Charles W. Chesnutt to Booker T. Washington, 11 August 1903

  CHAS. W. CHESNUTT 1005 WILLIAMSON BUILDING. CLEVELAND. O. T Personal. Cleveland, O.,August 11, 1903. 133 My dear Dr. Washington:-

I should have replied sooner to your private and confidential letter of July 7th, but have been very busy, and could not find time to express myself as I would like to—will probably not do that even here.¹

Permit me to express my strong disapproval of the conduct of Mr. Trotter² and his adherents at your Boston meeting³. A man who has a cause, or thinks he has a cause, which cannot be presented, at the proper time and place, in calm and dignified argument, has mistaken his calling as an advocate.

Replying to that portion of your letter in which you invite the expression of my opinion on matters pertaining to the race, I wish to say that I differ from you most decidedly on the matter of a restricted franchise. It is an issue gotten up solely to disfranchise the Negroes, and with no serious intention of ever applying it to any one else. I see nothing at all to justify what you term "the protection of the ballot, for a while at least, either by an educational test, property test, or by both combined."⁴ It is a complete acquiescence in the withdrawal of the ballot from the Negro, and his entire deprivation of any representation; it means that you are willing, in your own State and county, to throw yourself upon the mercy of the whites, rather than to claim your share in your own government under a free franchise. You may reply that you would have to do it anyway. But you need not approve of it, thereby tying the hands of the friends of the race who would be willing and able to cry out against the injustice. The little handful of colored voters registered in Alabama, for instance, cut no figure in the general result of an election.⁵ The State of Mississippi, where the ballot is "protected" in the manner you approve of, has just nominated a governor⁶ and a U.S. Senator⁷ on an anti-negro platform. The world is not having long to wait nor much need to watch, to see how the white South, under the policy of non-interference, is carrying out its "sacred trust"—I doubt whether "sacred" is quite the word for a trust which was acquired by highway robbery of another class. Your qualification that "whatever tests are required, they should be made to apply with equal and exact justice to both races," would be all right if we could see or hope for any disposition on the part of even a decent minority of Southern white men to apply these tests fairly.⁸ I for one prefer to wait until I see this disposition before I will agree that the ballot should be "protected" by restrictions which have but one purpose and can have but one result—to deny the colored race all representation. Such a restriction could never be fair so long as there remained any disparity in the condition of the races, so long as there was any race question in Southern politics; and therefore it could never be fair in your lifetime or mine.

Nor do I think it the part of policy to dwell too much upon the weakness of the Negro race. That their condition should be lowly, in view of their antecedents, is entirely natural, and scarcely calls for any lengthy disquisitions. It is altogether contrary to the   CHAS W. CHESNUTT

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CLEVELAND, O. -2- 134 spirit of our institutions and to the Constitution to pick out any one class of people, differentiated from the rest by color or origin or anything else, make some average deduction concerning their capacity, and then proceed to measure their rights by this standard. Every individual Negro, weak or strong, is entitled to the same rights before the law as every individual white man, whether weak or strong; nor is there any good reason in law, in morals or anywhere else, why the strong Negro should have his rights and opportunities measured by those of the weak. I think that by recognizing and dwelling upon these distinctions, and suggesting different kinds of education and different degrees of political power and all that sort of thing for the colored people, we are merely intensifying the class spirit which is fast robbing them of every shadow of right. Let the white man dwell upon the weakness of the Negro, if he will; it is not a matter which you or I need to emphasize. The question with which, in principalle, we have to deal, is not the question of the Negro race; what the black race has or has not been able to do in Africa should no more enter into the discussion of the Negro's rights as a citizen, than what the Irish have not done in Ireland should be the basis of their citizenship here. We are directly concerned with the interests of some millions of American citizens of more or less mixed descent, whose rights are fixed by the Constitution and laws of the United States; nor am I ready yet to accept the doctrine that those constitutional rights are mere waste paper. The Supreme Court may assent to their nullification, but we ought not to accept its finding as conclusive: there is still the court of public opinion to which we may find appeal.⁹

