An Introduction to the Correspondence of Charles W. Chesnutt
This in-progress digital edition of Charles W. Chesnutt's correspondence offers letters from across Chesnutt's life. We believe that the realization of an open-access collection of Chesnutt's correspondence is an invaluable resource for understanding postbellum America. Chesnutt was the beneficiary of Black schools and he began his adult life emboldened by the promises of Reconstruction. He participated in the strengthening of Black communities, and he sustained friendships with a wide range of Black leaders and writers. He witnessed racism codified by law, and he was an astute observer of his nation. He never refrained from clear-eyed study and critique as the U.S. moved onto the world stage, even as he retained his characteristic wit, sly irony, and commitments to community, family, political advocacy, and writing. His fiction is taught in classrooms across the country and internationally, and it has been at the center of groundbreaking scholarship on race for decades. For example, Eric Sundquist's To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature (1993) reads Chesnutt's fiction as the "leading literary assessment" of turn-of-the-century racial prejudice and violence, and Brooke Thomas's American Literary Realism and the Failed Promise of Contract (1997) focuses on Chesnutt's responses to a range of constitutional failures, including the 1903 voting rights case Giles v. Harris. Historians of education have turned to his experiences as a teacher and principal, and Chesnutt's legal thinking has prompted such studies as David Hollingshead's "Nonhuman Liability: Charles Chesnutt, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., and the Racial Discourses of Tort Law" (2018).[1]
Less commonly noted is that Chesnutt was also a prolific letter writer, and until this edition scholars have depended on two print volumes of selected letters, which offer less than a quarter of the 2,000 plus letters we have identified. The print volumes—"To Be An Author": Letters of Charles W. Chesnutt, 1889-1905, edited by Joseph R. McElrath, Jr. and Robert C. Leitz, III (Princeton University Press, 1997) and An Exemplary Citizen: Letters of Charles W. Chesnutt 1906-1932 edited by Jesse S. Crisler, Robert C. Leitz, III, and Joseph R. McElrath, Jr. (Stanford University Press, 2002)—are excellent. They offer meticulous transcriptions and well-researched annotations, and they have been invaluable. But incoming letters are only summarized or quoted in part in footnotes, and the volumes overlook significant periods in Chesnutt's life. They give little attention to the earliest of Chesnutt's letters, despite the light they shed on African American education as Reconstruction came to a close, and they largely omit exchanges with Chesnutt's extensive Black networks. The first volume regards the years Chesnutt published in the Atlantic and with Houghton, Mifflin publishing company as the apex of his career, even though then and later he was placing fiction and essays in major Black venues, including The Crisis, Cygnet, Colophon, and the A.M.E. Review. The second volume covers years when Chesnutt was very active in Cleveland, but the selection does not capture the extent of his political and civic work nor does it do justice to the range of his epistolary relationships. The volumes provide few letters that illuminate Chesnutt's contributions as a speaker and essayist, although he gave speeches on such topics as the role of Blacks in the Revolutionary War, racial identity in South America, the history of race laws in the U.S., and African American migration out of the South. They almost completely ignore family correspondence, even though Chesnutt's sister was a North Carolina school supervisor for decades, his daughter taught Latin at Cleveland's Central High School, his son-in-law was the librarian at Case Western Reserve and later at Howard University, and two of his brothers were business leaders who thrived as portrait photographers in Cleveland.
Chesnutt scholarship has been lively for half a century, and it has roots that reach back even earlier to scholarship that began appearing in Black journals shortly after his death. Reading and teaching editions of his fiction appear regularly, an MLA teaching volume was published in 2017, and a Library of America Chesnutt volume in 2002. There are now four biographies of Chesnutt, with the most recent appearing in 2025. Scholarly editing of Chesnutt's works is underway. The first volume of the six-volume The Writing of Charles W. Chesnutt (Oxford University Press), will appear in 2027, and The Charles W. Chesnutt Archive was redesigned and its infrastructure overhauled thanks to a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (2019-2021). In this context, a comprehensive digital edition of Chesnutt's correspondence will make a major contribution to knowing the man and his world more fully.
Highlights
Although we cannot anticipate the range of scholarship this edition will support, we want to identify a few highlights, noting in particular what is gained by the edition's treatment of drafts, inclusion of Chesnutt's correspondence with Black leaders and writers, and coverage of all letters at WRHS, the largest repository of Chesnutt's late-life letters.
