very sweet to me and my brother when we were young. Even through the tainted prism of racism, I could see a strong and lovely person in her. Her family and most of the Allendale blacks endured a harsh life. I, like most white children, was sealed off from full knowledge of the conditions they faced. But for some unknown reason I was somet...