I just discovered that my great-great grandfathers uncle, Reverend Charles C. Painter not only helped raise funds for W.E.B. Du Bois to attend college, but also convinced him to travel south to Fisk University, where he observed overt racism for the first time in his life, ultimately leading to his decision to form the NAACP. I discovered this fact after a conversation with my grandfathers third cousin, Virginia Perkins née Painter, who I had the good fortune to meet at my grandfather’s burial service, held at the church which Charles Painter’s father built in the 1830s. Virginia was baptized by Charles Painter’s younger brother, the Reverend George Whitfield Painter, a Confederate veteran and former missionary to China during the Qing Dynasty. While discussing the Painter family she mentioned that one of the brothers had headed north, but only through internet sleuthing did we discover the rest of the story. In light of the my prior discovery that my great-great-great-great grandfather Thomas Walker Gilmer had purchased a slave from Thomas Jefferson’s estate, I am fascinated by the existential grapple that my Southern family members had with the morality of slavery and racism, especially in light of my family’s strong Christian roots and American patriotism. While some seemed to have little difficulty reconciling the cause of freedom and justice with the institutional horror of slavery, others recognized the incompatibility of the two. I admire the bravery of those who directly confronted this dilemma. From the biography: Meantime in other quarters a way was being made for me to go to college. The father of one of my schoolmates, the Reverend C. C. Painter, was once in the Indian Bureau. There and elsewhere he saw the problem of the reconstructed South, and conceived the idea that there was the place for me to be educated, and there lay my future field of work. My family and colored friends rather resented the idea. Their Northern Free Negro prejudice naturally revolted at the idea of sending me to the former land of slavery, either for education or for living. I am rather proud of myself that I did not agree with them. That I should always live and work in the South, I did not then stop to decide; that I would give up the idea of graduating from Harvard, did not occur to me. But I wanted to go to Fisk, not simply because it was at least a beginning of my dream of college, but also, I suspect, because I was beginning to feel lonesome in New England; because, unconsciously, I realized, that as I grew older, the close social intermingling with my white fellows would grow more restricted. There were meetings, parties, clubs, to which I was not invited. Especially in the case of strangers, visitors, newcomers to the town was my presence and friendship a matter of explanation or even embarrassment to my schoolmates. Similar discriminations and separations met the Irish youth, and the cleft between rich and poor widened. On the other hand, the inner social group of my own relatives and colored friends always had furnished me as a boy most interesting and satisfying company; and now as I grew, it was augmented by visitors from other places. I remember a lovely little plump and brown girl who appeared out of nowhere, and smiled at me demurely; I went to the East to visit my fathers father in New Bedford, and on that trip saw well-to-do, well-mannered colored people; and once, at Rocky Point, Rhode Island, I viewed with astonishment 10,000 Negroes of every hue and bearing. I was transported with amazement and dreams; I apparently noted nothing of poverty or degradation, but only extraordinary beauty of skin-color and utter equality of mien, with absence so far as I could see of even the shadow of the line of race. Gladly and armed with a scholarship, I set out for Fisk.
Posted on: Sun, 17 Aug 2014 20:50:33 +0000
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