The Making of a Racist

A Southerner Reflects on Family, History, and the Slave Trade

Charles B. Dew

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9780813938882
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

In this powerful memoir, Charles Dew, one of America's most respected historians of the South--and particularly its history of slavery--turns the focus on his own life, which began not in the halls of enlightenment but in a society unequivocally committed to segregation.

Dew re-creates the midcentury American South of his childhood--in many respects a boy's paradise, but one stained by Lost Cause revisionism and, worse, by the full brunt of Jim Crow. Through entertainments and "educational" books that belittled African Americans, as well as the living examples of his own family, Dew was indoctrinated in a white supremacy that, at best, was condescendingly paternalistic and, at worst, brutally intolerant. The fear that southern culture, and the "hallowed white male brotherhood," could come undone through the slightest flexibility in the color line gave the Jim Crow mindset its distinctly unyielding quality. Dew recalls his father, in most regards a decent man, becoming livid over a black tradesman daring to use the front, and not the back, door.

The second half of the book shows how this former Confederate youth and descendant of Thomas Roderick Dew, one of slavery's most passionate apologists, went on to reject his racist upbringing and become a scholar of the South and its deeply conflicted history. The centerpiece of Dew's story is his sobering discovery of a price circular from 1860--an itemized list of humans up for sale. Contemplating this document becomes Dew's first step in an exploration of antebellum Richmond's slave trade that investigates the terrible--but, to its white participants, unremarkable--inhumanity inherent in the institution.

Dew's wish with this book is to show how the South of his childhood came into being, poisoning the minds even of honorable people, and to answer the question put to him by Illinois Browning Culver, the African American woman who devoted decades of her life to serving his family: "Charles, why do the grown-ups put so much hate in the children?"

1
A Confederate Youth

I came by my Confederate youth naturally. I was born in the South, my parents were both southerners, ancestors on both sides fought for the Confederacy, and one of my antebellum forebearers probably did as much as anyone in his time to make the defense of slavery an intellectually legitimate exercise. But one must still be taught. A description of that process—my education as a Confederate youth—seems the best way to start this story.

To begin at the very beginning, I was born in 1937 in St. Petersburg, Florida. My mother, Amy Meek Dew, and my father, Jack Carlos Dew, were both, to repeat, dyed-in-the-wool southerners, although my mother’s place of birth, Wayne County, West Virginia, might not suggest that at first glance.

My father’s roots were unmistakably southern—Tennessee—but as it happened, he was born in 1903 in Lake Charles, Louisiana. His father, my grandfather, Charles Givens Dew, made his living farming and digging water wells in and around the town of Trenton in West Tennessee, and he had taken his drilling equipment to Louisiana in hopes of striking oil. As it turned out, he was drilling in the right place but ran out of pipe before he hit the precious stuff, or at least that was what I was told growing up. No one had the good sense to lend him money for more pipe, thus depriving the Dew clan of what my boyhood imagination saw as a mighty gusher of black gold.¹

Grandfather Givens, as he was known in the family, went back to Tennessee with a new son in the family but not much else. He also brought with him a fatal disease. Somewhere along the way, he had managed to contract tuberculosis, and it was this circumstance that led the family to the West Coast of Florida.

Local boosters touted the supposedly salubrious climate around St. Petersburg as a cure for just about any malady known to mankind, and this was where the family settled in 1912.² Four years later, my grandfather died at the age of fifty, leaving a widow and six children—three boys and three girls. My father was thirteen at the time his father died. One of the girls, my aunt Maude, remembered visiting her father in the sanatorium separated from him by a glass window to prevent physical contact and the possible spread of infection.

My father was the youngest of the three boys in the family, and they worked hard in the following years to support their mother and their three sisters. It was not an easy life for any of them. The two older boys, Roy and Joe, clerked in a local hardware store, and my father rose before dawn to sell newspapers to the drummers who arrived in downtown St. Petersburg on the early morning trains. But those three boys remained persistent, using their considerable drive and intelligence to begin a process that culminated in their eventual emergence as leading citizens of St. Pete, as everyone called my hometown.

