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A Columbia County Boy's Recollections and Memories of Columbia County Florida (2012) Lenvil H. Dicks

THE KU KL UX KLAN

The things I am going to talk about in this section of my book have come to me over the years from
several different sources, and portions of it I heard many, many, many years ago when I was still quite
young.

My great grandfather, Joseph Dicks, who stowed away on a ship and came over from England in 1833,
was the father of my grandfather Henry Dicks, and all my grandfathers brothers and sisters, and the one
sister that survived among my daddy’s brothers and sisters was my aunt Sarah Toney (aunt Sis). Aunt
Sis had four daughters, and the youngest was named Sybil, and Sybil was some two years or maybe
three years older than I. She called me on the telephone late one Saturday night, several years ago, and I
believe it would have been sometime in the 1990’s.

Now, with my great grandfather being born in England and living the first 14 years of his life there, he
was not exposed to the part of the culture in the United States, which included a general prejudice
against black people. Joseph Dicks considered all men to be alike, and paid no attention whatsoever to
the color of their skin.

Contrary to the customs of the time, if a Negro came along to his house at about meal time, he would
invite them in and let them sit at the table with the whole family, and have a meal with the entire family.
The custom in North Central Florida, and indeed all over the South, was to have colored people eat in
another room, or at another table, or out on the porch, or sometimes even out in the yard. My great
granddaddy did not make any such distinction, and later when he was a substantial farmer and a sawmill
operator, when he would hire black people to work for him, he paid them and treated them exactly the
same way he did his white labor.

He had been in the Union Army from about 1836 up until sometime around 1840, or not too long
thereafter, and the US Army sent him to Florida to fight Seminole Indians. After he was discharged, a
period of time elapsed before he acquired land and started farming, and although slavery was much in
vogue at that time, he refused to have slave labor as he did not believe in slavery. (I guess I am a Gator
Fan today, because for generations we have fought Seminoles.)

I am saying all of that, to make this point: many of his neighbors considered him to be a “Nigger Lover”
which was a term that had been used in the southern vocabulary for many, many years, and after the
Civil Wan, and apparently for his attitude toward blacks, not to mention the fact that he had been a
former Union Soldier, (although that was years before the Civil War started,) some of his neighbors who
were members of the Ku Klux Klan decided apparently that he needed to be taught a lesson, and they
came to his home one night and took him off in the woods and whipped him severely.

He apparently could tell who they were from their voices, and for years nothing was ever said anymore
about that subject.

However, on the night that my cousin Sybil Toney called me, after we had talked for a good while she
said, “Lenvil, I suppose you are wondering why I called you”. I probably said something to the affect
that I had figured she just wanted to talk to a good looking cousin or something along those lines, and
she said “well you know mama lived with me during the last years of her life, and just before she died,
she told me something that she felt like some of the rest of the family ought to know, and asked me to
see that at least some of the rest of the family knew about it”.

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