Charles W. Chesnutt to Booker T. Washington, 31 October 1903
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CHAS. W. CHESNUTT
1005 WILLIAMSON BUILDING.
CLEVELAND, O.
Cleveland, O.,Oct. 31, 1903.
Dr. Booker T. Washington,
Tuskegee, Ala.
My dear Dr. Washington:—
Replying to your favor of Oct. 26th, in which you make inquiry concerning the letter addressed to you by Rabbi Moses J. Gries of this city, ‸(which I return) I would say Mr. Gries is pastor of the leading Jewish congregation of Cleveland, ‸(and a very fine man,) and that the lecture work concerning which he writes you is that of the Temple Course, which is a lecture course carried on under the auspices of the Temple congregation.1 They present talent of various sorts; among their oratorical attractions are Thomas Dixon2, Russell Conwell3 and others. Elbert Hubbard4 has lectured to them, and Mayor Sam Jones of Toledo5, and other distinguished men. I have appeared before them myself, but local talent cuts no great figure in such affairs.
5The congregation is made up of Jews, and while a great many people of other creeds patronize the lecture course, I do not imagine there are among them many persons of considerable wealth and social influence, though of course a few such people might be attracted by the presence of a distinguished speaker who could not be heard elsewhere. And Jews, you know, have many charities and philanthropic enterprises of their own, which I imagine require the bulk of their resources available for such purposes.
I read your article in the October "Atlantic,"6 and I agree with it perfectly so far as it preaches the doctrine of labor, patience, and industrial training. I disagree with it most pointedly where, even
CHAS. W. CHESNUTT
1005 WILLIAMSON BUILDING.
CLEVELAND, O.
-2-
6
by inference, the registration of the twenty-five teachers of Tuskegee or even the twenty-five hundred colored voters in Alabama is by inference accepted in lieu of the 180,000 votes to which, under manhood suffrage, the negroes of Alabama would be entitled. I commend to your consideration the editorial7 in the "Independent"8 of this week, which expresses my views upon your work exactly. I had the pleasure of meeting Dr. Ward, the editor of the Independent,9 here a week ago, while he was in attendance upon the American Missionary Association Convention;10 I was invited to lunch with him at the residence of an acquaintance, but was unable to be present, and though I met him afterwards our interview was very brief, and did not touch upon your work. However, he evidently thinks upon the subject just as I do. To my mind it is nothing less than an outrage that the very off-scourings of Europe, and even of Western Asia may pour into this Union ‸almost by the millions annually, and be endued with full citizenship after a year or two of residence, while native-born Americans, who have no interest elsewhere and probably never will have, must be lead[sic] around by the nose as members of a "child race", and be told that they must meekly and patiently await the result of an evolution which may last through several thousand years, before they can stand upon the same level of citizenship which any Sicilian, or Syrian or Turk or Greek or any other sort of European proletary may enjoy in the State of Alabama.
The article in Pott & Co.'s book is the only thing I have published for a year or two, my time having been mainly absorbed in the somewhat prosaic task of earning a living along other lines; but I
CHAS. W. CHESNUTT
1005 WILLIAMSON BUILDING.
CLEVELAND, O.
-3-
hope to do better in the future.11 I hope that you enjoyed your trip to Europe, indeed I do not see how a man of breadth and culture could do otherwise. My daughter, Ethel, whom you know,12 has become within a month the mother of a fine boy.13 She and the child are doing well. Please give my regards to Mrs. Washington and believe me,
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. Rabbi Moses Gries (1868-1918) led Cleveland's Temple congregation (Tifereth Israel) from 1892 to 1917 as a Reformed Rabbi. He was politically progressive and interested in interfaith connections and in education; Chesnutt read excerpts from his stories at the temple in November 1900 (see "Introduction to Temple Course Reading," Essays and Speeches, p.136-139).[back]
2. Thomas Dixon (1864-1946) was a White writer, Baptist minister and politician from North Carolina. Already notorious for speeches and lectures on White supremacy in the 1890s, he wrote fiction in the same vein, including two best-selling novels: The Leopard's Spots (1902) and The Clansman (1905), the latter of which was adapted for the stage and for D.W. Griffith's silent movie The Birth of a Nation (1915). Both novels were published by Doubleday, Page & Co., which also published Chesnutt's The Colonel's Dream in 1905. [back]
3. Russell Conwell (1843-1925) was a White lawyer, Baptist minister, and orator from the Northeast who founded Temple College (now Temple University) in 1888. He became famous for his charismatic speeches and sermons, especially a Chautauqua circuit lecture entitled "Acres of Diamonds," delivered thousands of times from the 1870s on and published in book form in 1890.[back]
4. Elbert Hubbard (1856-1915) was a White writer from Illinois who founded the William Morris-inspired Arts and Crafts community Roycroft in New York in 1895. He expressed his changing political and social views (from promoting socialism and anarchism to advocating American-style capitalism) in his books and on the lecture circuit in the 1890s and 1900s.[back]
5. Samuel Milton "Golden Rule" Jones (1846-1904) was the popular White mayor of Toledo, Ohio from 1897 until his death. Wealthy from oil-related speculation and manufacture, he gained a reputation for treating his workers fairly. As mayor, he advocated for municipal reforms benefiting the working class, first as a Republican and then as an Independent.[back]
6. "The Fruits of Industrial Training" by Booker T. Washington was published in the Atlantic Monthly 92, no. 552 (October 1903): 453-62.[back]
7. "Booker T. Washington," in The Independent, 29 October 1903, Vol. 55, N. 2865, pp. 2590-91, is an unsigned editorial. It mentions W. E. B. Du Bois' and Bishop Turner's criticism of Washington's stance on higher education and the Black vote, but points out that it is not Washington, but White Southern Democrats who are "responsible for the exclusion of negroes from the ballot," and that the most he can be accused of is "prudent reticence" (2591). [back]
8. The New York City-based weekly magazine the Independent argued a Black civil rights platform. The magazine published three of Chesnutt's earliest pieces: "What Is A White Man?" and "The Sheriff's Children" in 1889 and "A Multitude of Counselors" in 1891.[back]
9. William Hayes Ward (1835-1916) was a White Congregationalist minister and writer from Maine. From 1868 to 1913, he served as editor and then editor-in-chief for the New York Independent, which published pieces by Chesnutt and reviews of his work.[back]
10. 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]
11. James Pott & Company was founded by James Pott (1829–1905) in the 1880s; his son James (1859–1931) joined the company in 1884. In January of 1903, the publishing house solicited essays from leading Black American writers for their book The Negro Problem, published September 1903. Chesnutt's contribution, "Disfranchisement of the Negro," was one of seven essays. The other contributors were W. E. B. Du Bois, Booker T. Washington, Paul Laurence Dunbar, T. Thomas Fortune, Wilford H. Smith, and H. T. Keeling [back]
12. 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]
13. Charles Waddell Chesnutt Williams (1903-1939) was the older of Chesnutt's two grandchildren and the only child of his daughter Ethel and her husband Edward C. Williams. He graduated from Howard University in 1926 with a B.A. and from Howard Law School in 1929, and married Colleen Brooks Williams (1904-2006) the following year. His only child and Chesnutt's only great grandchild, Patricia, was born in 1931, the year before Chesnutt's death.[back]