Chesnutt was an inveterate reviser, and we planned from the outset to include drafts and to transcribe and encode all marks on the front and back of every sheet of all materials—drafts sent letters, and received letters.[2] As it turns out, Chesnutt's first and second thoughts prove even more intriguing and revealing than expected. For example, in a draft letter to his editor Walter Hines Page, dated 20 May 1898, Chesnutt changed the word "offensive" to "doubtful." In this passage Chesnutt is explaining that he had considered two titles for his short story about a white enslaver who is turned into an enslaved man for a few weeks and thus experiences slavery's brutality. Although Chesnutt ultimately made the title "Mars Jeems's Nightmare," he wanted to let his editor know he had contemplated "De Noo Nigger" as a possible title. As he explains in the draft letter, he decided against that title because he "didn't care to dignify an offensive word quite so much." He then struck "offensive" and replaced it with "doubtful," which is the word that appears in the letter he sent.[3] Both Chesnutt's decision to mention the alternative title to Page and his second thoughts on how to describe to his editor exactly what was wrong with the word "nigger" suggest the word, the title, and perhaps even the idea of a white man becoming an enslaved man, "a noo nigger," were all matters for which he wanted to find just the right words. Did the rejected title appeal precisely because of the problematic word? Did Chesnutt like the idea of foregrounding that a white man might be aptly described by that offensive word? And why the second thoughts about whether the word is "offensive" or "doubtful"? Was the change to soft-pedal his critique of the word? Was "doubtful" a better description of a word so deeply context-dependent—a word Chesnutt's characters use often, but he used rarely? Was it a "doubtful" word because it trivialized the word by applying it to a man who only briefly experiences life as an enslaved Black man? Is this a moment of "double-consciousness," an instance of hearing his words through the ears of another, and as a consequence having second thoughts?
In another case, Chesnutt radically revised a draft when he wrote the final version. Early in his relationship with George Washington Cable, Chesnutt seems to have wanted to speak frankly. Cable was a Southern writer now living in the North, and after meeting Chesnutt he immediately enlisted him in work on race-related writing projects.[4] In a draft letter to Cable, he wrote of the anguish caused by racism: "my mental health and equipoise require constant employment, either in working or in writing," adding that "If I should remain idle for two weeks, at the end of that time I should be ready to close out my affairs and move my family to Europe."[5] This is a rare cry from a man often reserved and always professional. But none of this appears in the letter he sent. In another draft, on the verso side, Chesnutt calculates his stenography income, as he prepares to decline Cable's offer of employment as his secretary.[6] Chesnutt might well have taken umbrage at an offer that, though delivered with good intentions, made no mention at all of business and familial commitments that might pull on Chesnutt. He was a father of four and doing well in Cleveland, and the secretarial salary paid less than he was earning as a stenographer.
The letters from Cable are equally revealing. In his first letter to Chesnutt, Cable corrected his misspelling of Chesnutt's name, deleting an erroneous "t" in the middle with three sharp lines. In subsequent letters he spelled it correctly, until Chesnutt declined the job offer. Cable then misspelled his name in the next five letters, and after that increasingly had his assistant write his letters to Chesnutt.[7] This would not have been lost on Chesnutt, a man attentive to how written communication conveys, subtly or inelegantly, forcefully or clumsily, wit, disagreement, warmth, or distance.
The letters held at WRHS offer a rich understanding of the extent to which Cleveland—its history, culture, and architecture—was important to Chesnutt. His relationship to Cleveland has been understudied to date, since scholarship has tended to center Chesnutt's southern stories. But eighteen stories are set in a fictional version of Cleveland, and they take up such issues as race and labor unions, patents and torts, and railroad catastrophes. They feature neighborhoods, buildings, and major roads, as well as the city's changing ethnic demographics. The correspondence offers invaluable context for these stories and places Chesnutt—father, stenographer, writer, and publicly engaged citizen—in particular places, at specific city events, and involved in important city initiatives. The changing letterhead of Chesnutt's stationary allow us to date the locations of his stenography offices in major downtown buildings, some of which he used as settings for stories. Business letters shed light on his real estate holdings and transactions, and other letters help us identify neighborhoods where he, extended family, and friends lived and socialized. The Cleveland letters also speak to hs civic work and his involvement in community projects. Read alongside the fiction, the correspondence offers an account of a major city—its built and social environment—and Chesnutt's role in shaping the city. More generally, these letters deepen our understanding of the role of place in Chesnutt's oeuvre.
