Charles W. Chesnutt to Booker T. Washington, 8 October 1901
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Said would call to your attention.10/11 194
co 1005 Williamson Building, Cleveland, O. October 8, 1901. My dear Mr. Washington:-
I have just requested my publishers to send you an advance copy of my new novel, "The Marrow of Tradition,"1 which will be out in a week. It is by far the best thing I have done, and is a comprehensive study of racial conditions in the South, in the shape of what is said to be a very dramatic novel, which my publishers boldly compare with Uncle Tom's Cabin for its "Ggreat dramatic intensity and its powerful appeal to popular sympathies."2 It discusses, incidentally, miscegenation, lynching, disfranchisement, separate cars, and the struggle for professional and social progress in an unfriendly environment—and all this without at all interfering with the progress of an interesting plot with which they are all bound up. It is, in a word, our side of the Negro question, in popular form, as you have presented it in the more dignified garb of essay and biography.
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 t it almost as much good. I should like to feel that I had
been able, in the form of a widely popular work of fiction, to do something tangible and worth mentioning to [?] supplement your own work, and to win back or help retain the popular sympathy of the Northern people, which has been so sorely weakened by Southern deviltry in the past decade; for while the tolerance of the South is necessary to the progress of the colored race, and their friendship desirable, you know better than I can how absolutely essential is Northern sympathy yto the work of Southern education.
I have read your utterances on the subject of the president's death, and its connection with national lawlessness; and I say amen to it.3 The country is suffering from blood-poisoning, and the South is the source of the infection. It is refreshing to note the growth of a small party of Southern whites who are beginning to perceive the truth. I see Mr. Page4 has been telling the North Carolinians some wholesome but unpalatable truths;5 my novel will tell them some more in the same strain. I hope they may profit by both.
My daughter is very much pleased with Tuskegee.6 I hope she is making herself useful, and I am glad to be able to contribute through her, a little more work for the good cause.
Cordially yours, Chas. W. Chesnutt. Dr. Booker T. Washington, Tuskegee, Ala.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. The Marrow of Tradition was published by Houghton, Mifflin in October 1901. The novel was a thinly veiled account of the Wilmington Massacre of 1898, a White supremacist coup that overthrew an interracial city government, targeted Black elected officials, killed between 60 and possibly 300 Black citizens, and terrorized several thousand who fled the city and never returned.[back]
2. Uncle Tom's Cabin, the best-selling anti-slavery novel by Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896) was first serialized beginning in 1851 and published in book form the next year. Widely admired for its abolitionism, it was also later criticized for stereotyping Black characters, sentimental language and controversial solutions like emigration. A number of reviews (and Houghton, Mifflin in its advertisements) drew comparisons between Uncle Tom's Cabin and The Marrow of Tradition.[back]
3. On September 5, 1901, President William McKinley was shot by an assassin at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, NY. He died on September 14, 1901, from gangrene or "blood-poisoning," caused by sepsis. Washington issued a statement reported in a number of newspapers that linked "anarchy," the assassination, and lynching as crimes that Americans need to combat. See "Lynching is Held Anarchy: Booker T. Washington Declares in Assassination Nation Reaps What It Is Sowing," Chicago Tribune (September 25, 1901): 5.[back]
4. Walter Hines Page (1855–1918) was a renowned journalist and experienced editor who was born in North Carolina, and rose to fame in the publishing worlds of Boston and New York. In 1895, he began working for Houghton, Mifflin, as literary editor, and eventually as editor-in-chief of their flagship magazine, the Atlantic Monthly. He left in 1899 and eventually founded his own publishing house with a partner, Frank Nelson Doubleday (1862–1934), named Doubleday, Page & Co. Chesnutt and Page corresponded for years.[back]
5. Walter Hines Page's monthly, The World's Work, featured two consecutive articles on race in its October 1901 issue: "Barbarism and Heroism in the South," which decried the actions of a lynch mob in Tennessee, and "No Artificial Solution to the Race 'Problem,'" which advocates against emigration or deportation to Africa (The World's Work 2, no. 6 [October 1901]: 1250-51).[back]
6. Ethel Perry Chesnutt (1879-1958), Chesnutt's eldest daughter, graduated from Smith College in June of 1901 and worked as an instructor at Tuskegee for the academic year 1901-1902. In the fall of 1902, she married her fiancé, Edward C. Williams, then head librarian at Western Reserve University, Cleveland. Their only child, Charles Waddell Chesnutt Williams, was born in 1903. After several years spent in Ohio and Alabama, they moved to Washington, D.C., where Ethel continued to live after her husband's death in 1929.[back]