Hardware stores in those early twentieth-century days sold an amazing array of merchandise, everything from the usual tools and building supplies to furniture and automobiles. These last two items turned out to be the keys to my family’s rise to local prominence. Roy focused on car sales and Joe on furniture, eventually working his way up to manager of the furniture department. The storeowners, apparently raised in the marrow of nineteenth-century hardware store tradition, were not all that interested in selling automobiles or furniture, so the two Dew boys made their move. As my father told the story, Roy managed to borrow the money to buy the Ford, Buick, and Cadillac franchises. Joe, with what he had learned in the furniture trade, managed to acquire a partner and open his own store. Both men thrived. Roy sold the Ford and half the Buick franchises to pay off his creditors; the Cadillac franchise he wisely kept for himself. Joe’s furniture business rose on the crest of the Florida boom in the early 1920s and soon became one of the leading stores in the area.

In subsequent years, I never had to explain locally that my name was “Dew” and not “Drew.” My uncles’ two businesses, Dew Cadillac and Dew Furniture, were household names in St. Pete. The Dew Motor Company was housed in a handsome white stucco building a few blocks south of Central Avenue, the main business thoroughfare. The Dew Furniture Company occupied several upper floors of Wilson-Chase & Company, the leading department store in town. Uncle Roy sold those huge Cadillacs to the rising money class of local businessmen and made a small fortune in the process. Uncle Joe may not have invented the term “loss leaders,” but he certainly knew how to get customers into his store. His sales were trumpeted by outsized ads in the local papers, and Uncle Joe eventually moved to a fine house at nearby Pass-A-Grille Beach and ended up as the commodore of the Pass-A-Grille Yacht Club. Not bad for a couple of small-town southern boys who never got past high school.

When my father finished his high school education—at St. Pete High—his two older brothers paid for both his undergraduate and law school education at the University of Virginia. Jack Dew thus became the first member of his immediate family to go to college. He loved UVa, joined a fraternity, and ended up earning his law degree in 1926. Upon graduation, he took a position with one of the leading law firms in St. Petersburg.

I never really thought of my family as characters out of a Faulkner novel, but looking back on it, I may have missed something there. We clearly were not Sartorises, the Mississippi planter-aristocrats who stood at the top of Faulkner’s fictional food chain. But I certainly did not think of us as Snopeses, either—no one was named “Montgomery Ward” Dew or “Wall Street Panic” Dew or “Admiral Dewey” Dew or even “Flem” Dew (although I did have an Uncle Flip, married to my father’s middle sister, Doris, and a great favorite of mine growing up).

There was, nevertheless, something at least mildly Faulknerian about the rise of the Dew family. Uncle Roy was capable of some fascinating turns on the English language, and Uncle Joe’s pencil moustache and swarthy complexion (a heritage of some Spanish ancestry in our family tree, as was my father’s middle name, Carlos) made him something of an exotic character in my youthful eyes. But whatever their rags-to-riches southern story might entail, I was intensely proud of my family. And I was intensely proud of my father as well. I can still recall the day one of my Sunday school teachers, a young, well-spoken stockbroker newly arrived in town, referred to him as “the best lawyer in St. Petersburg.” The family of a peripatetic well digger from West Tennessee had come a long way.

My father’s time at the University of Virginia turned out to be fortunate in more ways than one. In addition to receiving a first-rate education during his years there, he also encountered a rather shy and quite lovely young woman by the name of Amy Kirk Meek. Her brother Jack Meek was a law school classmate of my father’s, and it was through him that my father and mother first met. Amy Meek was the daughter of a well-established family in Huntington, West Virginia—her father was a prominent attorney, and her mother, Charlie (yes, Charlie) Burgess Meek, came from a nearby Wayne County family of impeccable southern roots. My mother grew up with two brothers who watched over her like a hawk until she finally went away to boarding school, first Foxcroft in Virginia and then Holton Arms in Washington, DC.

If my father’s family had a hint of the Snopeses in their background, my mother definitely had an element of the Sartorises in hers. But that difference, as far as I could tell, was never a problem for either one of them. They certainly made a very handsome couple; the photographs from those days are clear evidence of that. After several years of courtship while my father was trying to build up a law practice, they set a date for their wedding.