Of particular interest in the Cleveland letters is Chesnutt's relationship with his cousin John Patterson Green. Born in North Carolina but living in Cleveland by the time he was nine years old, Green was a lawyer and the first Black justice of the peace in the city. He also served in the Ohio House of Representatives, and in 1892 he became the first Black Ohio state senator. In 1896, in recognition of his work on the presidential campaign, William McKinley appointed him U.S. postage stamp agent, a position never before held by an African American. By 1905, he was back in Cleveland practicing law. It is evident the two met often, but they also corresponded, often with marked warmth and openness. Of the twenty-one extant letters, fourteen of which are in the John Patterson Green Papers at WRHS, only two appear in the print volumes of Chesnutt's correspondence. An example of the intimacy that might happen only with a family member one remove from immediate family appears in an early letter Chesnutt wrote to Green after an extended stay in 1882 with Green's family in Cleveland. Writing right after his return to Fayetteville, Chesnutt shares his appreciation for the visit and Cleveland, but also acknowledges the appeal of being home even as he shares his ambivalence about the South:
This is a dirty, slow looking place, after a couple of months in your pretty towns and beautiful cities of the North. But I feel at home again, and the homelike feeling makes anything bearable. I believe I can endure the South three or four years longer before I come North again. My trip has made a new man of me . . .[8]In fact, Chesnutt could not endure, and he left Fayetteville only a year later. During Green's time in Washington, D.C., the cousins corresponded, sharing political and family news, as well as updates on their reading, including French novels, and sometimes corresponding in French.[9] Chesnutt also let Green know about negative press. In one letter, Chesnutt reported that H. C. Smith, the editor of the Black-owned Cleveland Gazette, disapproved of the "methods" by which Green, as well as Blanche K. Bruce, the former U.S. Representative from Mississippi and current Register of the U.S. Treasury, secured their posts—that is, as rewards for political support.[10] In addition to shedding light on the relationship between cousins, the letters will also allow literary scholars to probe in new ways Chesnutt's depiction of Black professionals in his fiction, and in particular Black lawyers, several of whom are likely inspired by Green.
Chesnutt's correspondence with other family members, as well as his business partners, are valuable for providing a sense of his private affairs, including the purchase of a small vacation home in Idlewild, Michigan, where the Chesnutts joined other African American families in the summer. While on vacation, Chesnutt often corresponded with Helen C. Moore, a White shorthand reporter who began working for him in 1918. She kept the office open during the summer when he was away, and later managed their firm, Chesnutt & Moore. These letters often weave together updates about weather, travel, and family affairs alongside comments about political and civic affairs, as well as, near the end of his life, the devastating impact of the Great Depression on his finances. Not surprisingly, some letters to family members are quite frank. In a letter to his daughter Ethel, who lived in Washington, D.C., Chesnutt wrote about his novel, The House Behind the Cedars, and various adaptations, not all authorized.
I note what you say about the movie "Veiled Aristocrats." I have seen the book . . . and thought once of getting it. I sold the movie rights to "The House Behind the Cedars," to the Morceau [Micheaux] Moving Picture Company of Chicago, and I saw it on the stage once, under the real name, "The House Behind the Cedars," and the ending as the editor had revised it was like the story that you saw . . . I don't know whether what you saw was the same or not, or whether the Morceau people got it out. If they did n't, it was rank plagiarism, and they would be liable in a civil action . . . When I saw it, I thought with you that it was very well done, but it was not my story, and it was a soundless picture when I saw it.[11]What these letters, as well as those to Green, offer is not only revealing moments of informal writing and important new information about his work, such as the existence of a stage-version of his novel, but more generally, that he was an ambitious, cosmopolitan man whose expansive vision of human rights and the arts was complemented by an equally steadfast dedication to his family and his community.
