Kelly Miller to Charles W. Chesnutt, 5 October 1903
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KELLY MILLER,
PROFESSOR OF MATHEMATICS,
HOWARD UNIVERSITY.1
WASHINGTON, D.C.Oct 5" 1903
Mr Chas W Chesnutt,
Cleveland Ohio.
Dear Mr. Chesnutt:
I am sending you some clippings from the Boston Transcript which I hope will interest you. I suppose that I may as well confess authorship of the articles in question.2
I will be in Cleveland in a few weeks in attendance upon the American Missionary Association, when I shall hope to see you.3
Yours truly Kelly MillerCorrespondent: Kelly Miller (1863–1939) was a mathematician and sociologist from South Carolina who received his B.A. at Howard University in 1886 and was the first Black student to attend Johns Hopkins University (1887-1889), where he studied mathematics and physics. He began teaching mathematics at Howard in 1890 and founded the university's sociology department. Eventually he taught exclusively sociology, while also serving as dean of Howard's College of Arts and Sciences and publishing widely in the popular and academic press on the political and social plight of the Black community. Originally part of Booker T. Washington's Committee of Twelve along with Chesnutt, he also co-founded the Niagara Movement with W. E. B. Du Bois, and later assisted him at the NAACP's journal, The Crisis. Despite his outspoken criticism of Booker T. Washington both in anonymous and signed articles and books, Miller often played a mediating role between what he termed "Conservatives" and "Radicals" in the Black movement of his day.
1. A private university in Washington, D.C., Howard University was founded in 1867 as one of the first Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU) by Oliver Otis Howard (1930–1909), the commissioner of the Freedmen's Bureau from 1865 to 1874. Chesnutt visited Howard University on his first trip to Washington, in 1879 (Charles W. Chesnutt, The Journals of Charles W. Chesnutt, ed. Richard Brodhead, [Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993], 116). His son-in-law Edward Williams (1871–1929) was head librarian at Howard from 1916 to his death in 1929; his son-in-law John G. Slade (1890–1976) attended Howard medical school, and his grandson Charles Waddell Chesnutt Williams (1909–1939) earned a B.A. and law degree from Howard.[back]
2. The enclosed articles were likely Kelly Miller's two-part essay "Washington's Policy," Boston Transcript (September 18, 1903): 8 and (September 19, 1903): 22, signed "FAIR PLAY." It was later revised as an essay famously distinguishing the "Conservatives" and the "Radicals" among Black activists, in Miller's 1908 collection Race Adjustment (New York and Boston: Neale Publishing): 11–27. But Miller may have authored other pieces in the Boston Transcript that were enclosed. For example, an anonymous review of the just-published The Negro Problem, briefly mentioning Chesnutt's essay on the "Negro Franchise," was published on September 30, 1903: 18, and would obviously also have interested Chesnutt.[back]
3. The American Missionary Association held its 57th Annual Meeting October 20–22, 1903, at the Plymouth Congregational Church in Cleveland, Ohio. Kelly Miller (1863–1939) of Howard University spoke on "The Higher Education of the Negro"; see The American Missionary, vol. 57, no.10, December 1903, 308–325.[back]
