Charles W. Chesnutt to Booker T. Washington, 5 February 1906
| Textual Feature | Appearance |
|---|---|
| alterations to base text (additions or deletions) | added or deleted text |
| passage deleted with a strikethrough mark | |
| passage deleted by overwritten added text | Deleted text Added text |
| position of added text (if not added inline) | [right margin] text added in right margin; [above line] text added above the line |
| proofreading mark | ‸ |
| page number, repeated letterhead, etc. | page number or repeated letterhead |
| supplied text | [supplied text] |
| archivist note | archivist note |
CHAS. W. CHESNUTT
1005 WILLIAMSON BUILDING
CLEVELAND, O.
P.S. I mailed this letter to Tuskegee1, but thinking you may be in New York, I send you this duplicate there.2
C.W.C.
Cleveland, February 5, 1906. Dr. Booker T. Washington, Tuskegee, Ala. My dear Mr. Washington:-Miss Mary Kline,3 the daughter of Mr. Virgil P. Kline,4 whom you know (I saw from the paper the other day that his salary as attorney for the Standard Oil is $50,000 a year), called at my office the other day to make a request of me, in fact two requests.
There is being erected in this city a large private school, the Hathaway-Brown school, and Miss Kline is one of a committee of the alumnae of the school who have agreed to raise the sum of $15,000 toward the new structure.5 The greater part of it they have already secured by subscriptions, but they wish to get the remainder by bringing out a special magazine, which they hope to issue about a month hence. There will be an edition of eight or ten thousand copies, and it will circulate among the best people in this and other communities.
Miss Kline's requests were these: first, (probably out of courtesy and in order to pave the way for her other request) that I should make a contribution to the proposed magazine, which I promised to do; second, whether I would write to you and ask if you would do the same. I know that you are a busy man, that your time is fully occupied, and that your words when you choose to put them on paper have a money value. But what could I do? I could only say that I would write to you and ask whether if you found time during the next few weeks, you could write something for Miss Kline's magazine. The subject is left entirely to yourself; she suggested that something about your school or about
CHAS. W. CHESNUT
1005 WILLIAMSON BUILDING
CLEVELAND, O.
BTW-2
education would be entirely acceptable. It would give you an opportunity for a good ad in a quarter where it might be of service to your work, and it would confer a favor upon certain people who have the means to reciprocate.6
Kindly let me know how you feel about this, whether you have the time or the inclination to do it, and oblige
Yours sincerely,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 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]
2. See Emmett J. Scott's letter of February 10, 1906. Booker T. Washington sent the article with his March 9, 1906, letter. [back]
3. Mary Kline Pope (1877–1964) was the older of the daughters of Virgil P. Kline, prominent Cleveland lawyer and acquaintance of Chesnutt's. Both Mary Kline Pope and her sister Minerva Kline Brooks (1883–1929) graduated from Hathaway Brown, a private school for girls. By 1906, Mary Kline was the president of the school's alumnae association and in that capacity approached Chesnutt (and through him Booker T. Washington) to contribute articles to the magazine that was part of her fundraiser to support the completion of the new school buildings on Logan St. [back]
4. Virgil P. Kline (1844–1917) was a prominent White lawyer in Cleveland and a long-time friend of Chesnutt's. For two years after passing the bar in 1887, Chesnutt worked out of the offices of Kline and his law firm partners. Kline represented Standard Oil for 30 years (including in their famous anti-trust court case in the 1890s) and also served as personal attorney to John D. Rockefeller (1839–1937), the head of Standard Oil. Kline was politically active in the Democratic party. [back]
5. The Hathaway Brown school in Cleveland, OH, a private school originally founded as the Brooks School for Ladies in 1876, offered schooling from kindergarten through college prep courses for the daughters of Cleveland's elite. In January of 1901, at the behest of then-owner and headmistress Mary Spencer, Chesnutt read from "The March of Progress" before it was published. The school changed locations and owners frequently in its early years, but in 1905–1906 funding was provided for a new facility on Logan St. (at East 97th St.), partly funded by Cleveland philanthropists and partly by the alumnae association. The site was in use from 1907 to 1927, when the school moved to its current location in Shaker Heights right outside of Cleveland. [back]
6. Only one issue of the Hathaway Brown Magazine was printed, to be sold for fundraising purposes in April 1906 by the alumnae association of the Hathaway Brown School. It included Chesnutt's story "The Prophet Peter" (pp. 51–66) and Booker T. Washington's "The Negro Rural School" (pp. 68–70), which Washington enclosed in his March 9, 1906, letter to Chesnutt. [back]
