“Ode to Charley: A Drinking Song”

“Ode to Charley: A Drinking Song”

As is evident from the many pictures in this case from the Reveille, the Maryland Agricultural College’s yearbook, and, once the institution became the University of Maryland, the Terrapin Yearbook, White students on campus engaged broadly and frequently in racist tropes and language in activities then deemed worthy of preservation in their annual publication.

At times this casual racism and focus extended to individual African Americans well-known to students on campus, individuals for whom a measure of affection is evident alongside and with tone, language, and imagery that is dehumanizing. Such language used by Whites towards Black individuals betrays a tendency simultaneously to both show affection and assume a position of superiority towards the subject of address.

Mr. Charles “Charlie” Dory was a most frequent target of students’ attention. The campus kitchen frequently was referred to as “Charlie Dory’s Health Resort,” innocuous enough, but in these pages from two of the Reveille yearbooks (1913 and 1916), Mr. Dory and two other Lakelanders are subjected to dehumanizing racialization. “Ode to Charley: A Drinking Song” is “dedicated to the Big Chief, by one of his tormentors.” While written in jest, the torment had to have been real for Mr. Dory and others from Lakeland and other Black communities who worked on campus. Mr. Dory’s cooking exploits are regaled, but others in the kitchen are named – Tom, Sid, and Chesley Mack – and “others, hid, but all as black As our well-known Minstrel Clown.”

A minstrel clown is exactly how a student cartoonist depicted Mr. Dory in the 1916 pages of Reveille. Mr. Dory is depicted as a blackface minstrel (Coon) character in livery carrying a tray of food and drink and with napkin draped over his left arm. In the register below this one in the cartoon, a “Sam” in blackface and polka-dot shirt and check-pocketed breeches and cap is shown furiously sweeping a cloud of dust, with a can and dead rat among the detritus. This Sam is Samuel Stewart, who worked at the Maryland Agricultural College at this time and lived in Lakeland. His father, also Samuel Stewart, and mother, Georgianna Stewart, founded Embry AME Church in 1903. That their son would be represented in this racist manner is particularly galling, especially for Lakelanders who to this day honor and revere the Stewarts for their role in building the community.

Reveille Yearbook, pp. 106-07

1913

Special Collections and University Archives, University of Maryland Libraries