My father, Jack Carlos Dew, in a portrait photograph taken about the time of his marriage to my mother.

Their marriage plans were rudely interrupted by the onset of the Great Depression. As my father told the story, he had managed to save up enough money to take his new bride on a honeymoon and was standing in line outside the Central National Bank in St. Petersburg when the bank closed its doors—for good. His savings went up in smoke, and it took him a full year to save enough to set their plans in motion again.

Finally, on a blistering hot West Virginia day in the summer of 1931, their wedding took place. It was an elaborate affair, I remember my mother saying, held in the side yard of the Meeks’ handsome brick residence in Huntington. Her wedding portrait shows a lovely, smiling young woman in a beautiful white satin dress, her face framed by a floral lace garland, holding what appears to be a white prayer book. The word “radiant” is overused in this context, but that is how she has always looked to me in this photograph, even when I was too young to know what the word meant.

My mother, Amy Meek Dew. This is her wedding portrait, taken in Huntington, West Virginia, in 1931.

Following the ceremony, the newly married couple journeyed up into the mountains to the famous Greenbrier hotel for their honeymoon. My father had managed to save up enough to cover their stay. I still have on my dresser at home a large, silver-colored shoehorn stamped on the back “The Greenbrier & Cottages White Sulphur Springs, W.Va.,” a keepsake one of them brought home to mark the occasion.

Dear, my brother, John, and me. This studio portrait was taken in 1937.

The marriage of Jack Carlos Dew, twenty-eight, and Amy Kirk Meek, twenty-six, on June 27, 1931, would last a lifetime for both. There was never a doubt in my mind as I was growing up that the two of them loved and respected each other deeply. Despite some tough times that lay ahead, I never heard either one of them say anything disparaging about the other.

They took up residence in St. Petersburg, and my father began establishing his law practice. My brother was the first child to arrive. John Carlos Dew was born in 1934, and I came along almost exactly three years later. That same year, 1937, we moved into a two-story white frame house on the north side—the better side—of St. Petersburg. That comfortable house, at 234 Twenty-Fifth Avenue North, would be my home for the next twenty-one years.

My father eventually made enough for us to move to a tonier neighborhood, but he was never interested in doing so. Indeed, I think he took some satisfaction in refusing to join those other lawyers over on Snell Isle and Brightwaters Boulevard. The place in which he lived suited him just fine, and there was no need to “put on the dog,” as he would say, by spending the money for a waterfront view.

My mother’s hand provided the soft touch in our household. Amy Meek Dew was a lovely person. There is no other way to describe her. She was attractive, certainly, and nothing short of beautiful in my eyes, but it was her gentle, caring nature that everyone noticed as soon as they came into contact with her. It had an almost luminous quality about it. Even her name in the family reflected the innate kindness that lay at the core of her being; my brother and I called her “Dear.” This came about before I was born when she and John were visiting her family in Huntington. Someone, I am not sure who, tried to get my brother to call her “Mother Dear.” It was too much for a toddler, but John did manage to get the “Dear” part out, and it stuck.

Deeply religious, Dear brought my brother and me up within the comfortable confines of the Episcopal faith. She loved the quiet eloquence of the Book of Common Prayer and provided both of us with our own copies as soon as we were reasonably proficient readers. She did not criticize other faiths, but it was clear to us that she did not approve of the Bible-thumping histrionics that characterized services at some of the other Protestant churches in our hometown. Her God was a benevolent God who looked out for all of his earthly children. “The Good Lord” was how she invariably referred to the Almighty.

My mother’s gentle nature was complemented by a delightful sense of humor. She had a wonderful laugh, took genuine delight in the vagaries and absurdities of the world, and was especially adept at poking fun at herself. I recall her telling me when I was older that she could not understand why no one ever told a dirty joke around her. It was not that she particularly wanted to hear them; it was just that she did not think of herself as a prude and did not want others to think of her that way, either. But I knew exactly why people did not tell those jokes around her. Her manner and her presence, simply who she was, brought out the best qualities in those around her. You would no more tell an off-color joke around my mother than you would take the Lord’s name in vain at the Communion rail.

