Charles W. Chesnutt to Booker T. Washington, 13 March 1901
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not answ'd2/16 193-CA-9 5 64 Brenton St., Cleveland, O., March 13, 1901. My dear Mr. Washington:-
I arrived safely home, after a roundabout trip with numerous stops1, and have brought with me many pleasant impressions of Tuskegee2, and of the great work you have under way there. I habve put some of my impressions in the shape of letters to the Boston Transcript, which will no doubt see the light, unless I have delayed them too long. I hope they may please you.3
But, personally, I don't like the South. I couldn't tell the people any better place to go to, and I hope they may work out— a happy destiny there; you are certainly doing a great deal to help them to that end. I hope to meet you sometime at the North, and meantime I remain,
Yours cordially, Chas. W. Chesnutt Booker T. Washington, Esq.Correspondent: Booker T. Washington (1856–1913), one of the most well-known Black activists of the early 20th century, was born into slavery in Virginia; in 1881, he became the principal of what would become the Tuskegee Institute, advocating widely as a speaker and writer for technical education for Blacks, whose entry into American industry and business leadership he believed to be the road to equality. His political power was significant, but because he frequently argued for compromise with White Southerners, including on voting rights, he was also criticized by other Black activists, especially by W. E. B. Du Bois.
1. Chesnutt visited Wilmington, North Carolina, to research the 1898 Wilmington Massacre, a White supremacist uprising that targeted Black elected officials in the city government of Wilmington, NC and resulted in an estimated 60 to possibly 300 Black citizens being killed, in order to write his novel The Marrow of Tradition. Although he seems to have conceived of this trip in the fall of 1900, he did not begin his journey until February 6, 1901, and combined it with a series of readings across the South.[back]
2. The Tuskegee Institute (now Tuskegee University), in Tuskegee, Alabama, evolved from the Tuskegee Normal School for Colored Teachers, founded in 1881, with Booker T. Washington as its principal. It became a leading educational institution for Blacks in the South, emphasizing teacher training and industrial education. Chesnutt, who had himself been the principal of a Black normal school in the early 1880s, first visited Tuskegee in February 1901, and remained well-informed about and personally connected with the institution all his life.[back]
3. Chesnutt lectured at the Tuskegee Institute on Februrary 19, 1901, during a research and lecture trip to the South. He described his impressions after his return in the Boston Transcript in "The Black and the White" and "The Negro's Franchise" as well as in the Cleveland Leader article "A Visit to Tuskegee".[back]