The rich trove of late life letters in the WRHS collection offers for the first time the opportunity to develop a more expansive understanding of a period notably understudied in Chesnutt scholarship. Indeed, comprehensive correspondence editions are often especially valuable for reminding us that many writers' lives extend beyond the period when they were publishing the most. In Chesnutt's case, these later letters reveal a man far more engaged with civic affairs than scholars have appreciated. They include an exchange of letters during WWI with Secretary of War Newton D. Baker (former mayor of Cleveland) about forming a Black regiment, and with the NAACP as he presided over local events in Cleveland and hosted guests when the national NAACP convention was held there. They also include a 1905 letter to Attorney General William Henry Moody requesting a copy of his oral arguments in Clyatt v. United States (1905), commonly known as the Peonage Case. This exchange is not documented in the published print volumes of selected letters, but Clyatt v. United States was a vitally important case that affirmed the constitutionality of the law against debt servitude, a topic Chesnutt treated both acerbically and with careful legal-historical detail in his novel The Colonel's Dream (1905).
This edition of letters is also critical to building accurate and complete bibliographies of Chesnutt's published works, reprints and adaptations, and incomplete or proposed but never written works. Later letters include correspondence with The Crisis, the national magazine of the NAACP, as its editor W. E. B. Du Bois asked repeatedly for stories, and then published all four that Chesnutt sent over several years. They also include his negotiations with acclaimed Black filmmaker Oscar Micheaux for two film adaptations which played at Black theaters across the country, and with the Chicago Defender, which serialized his 1900 novel The House Behind the Cedars in 1921-22. Chesnutt also corresponded with Chicago journalist and anti-lynching activist Ida B. Wells about dramatizing one of his Cleveland stories and having it performed in Chicago at a fundraiser for the Frederick Douglass House. Another provides the only information available about Aunt Hagar's Children, a work of fiction (perhaps short stories) he proposed in 1919 to Smith, Maynard & Company, the firm that had commissioned and published his biography of Frederick Douglass for their series, "The Beacon Biographies of Eminent Americans."[12]
The edition also includes seemingly minor letters, but which, in fact, expand our awareness of the range of Chesnutt's voice. His love of languages (he was self-taught in French, German, Greek, and Latin), as well as his linguistic skill, wit, and playfulness, is fully on display in the correspondence in short notes to family or friends, as well as in longer letters to professional colleagues. In a letter to Green, he uses the Southern phrase "got the persimmon" for securing political office, and in a draft letter about family property and transferring ownership of the Idlewild property to Helen, his daughter, he shifts to shorthand.[13] Chesnutt was famous for being able to record 200 words per minute in shorthand, but the only other known example of extensive passages in shorthand are from early journals. These instances indicate that he not only used shorthand in his work, that is to record the spoken words of others, but also to think, perhaps privately, on the page, since putting the property in the control of one child when he had four may have been a contentious issue.
Finally, the edition facilitates research into the lives and minds of Chesnutt's epistolary partners, including poets Georgia Douglas Johnson and Langston Hughes, filmmaker Oscar Micheaux, journalists Monroe Trotter of the Boston Guardian and Harry C. Smith of the Cleveland Gazette, prominent intellectuals such as Benjmamin Brawley, Otelia Cromwell, and Kelly Miller, and NAACP officers such as Walter F. White, and, of course, W. E. B. Du Bois. Working across letters to various people can deepen an understanding of relationships among Black writers and leaders too often considered individually and with too little regard to their networks.
The more than one hundred letters Chesnutt exchanged with Booker T. Washington is of particular note given the extensive personal and professional ties that linked the two men. Chesnutt's daughter Ethel worked two summers at the Washington-led Tuskegee Institute; his daughter Helen considered working there until eye strain made her give up the plan; and his son Edwin worked as a secretary at Tuskegee after graduating from college. The letters reveal many instances of generosity and solicitude that went both ways. For example, Chesnutt provided assistance, including offering to host Washington in his home, when the Tuskegee President traveled to Cleveland to raise funds and deliver talks.
Chesnutt and Washington were almost exact contemporaries: Washington was born in 1856 and Chesnutt in 1858. They both lived their formative years in the South; both were ambitious, and both achieved national eminence. Both men had experience working in schools in the rural south and both were successful writers, at times appearing in pages of the same journal or contributing essays to the same volume. There were differences between them, too. Unlike Washington, Chesnutt was a white-looking African American. Unlike Washington, who was born into slavery, Chesnutt came from a family that had been free people of color in North Carolina before the Civil War. An accomplished autodidact, Chesnutt learned classical and modern languages largely on his own. In contrast, Washington was educated at Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute, a background that shaped his commitment to training in agriculture and industry as the education most likely to ensure economic advancement for formerly enslaved people and improve their social standing in the South.