You speak of Jim Crow work for Negroes at the North; I am unable to think of any colored man in this city, possessed of any art or trade, who cannot find employment and earn a living at it. There are plenty of them in shops and factories, sometimes as foremen, and they are not badly represented in offices and stores. All the Negroes down South must ride in the Jim Crow cars. Northern prejudice at least discriminates; Southern prejudice doesn't. I would by no means confound the good Southerners with the bad. Judge Jones is a noble man and worthy of all praise; I only wish he represented a larger constituency. But the white South insists upon judging the Negro as a class. They themselves must be measured by the same rules ;, must be judged by the laws they make, the customs they follow and the crimes they commit, under color of law, against colored people. They seem to me, as a class, barring a few honorable exceptions, an ignorant, narrow and childish people—as inferior to the white people of the North—barring a few of the lower class—as the Southern Negroes are said to be to the whites of that section. 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. My love I keep for my friends, and my friends are those who treat me fairly. I admire your Christ-like spirit in loving the Southern whites, but I confess I am not up to it.

I have taken occasion in the article which I have written for James Pott & Company, to express my disagreement with you upon the matter of the suffrage.¹⁰ I have done so without heat, and with what I meant to make ample recognition of your invaluable services to   CHAS W. CHESNUTT

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CLEVELAND, O. -3- 135 the country. If I have not said more along that line, it was because I could not believe that anything I might say would add in any degree to your well won fame. But I believe in manhood suffrage, especially now, and especially for the Negro. And I do not believe in a silent submission to any form of injustice.

I think the feeling with reference to yourself on the part of some colored men, which has resulted in occasional and sometimes very unjust and rancorous criticism—a feeling which seems to puzzle you, and which is not very easily explainable,—may grow out of a somewhat obscure consciousness of this fact:— No man living in the heart of the South, and conducting there a great institution¹¹ in the midst of a hostile race, can possibly be in a position to speak always frankly and fearlessly concerning the rights of his people. He is not at liberty to express that manly indignation which is always the natural and often the most effective way to meet injustice. He must choose his words; he must trim his sails; he must apply the salve so soon after the blow, that it takes away all the sting of the lash. I do not believe there is in the United States another colored man, situated as you are, who could have said even as much by way of criticism of the Southern whites as you have said. But I still recognize the limitation. But you Southern educators are all bound up with some one special cause or other, devotion to which sometimes unconsciously warps your judgment as to what is best for the general welfare of the race. Your institution, your system of education, whatever it may be, is too apt to dwarf everything else and become the sole remedy for social and political evils which have a much wider basis. The civil and political rights of the Negro would be just as vital and fundamental if there were no question at all of the education of the Southern Negro. It is not at all essential to the comparative happiness of the race that they should be highly educated in any particular way; they might be happy in comparative ignorance if they had the same education and the same chances as the other people among whom they live. It is the differences which make the trouble. Educate them all to a high degree and leave the same inequalities, and as old Ben Tillman¹² is so fond of saying—he occasionally tells the truth by accident—you merely shift the ground of the problem, you do not alter its essential features.

Permit me to compliment you upon the pamphlet on lynching¹³; I do not see that the President's is any more forceful. His letter, in spite of all its noble sentiment, I think unduly magnifies the importance of the crime of rape.¹⁴ It is no worse a crime now than it has always been, and cannot, that I can perceive, deserve any different or greater punishment than it has always had. I do not believe it is any more common than it has always been; and it has only seemed so since the fashion grew up of burning Negroes for it and making display headings in the newspapers upon the subject. In the eye of the law it is no greater crime when committed by a Negro upon a white woman than when committed by a white man upon a Negro woman; and yet from the hysterical utterances on the subject one would be almost inclined to believe that rape committed by a white man upon a white woman was scarcely any offense at all in comparison. It is the rape that is the   CHAS W. CHESNUTT

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CLEVELAND, O. -4- crime, and not the person who commits it; and it is scarcely less unjust to railroad a man to the gallows without opportunity to prepare a defense and give the public time for calm and cool deliberation, than it is to put him out of the way upon the spot with the rope or the torch.

I wish you godspeed in the conversion of the Southern white people; encourage the good ones all you may, but I think the rest of us, when we can get a hearing, should score the bad ones; it will do them good. Your ability and your influence are so great that I should like to see them exerted always in the favor of the highest and the best things, which are also, in the long run, the wisest and the most successful, though perhaps at times not seemingly the most immediately practical. On this franchise proposition I think you are training with the wrong crowd. I wish that you were in a position to undertake the political leadership of the colored race, or that there were one or two men as able and as honest as yourself to do so. I think we might then reasonably hope that the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments would become vitally operative.¹⁵

Cordially yours, Chas. W. Chesnutt. 136