His maternal grandfather was a prominent attorney in Huntington, West Virginia, and his wife, Charlie Burgess Meek, would be memorialized in this boy's middle name.
[9] Dew also relates his father's political conservatism (from opposition to Franklin D. Roosevelt's name and Sen. Claude Pepper to the Brown v. Board of Education decisions in 1955), as well as drinking problem, but notes his kindliness toward and sense of responsibility for elderly widows, which caused his father's practice to gravitate toward estate law.
[10] Dew's memoir also states his family had African-American help, who ate and drank from separated plates and cups, and who used a "grossly unequal" bathroom.
[11] In an essay he wrote in 2016, Dew commented that he had not crossed the Mason–Dixon line until he went to college in 1954, and that his experiences at Williams College—where he studied history (which "blew [his] assumptions about Confederate glory out of the water") and had black classmates—were formative for his developing a critique of what he termed "collective white blindness".
[1] His thesis advisor was C. Vann Woodward, who had been a professor at Johns Hopkins and continued keeping Dew as an advisee after he accepted a position at Yale University.