Their exchanges reveal abundant good will between the two men as they exchanged favors and helped each other. Chesnutt twice favorably reviewed Washington's The Future of the American Negro (1899)—in the Saturday Evening Post and in The Critic, and in one instance Chesnutt asked Washington if he might assist in the reception of his novel about the Wilmington, NC, coup and race massacre, The Marrow of Tradition. He wrote to Washington,
If you feel moved, after reading it, to write a word or two, concerning it, I am sure it would be highly appreciated by my publishers and myself; or if you find it too strenuous for you to publicly approve, I feel pretty certain that in private you can do it almost as much good. I should like to . . . retain the popular sympathy of the Northern people, which has been so sorely weakened by Southern deviltry in the past decade.[14]Later in the letter Chesnutt wonders if Washington might use his sway to get President Theodore Roosevelt to read the novel, and a month later he reminded his friend that "You and your machinery can do a great deal to further its reading."[15]
The two men also disagreed, both in public and at times quite forcefully in private letters. Although Chesnutt gave Washington's The Future of the American Negro positive reviews, in private he had grave reservations. The book offered a history of African Americans, an argument for "industrial education," and encouragement to Southern leaders to do right by Blacks. Washington wrote, "By the present policy of non-interference on the part of the North and the federal government the South is given a sacred trust. How will she execute this trust? The world is waiting and watching to see."[16] Chesnutt's review does not take issue with Washington's description of the federal government's retreat from civil rights enforcement, but in his letter to Washington he is acerbic: "I doubt whether sacred is quite the word for a trust which was acquired by highway robbery of another class!" And he made clear his view of Southern whites:
They seem to me, as a class, barring a few honorable exceptions, an ignorant, narrow and childish people—. . . I make no pretense of any special love for them. I was brought up among them; I have a large share of their blood in my veins; I wish them well, and first of all I wish that they may learn to do justice. . . . I admire your Christ-like spirit in loving the Southern whites, but I confess I am not up to it.[17]Even as he claims to admire Washington's magnanimity, Chesnutt questions the wisdom of Washington's conciliatory attitude.
The correspondence also illuminates the two men's disagreement on the franchise. After visiting Tuskegee in the spring of 1901, Chesnutt declared in The Cleveland Leader that he found the school to be "a revelation," and that he left feeling that "industrial education is the only education worthy of consideration for colored people, or people of any other sort." But he then qualified this assesement, adding "sober reflection reveals what is needed beyond."[18] The "beyond" was access to all types of higher education and to the vote. Chesnutt did not go to college, but he made sure all of his children completed degrees in the liberal arts (at Smith College, Case Western Reserve University, and Harvard University), and to him the franchise was the right fundamental to all others. In 1903, Washington, Chesnutt, and Du Bois all contributed to The Negro Problem, a book of essays by an array of Black leaders published by James Pott & Co. In his contribution to the volume, "The Disfranchisement of the Negro," Chesnutt outlines the violence, degradation, predation, and injustices that Blacks are vulnerable to when constables, judges, and lawmakers need not worry about securing the votes of Black men. He also makes a more fundamental constitutional argument, insisting that "[T]he right of American citizens of African descent, commonly called Negroes, to vote upon the same terms as other citizens of the United States, is plainly declared . . . by the Constitution."[19] In his view, Blacks should not have to argue for their rights—the 14th amendment had answered that question—and he observes that Washington's "utterances [on this issue] have not always been so wise nor so happy."[20] He laments that Washington's public acceptance of restricted suffrage for Blacks encouraged white political leaders like Senator Samuel D. McEnery of Louisiana to consider such ready acceptance evidence of Black inferiority. Chesnutt had no patience with what he considered sophistry:
The time to philosophize about the good there is in evil is not while its correction is still possible, but, if at all after all hope of correction is past. Until then it calls for nothing but rigorous condemnation. To try to read any good thing into these fraudulent Southern constitutions, or to accept them as an accomplished fact, is to condone a crime against one's race. Those who commit crime should bear the odium. It is not a pleasing spectacle to see the robbed applaud the robber. Silence were better.[21]These were sharp words for a friend, but Chesnutt was troubled by Washington's public acquiescence in his statements regarding Jim Crow segregation and the disenfranchisement of Black voters in the South.