Our father showed the reserve around his sons that fathers of that era customarily displayed, but I never doubted that he loved my brother and me as well, and that he wanted the best for us. We also knew not to cross him. There was a straight-ahead, no-nonsense quality about him that usually kept us in line without being reminded of how we were supposed to behave. John and I were anything but “goody two-shoes,” but we were on our best behavior whenever Pop, as we called him, was around. When he whistled in the late afternoon to call us home for dinner—we played outdoors continuously in the numerous vacant lots in our neighborhood, building forts and occasionally puffing on a cigarette one of our buddies had swiped from home—we dropped whatever it was we were doing and headed for our back porch without hesitation. The sound of Pop’s piercing whistle carried for blocks, and it never occurred to us to claim we had not heard it.

I got a dramatic illustration of his “don’t mess with me” anger when I was five or six years old. World War II was on, and Pop, who had been too young to serve in World War I, was now too old to serve in the current conflict. He was our neighborhood air raid warden, was issued a World War I–era steel helmet to wear on his rounds, and was taxed with making sure the tree trunks that lined the streets of our neighborhood were painted white up to waist level so they could be seen during blackouts. It was heady stuff for my brother and me, although we did not take so readily to working in the victory garden Pop planted (to mollify us, I suspect, he also erected a fabulous double swing set in our backyard that became a magnet for every child in the neighborhood). It was clear to us that he was doing what he could for the war effort.

Rationing of gasoline and rubber was also on, and Pop rode the municipal bus to work every morning from the corner of Twenty-Fifth Avenue and Fourth Street, which was the main route downtown from our part of the city (it was, of course, a segregated bus, with “colored” passengers required by law to move to the rear). To provide a place to sit while he and others waited for the bus, he moved a high-backed wooden bench from our breakfast nook at home up to the corner so that the hot, muggy weather that settled in early in the day would not wilt him (in his business suit, snap-brim hat, and freshly shined spectator shoes) before he even got to his office.

The bench lasted one day on the corner. Its disappearance produced a cold fury in Pop and an immediate neighborhood-wide search for the missing item. We did not have to look far. Connie (short for Constantine) and Socs (short for Socrates) Trangus, who owned the popular Oceanana Restaurant at the corner of Fourth Street and Twenty-Fourth Avenue, had spotted the bench and apparently decided it would look good in front of their establishment. And there it sat.

This news created an immediate sense of unease for me. I considered Socs Trangus something of a pal. Connie was the front man who took care of the customers and Socs was the cook. I sat on a high wooden stool in his kitchen on a fairly regular basis, watching him at work in front of the massive black ranges that seemed to fill the kitchen at the rear of the Oceanana. With instructions to hold the china platter tightly in both hands, I was sent the half block up the alley behind our house to the restaurant to pick up dinner for all of us when Dear wanted a break from cooking, which happened fairly often in the late afternoon in our unair-conditioned home. I would take my place on the stool and wait for Socs to fill our order—fried shrimp or scallops, French-fried potatoes, coleslaw, and, my favorite, hamburger steak smothered in rich brown gravy. Socs did not say a lot on these occasions, but he did not treat me like a kid who didn’t know anything, either. We were both there just doing our jobs.

So it was with some trepidation that I witnessed, and participated in, the events that unfolded after the discovery of that missing bench. Pop mobilized my brother and me and just about every other boy in the neighborhood, took the removable wooden sides off John’s Radio Flyer wagon, and off we headed for the Oceanana, with Pop leading the way. I don’t know what he said to Connie and Socs; he went into the restaurant while we stayed outside. But I remember the look of determination on his face when he came out, and I remember loading the bench onto John’s wagon and steadying it with many young hands as we rolled it back to the corner. It remained there for the duration of the war, a symbol, in my youthful eyes, of my father’s prowess and his willingness to take immediate action to...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction: The Stuff of History
• 1 A Confederate Youth
• 2 The Making of a Racist
• 3 The Unmaking of a Racist
• 4 The Document
• 5 The Correspondence, Part I
• 6 The Correspondence, Part II
• 7 The Market
• In Conclusion
• Notes
• Index