Charles W. Chesnutt to Booker T. Washington, 16 November 1901
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CHAS. W. CHESNUTT
ATTORNEY-AT-LAW,
1005 WILLIAMSON BUILDING
CLEVELAND O.
November 16, 1901.
My Dear Mr. Washington:-
Your personal letter of November 11th is before me. I am sorry to know that you have been unwell, and hope that ere this you have recovered your usual vigor. I feel complimented at your having read "The Marrow of Tradition"1 so promptly, and I need not say that I appreciate in the highest degree your commendation of the work. I have a letter from T. Thomas Fortune2, from which I quote a line or two:
"I have just finished reading 'The Marrow of Tradition'. I thank God that He has given you genius to write such a work. It is the strongest work of fiction on our side since 'Uncle Tom's Cabin'3, which it equals in dramatic power and excels in plot and literary finish. I would not be surprised if it should work such a revolution in public sentiment as 'Uncle Tom's Cabin' wrought, at any venture it will accomplish vast good."
I have taken a leaf from your own experience in regard to this book. I think that although you draw the sinews of war from the white people, your own influence is vastly strengthened by the fact that you have the moral support of the best element of our own people. It is a source of much satisfaction to me to have men of your stamp and that of Mr. Fortune's approve this book and recognize its evident purpose. I sincerely hope for several reasons that it may do some little good. I have no doubt that you can find a dozen ways, without any embarrassment to yourself, in which you can induce people to read this book. The southern whites are filling the eastern papers with pleas for sympathy in their hard situation; I have done my best to give the southern blacks a hearing.
I hear from my daughter occasionally; she is pleased with her work and likes to think that she is helping on a good cause.4 Mrs. Chesnutt joins me in regards to yourself and Mrs. Washington.
Cordially yours, Chas. W. Chesnutt Mr. Booker T. Washington Tuskegee.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 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]
2. Timothy Thomas Fortune (1856–1928) was a Black journalist and leading activist from the 1880s to the 1910s. He was publisher and editor of the New York Age, at the time the most prominent Black newspaper in the nation. The National Afro-American League (later Council) founded by him in the 1890s was a forerunner of the NAACP. [back]
3. 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, relying on sentimentality, and advocating emigration. A number of reviews (and Houghton, Mifflin & Company in its advertisements) drew comparisons between Uncle Tom's Cabin and The Marrow of Tradition. [back]
4. Ethel Perry Chesnutt Williams (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 (1871–1929), then head librarian at Western Reserve University in Cleveland. Their only child was Charles Waddell Chesnutt Williams (1903–1940). After several years spent in Cleveland in 1909, the Williamses moved to Washington, D.C., where Ethel continued to live and work after her husband's death in 1929; in the early 1930s, she was working as a social worker (home visitor) for Associated Charities of Washington, a poverty-relief umbrella organization. By 1939, she had remarried; her spouse was Rev. Joseph N. Beaman (1868–1943). [back]