The letters between these two men are particularly moving since they reveal that Chesnutt never learned of his friend's secret efforts to advance voting rights. Unbeknownst to Chesnutt, who lamented the U.S. Supreme Court's repeated undermining of civil rights laws and protections, Washington surreptitiously provided financial support to law suits challenging segregation and restrictive voting laws. In their letters, there are no references to Washington providing funds for the Alabama voting rights case Giles v. Harris, a case Chesnutt watched closely and lamented when the Supreme Court upheld the state's restrictive voter qualifications. The exchanges reveal a fascinating friendship that included much warmth and good will yet that also had limits because Washington never believed he could risk being open about his behind-the-scenes maneuvering. On a letter about lynching, Washington wrote at the top "confidential and private," implying that he was giving Chesnutt a view of his private thoughts on sensitive matters, but this was illusory.[22] Letters are sometimes as revealing in what they do not say as in what they do, and scholars who have tried to make sense of Booker T. Washington's political strategy and complex maneuverings will find in these letters much to ponder.[23]
Correspondence is tantalizing. Writing intended to be read by only one person promises access to intimate thoughts, both unvarnished and guarded opinions, glimpses of how a voice and style we know from published work may be far more labile and dependent on recipient and topic. Editions of correspondence also provide details and facts—about dates, locations, finances, and relationships. When we have both sides and drafts, the revisions, misspellings, silences, and gaps are also telling. This edition of Chesnutt's correspondence strives to open doors to an array of insights.
Methods
The digital edition of Chesnutt's correspondence (incoming, outgoing, and drafts) complies with current technical standards. The correspondence is an integral part of The Charles W. Chesnutt Archive, a longstanding open-access digital archive hosted at the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities (CDRH) at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. The correspondence can be searched alongside the entire archive, and faceted searches allow filtering by date and genre such as correspondence, novel, story, and essay. For each item we provide a digital scan of the original (if available) and a transcription of the body of the letter, as well as transcriptions of any revisions or notes on the page and the letterhead. Letters that are part of a series are linked to the previous or subsequent letter, and at the bottom of each letter is a biographical note on recipient, and annotations of people, places, events, and works mentioned in the letter. The edition is also accompanied by a catalog of all known letters, the first of its kind for Chesnutt, and the catalog can be sorted by recipient, writer, date, or repository. The edition has achieved an expansive and fully operable state, and we are prepared for further additions and enrichment. We have established metadata and editorial protocols, templates for encoding, and workflow processes that ensure items added in the future will be treated similarly.
All letters are encoded in the latest version (P5) of TEI-compliant XML,[24] and the metadata follows the Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard (METS). We document our editing practices in detail, so that later editors will understand what we did and why, and our XML for every letter is easily available and downloadable as a batch from our public repository on GitHub. We have used a modular publishing software developed by the CDRH that utilizes a data repository to format, store, and manipulate the TEI and other data; an Application Programming Interface (API) to power the site's data, indexes, and search; and software called Orchid to power the front end of the website. The layout and design are mobile-device ready, and all software is publicly available in the Center's GitHub archive and continuously improved. The API is based on the OpenAPI specification and enables others to reuse materials in new and innovative ways.
We also include item-level rights statements in the XML that indicate the different layers of sourcing and how different assets can be used by others. Transcriptions are accompanied by images of the manuscript pages whenever possible, and we transcribe and encode all details, including names and addresses on letterhead and such marks as strikethroughs, additions, and other aspects of the originals. Recognizing that the documentation of African American lives has often been sparse, our annotations are detailed and, as possible, we identify individuals, events, places, and obscure terms. We also cross reference other letters and link to material elsewhere on the Archive. All transcriptions, encoding, and annotations are proofed a minimum of three times, in accordance with Association for Documentary Editing guidelines. Editing Chesnutt's correspondence comprehensively online sometimes involves revising materials previously presented in print, as well as gathering many significant items never before treated. With regard to the work of previous editors of Chesnutt, we quote or cite helpful annotations within the limits of fair use; in other cases, we paraphrase and reconceptualize earlier findings; and we extend, refine, or contradict claims made by previous editors when new information or a differing perspective so dictates.
