Confession and catharsis
SEPTEMBER 3, 2016 8:00 AM
BY JOHN DAVID SMITH
... Born in 1937, Dew grew up in St. Petersburg, Fla., in an upper middle class family. Among his first childhood memories was that of his mother reading dialect stories about black persons as comical and decidedly inferior to whites. Although today he considers these tales “deeply racist,” Dew recognizes that his mother lived “in a place and time when whites did not consider these portrayals of African Americans either offensive or outlandish” ...
By September 1957, when watching TV coverage of whites protesting the desegregation of Little Rock’s Central High School, events had transformed him. “The people in that mob disgusted me,” Dew recalled. “I did not want to be like them. I did not want anything to do with people like that. I, we, the South, surely we were better than that.” By the time he headed to Johns Hopkins in 1958 to begin graduate work, Dew had tossed his Confederate youth “into the dustbin of history” and “finally, finally, managed to break loose from my racist moorings.”
Reflecting on his long career as a historian of the South, Dew explains that he focused his research on slavery and race “because I wanted to know how white Southerners – my people – had managed to look evil in the face every day and not see what was right there in front of them, in front of us” ...
http://www.newsobserver.com/entertainment/books/article99027847.html
= new reply since forum marked as read
