Charles W. Chesnutt to Booker T. Washington, 5 November 1901
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CHAS. W. CHESNUTT,
ATTORNEY-AT-LAW,
1005 WILLIAMSON BUILDING
CLEVELAND, O. November 5, 1901.
Booker T. Washington, Esq.,
Tuskegee, Ala.
My dear Mr. Washington,-
Your kind favor of October 28th is before me. Replying first to a question that you ask me, I would say that I started to read "The Crisis"1 but got switched off before I finished it. It is said to be quite a good novel, although the best critics say it lacks several of the elements of greatness. It is in the popular vein, which is sufficient to account in large measure for its popularity.
Yes, I have seen something of the storm that has been blowing down your way, and like you I think that everything of the sort will tend in the end toward the result which we seek. I think, however, that the feeling manifested by southern expressions concerning the little incident is very deep-seated.2 Underneath it all lies the fear of what they consider corruption of blood. But whatever they may call it or consider it, I think that it would be vastly preferable to the sort of thing toward which they are tending under the present condition of things.
I quite agree with you that the medium of fiction offers a golden opportunity to create sympathy throughout the country for our cause. It has been the writings of Harris3 and Page4 and others of that ilk which haves furnished my chief incentive to write something upon the other side of this very vital question. I know I am on the weaker side in point of popular sympathy, but I am on the stronger side in point of justice and morality, and if I can but command the skill and the power to compel attention, I think I will win out in the long run, so far as I am personally concerned, and will help the cause, which is vastly more important. I am really inclined to think from the reception so far accorded to "The Marrow of Tradition"5 that I may have "arrived" with this book. You and your machinery6 can do a great deal to further its reading.
For instance, your Mr. Robert W. Taylor7 called on me the other day while in Cleveland. I gave him a copy of the book. He writes me from Boston that he has read it with great interest and spoken of it widely, that a number have promised to buy it and that, in his opinion, it is bound to make a great hit. He has also dropped the suggestion here and there that I can be secured for lectures—for all which I am under obligations both to him and to Tuskegee8.
I see that you received pronounced attentions at Yale College.9
Everything that you accomplish, every upward step that you may take redounds to the credit and advances the interests of millions of people. I for one am most sincerely and unselfishly delighted at all of your successes.
Very cordially yours, Chas. W. Chesnutt.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 president 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 Crisis (1901) was a historial novel about the Civil War, set mostly in St. Louis, Missouri, by White American novelist Winston Churchill (1871–1947; no relation to the British Prime Minister of the same name). Its focus was the reconciliation of White Northerners and Southerners. [back]
2. On October 16, 1901, Booker T. Washington dined at the White House at the invitation of President Theodore Roosevelt, an event that was widely reported. Washington also references this dinner in his letter to Chesnutt of October 28, 1901. [back]
3. Joel Chandler Harris (1848–1908) was a White writer from Georgia most famous for his "Bre'r Rabbit" stories, which were based on African-American animal folklore he heard during his youth. Set on an antebellum plantation, they featured an enslaved storyteller, Uncle Remus, to whom Chesnutt's Uncle Julius was sometimes compared. Chesnutt distinguishes his Julius stories from Harris's Remus stories in "Superstitions and Folk-Lore of the South," published in Modern Culture in May 1901 and "The Negro in Books," a speech delivered in 1916. [back]
4. Thomas Nelson Page (1853–1922) was a White writer and lawyer from Virginia who glorified the antebellum South in his fiction and nonfiction, beginning with his "Marse Chan" stories published in Century Magazine. Chesnutt frequently criticized Page's writings; see Chesnutt's retrospective assessment in "Post-Bellum—Pre-Harlem" (1931). [back]
5. The Marrow of Tradition was published by Houghton, Mifflin & Company 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 300 Black citizens, and terrorized several thousand who fled the city and never returned. [back]
6. While probably a reference to the effective public relations organization Booker T. Washington had built at Tuskegee, the phrase "Tuskegee Machine" was used critically by W. E. B. Du Bois and others in these years for Washington's political and financial control over a broad swath of Black newspapers, organizations, leaders, and schools. [back]
7. Robert Wesley Taylor, an 1890 Tuskegee Institute graduate, was at this time financial secretary of Tuskegee and a key fund-raiser and speaker for the institute in the Northern states. He had just published the fundraising pamphlet Harriet Tubman: The Heroine in Ebony (1901). [back]
8. The Tuskegee Institute (now University), in Tuskegee, Alabama, evolved from the Tuskegee Normal School for Colored Teachers, founded in 1881, with Booker T. Washington as its first president. 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]
9. The Bicentennial celebrations at Yale University on October 23 and 24, 1901, included both President Theodore Roosevelt and Booker T. Washington as guests of honor just a week after their dinner together. [back]