In addition to these technical and editorial protocols, the correspondence project has also embraced an ethos of community engagement. As a first step, when we were preparing to redesign the site to accommodate the correspondence, we commissioned original art. Kat Wiese, a mixed-race artist whose work has explored racial identity, created images based on portraits and photographs of Chesnutt, covers of his books, and images of his manuscripts. Her art is now integrated into the site, serving as banners and backgrounds in the correspondence wing and throughout. We made a second and deeper commitment to working in community when we decided to make the letters held at Cleveland's Western Reserve Historical Society (WRHS) the focus of the first installment of the edition. Although Chesnutt grew up in Fayetteville, NC, and is often associated with the South, he was born in Cleveland, returned when he was twenty-five, and is buried there. WRHS, which holds the second largest collection of Chesnutt letters, was an enthusiastic partner, and encouraged us to extend our Cleveland collaborations to include the African American Archives Auxiliary of WRHS, Chesnutt PEP (a school on the site of Chesnutt's Cleveland home), Cleveland Public Library, area professors and students, the Rust Belt Humanities Lab (based at Ursuline College), and the Black-owned Third Space Reading Room. During regular visits to WRHS we also contributed by helping to organize, fund, or otherwise support such events as a poetry reading at Third Space and the annual High Tea of the African American Archives Auxiliary. We presented alongside the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture at the Langston Hughes Public Library to community members interested in cultural memory and preservation, and we joined a day of Chesnutt activities at Chesnutt PEP, as well as a day-long symposium on public humanities in Northeast Ohio hosted by the Rust Belt Humanities Lab. In addition, Cleveland undergraduate students have worked as interns on the project, received training from the CDRH team, and contributed directly to the transcribing, encoding, and annotating of letters. They have also traveled to Lincoln, Nebraska, for additional training and a deeper introduction to the work of a research-oriented digital humanities center. All individuals who contribute to the editing of individual letters are credited by name.
Our community work has been shaped by the ideas and experiences of many others, particularly those who have developed approaches and frameworks for community-based digital projects.[25] It has taken years for us to form these Cleveland relationships, and each has been undertaken with the understanding that collaborations must be open-ended and not driven by any urgency on our end for particular and preconceived outcomes about what will be of direct use to the correspondence project. We have discovered that over time such collaborations, maintained and honored, do in fact shape the archive's contents and our priorities as editors. We also recognize that community work, travel and paid internships require funds above and beyond what is available at our universities, and we are immensely grateful to the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (part of the National Archives) for three successive annual grants. We believe that the Chesnutt correspondence project is now woven into existing and emerging local initiatives in education and public history, that what we have learned will shape our work with other repositories and communities and that by sharing our experiences we can contribute to ongoing efforts to think about archives and editions in new ways. We hope that we will be able to obtain future funding so that the full potential of this edition can be realized.
For Chesnutt and education, see Adam Fairclough, A Class of Their Own: Black Teachers in the Segregated South (Harvard University Press, 2007). For additional discussions of his legal thinking, see Daniel J. Sharfstein's "The Secret History of Race in the United States," Yale Law Journal 112, no. 6 (2003), 1473-1510, and Trinyan Mariano, "The Law of Torts and the Logic of Lynching in Charles Chesnutt's "The Marrow of Tradition," PMLA 128, no. 3 (2013), 559-574. For Chesnutt and passing, see Allyson Hobbs, A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life (Harvard University Press, 2014), 73-76 and 112-119. For Chesnutt's influence in Cleveland, see William W. Giffin, "Mobilization of Black Militiamen in World War I: Ohio's Ninth Battalion," The Historian 40, no. 4 (1978), 686-703. His travels across the U.S. are discussed in Mark S. Foster, "In the Face of ‘Jim Crow': Prosperous Blacks and Vacations, Travel and Outdoor Leisure, 1890-1945," The Journal of Negro History 84, no. 2 (1999), 130-149. ↩
