Description: 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?
Review Quotes:
Professor Charles Dew, one of the most renowned historians of the South and slavery, now recounts his childhood in the Jim Crow South in a candid and moving memoir, The Making of a Racist. In this powerful work, Professor Dew brings to life a society committed to white supremacy and the vile consequences of rigidly enforced segregation and brutal intolerance.
--History News Network