Chesnutt's revisions to his fiction range from major changes to plot and character to tweaks to phrasing and word choice both in initial drafting and also on galley proofs. His revisions of the short story "Rena," which eventually became The House Behind the Cedars are evident in the abundance of extant manuscripts which show him at work. In another case, when he revised the magazine version of "The Conjurer's Revenge" for its appearance in The Conjure Woman he made hundreds of changes to Julius's narrative and to the rendering of dialect. ↩
20 May 1898 draft, Chesnutt Collection, Fisk University, Box 1, folder 6. Final version, 20 May 1898, "To Be an Author": Letters of Charles W. Chesnutt, ed. Joseph R. McElrath, Jr. and Robert C. Leitz, III (Princeton University Press, 1997), 65-68. ↩
Cable and Chesnutt met December 21, 1888, at an event in Cleveland. They began corresponding immediately, and Cable visited the Chesnutt home in the fall of 1889. For two years, their correspondence was frequent, typically about Cable's political efforts on race issues, Chesnutt's writings, and recent publications. ↩
Chesnutt to Cable 13 June 1890, "To Be an Author", 68 n5. The draft and the letter are not yet published on the Archive. ↩
Chesnutt to Cable, 3 May 1889, holograph draft, Chesnutt Collection, Fisk University, Box 1, folder 5. On the back of one sheet are Chesnutt's calculation, a long list of numbers tallied up to equal $250.65, the monthly income that led him to tell Cable that he could not accept the position since the salary Cable was offering, $1200 or $1500, would mean cutting his annual income in half. See also the final version of the Chesnutt to Cable, 3 May 1889 letter. ↩
The first misspelling of Chesnutt's name is in Cable to Chesnutt 30 May 1889, which is followed by a 16 September 1889 letter from Cable's secretary Adeline Moffat, who also spells it as "Chestnutt," and a 25 September 1889 letter from Cable that makes an additional error: "Chestnut." These letters are in the Chesnutt Collection, Fisk University, Box 1, folder 6. They are not yet published on the Archive. For more on the correspondence between Cable and Chesnutt, as well as transcriptions of both sides (which includes silent emendations of Cable's misspellings of Chesnutt's name), see Matthew Wilson and Marjan A. van Schaik, "The Letters of George Washington Cable to Charles W. Chesnutt," Modern Language Studies, vol. 36, no. 2, 2007, 8–41. ↩
Chesnutt to John Patterson Green, 13 February 1899, Box 5, John Patterson Green Papers, Western Reserve Historical Society (not yet published on the Chesnutt Archive). All elements of the letter—date, salutation, and body—are in French. ↩
Booker T. Washington, The Future of the American Negro (Small, Maynard, 1902), 184. ↩
"A Visit to Tuskegee," in Charles W. Chesnutt: Essays and Speeches, ed. Joseph R. McElrath, Jr., Robert C. Leitz, III, and Jesse S. Crisler (Stanford University Press, 1999), 146. ↩
"The Disfranchisement of the Negro," in The Negro Problem (J. Pott & Company, 1903), 77. ↩
"The Disfranchisement of the Negro," 110. ↩
"The Disfranchisement of the Negro," 111. ↩
For an insightful recent discussion of Washington's reliance on "deception," see Desmond Jagmohan, "Booker T. Washington and the Politics of Deception" in African American Political Thought: A Collected History, eds. Melvin Rogers and Jack Turner (University of Chicago Press, 2021), 167-191. ↩
TEI encoding guidelines, first established in 1987 by the Text Encoding Initiative, are widely used by humanities projects. Unlike HTML, it is primarily semantic rather than presentational. ↩
To name only a few of the works we have drawn on: P. Gabrielle Foreman, "Black Organizing, Print Advocacy, and Collective Authorship: The Long History of the Colored Conventions Movement," in The Colored Conventions Movement: Black Organizing in the Nineteenth Century, ed. P. Gabrielle Foreman, Jim Casey, and Sarah Lynn Patterson (University of North Carolina Press, 2021), 21-71; Amy Earhart, "Can We Trust the University?: Digital Humanities Collaborations with Historically Exploited Cultural Communities," in Bodies of Information: Intersectional Feminism and the Digital Humanities, ed. Elizabeth Losh and Jacqueline Wernimont (University of Minnesota Press, 2018), 369-390; and Siobhan Senier, "An Indigenist Internet for Indigenous Futures: DH Beyond the Academy and ‘Preservation'," in Alternative Historiographies of the Digital Humanities, ed. Dorothy Kim and Adeline Koh (Punctum Books, 2021), 401-426. ↩