Charles W. Chesnutt to Booker T. Washington, 3 November 1906
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CHAS. W. CHESNUTT
1105 WILLIAMSON BUILDING
CLEVELAND, O.
not answr'd 11/6
Cleveland, November 3,
1906.
Dr. Booker T. Washington,
Tuskegee, Ala.
My dear Dr. Washington:-
I beg to acknowledge receipt of your letter of recent date. I note what you say about the franchise in Georgia, and while the riot occurred in Georgia, it was not because the Negroes had exercised the franchise or made any less progress or developed any less strength than elsewhere, but because of a wicked and indefensible effort to disfranchise them.1
I am quite aware that the Negro will not enjoy any large degree of liberty at the South until there has developed in that section a white party which is favorable to his enjoyment of the rights guaranteed by the Constitution of the United States. The rise of such men as Mr. Fleming indicates that this party, while small, is finding a voice.2 Surely no colored man can afford to demand less for his race than a white man is willing to concede, and as I read Mr. Fleming's pamphlet cursorily during a very busy week, he is willing to give them their rights under the Constitution. The scheme proposed in Georgia for the disfranchisement of the Negro is substantially that enacted in Alabama. This Mr. Fleming condemns. He uses this language: "Let us not in cowardice or want of faith needlessly sacrifice our higher ideals of private and public life."3 Manhood suffrage is an ideal, already attained in this country except where the reactionary Southern States have qualified it. Surely in a country except where every one 
CHAS. W. CHESNUTT
1105 WILLIAMSON BUILDING
CLEVELAND, O.
-2- else votes and the suffrage is freely conceded to foreigners in a great many States, including I believe Alabama, as soon as they declare their intention of becoming citizens, it is not only a great lapse from the ideal, but the rankest sort of injustice that any different rule should be applied to so numerous and important a class of the population as ‸itthe Negro constitutes in the South. I think a little more anti-Negro agitation in the South will very likely result in an effort at the North to see, for the welfare of the whole country, that the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments4 shall become not only the theoretical but the real law of the land. The practical difficulties I admit are enormous, but the value of equal citizenship is so great and so vital that it is worth whatever it may cost. Slavery was as deeply entrenched as race prejudice, yet it fell. And the sound of the trumpets you will remember shook down the walls of Jericho.5
If I wanted to answer with the argumentum ad hominem, with reference to the Atlanta riot, I could point out the fact that the riot occurred only a few days after your splendid object lesson of the Negro's progress in business and the other arts of peace.6 The fact of the matter is that this race problem involves all of the issues of life and must be attacked from many sides for a long time before it will approach anything like a peaceful solution. The American people will have to swallow the Negro, in punishment
of
for
their sins. Doubtless the dose is a bitter one, but there is no other way out. It only remains for all of us to make the process as little painful as possible to all concerned.
CHAS. W. CHESNUTT
1105 WILLIAMSON BUILDING
CLEVELAND, O.
-3-
One of your agents, Mr. Powell, has been operating around here for several weeks.7 I have shown him such small courtesies as I could during one of the busiest months of my life. And he tells me that he has been meeting with some encouragement.
I have read a review somewhere of a book which is described as a very vicious attack on Tuskegee. I trust that this false and reckless publication has not done you any injury.8
I also beg to thank you on behalf of myself and Mrs. Chesnutt, for the handsome little volume, "Putting the Most into Life," which you were good enough to send us. We shall prize it very highly.9
Sincerely yours, Chas. W. Chesnutt.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. Georgia's status as a Southern state in which the Black vote was not suppressed by a constitutional amendment ended when it adopted in 1908 a constitutional amendment that disenfranchised Blacks, in this case via a literacy law (and a grandfather clause that effectively exempted Whites). Intense agitation for the amendment began in the summer of 1906, when gubernatorial candidate M. Hoke Smith (1855–1932) aggressively campaigned for it, winning the Democratic primary in August and becoming governor in 1907. The attack on Black citizens during the Atlanta Riot that September is often seen as a direct consequence of Smith's 1906 campaign. [back]
2. William Henry Fleming (1856–1944) was a White politician and laywer who served in the Georgia House of Representative from 1888–1896 and in the US Congress (1897–1903) as a moderate Democrat. He was an outspoken opponent of Georgia's proposed disenfranchisement law. A speech Fleming gave on June 19, 1906, at the University of Georgia in Athens was published as a booklet, Slavery and the Race Problem in the South with Special Reference to the State of Georgia (Boston: Dana Estes Publishing Company, 1906) and given wide distribution by the Committee of Twelve. Chesnutt refers to Fleming's argument against disfranchisement in several letters and in his unpublished speech "Age of Problems," delivered at the Cleveland Council of Sociology in November 1906 (see Essays and Speeches, 238–252). [back]
3. Quoted verbatim (but with a comma deleted) from William Henry Fleming, Slavery and the Race Problem in the South with Special Reference to the State of Georgia (Boston: Dana Estes Publishing Company, 1906), 57. [back]
4. The Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution (1868) grants citizenship to all people born in the United States, including the formerly enslaved, and prevents individual states from abridging the constitutional rights of U.S. citizens. The Fifteenth Amendment (1870) grants male citizens the right to vote; it came under attack in the South at the end of Reconstruction, as voter suppression strategies proliferated (property tests, literacy stipulations, grandfather clauses) in the 1890s. Chesnutt discussed these amendments and the Supreme Court decisions that had limited their impact in "The Negro's Franchise" (1901), in "The Disfranchisement of the Negro" (1903), and in an essay that remained unpublished in his lifetime, "Liberty and the Franchise" (Charles W. Chesnutt: Essays and Speeches [Stanford: Stanford UP], 101–107). [back]
5. The fall of the city of Jericho (today's Tell es-Sultan on the West Bank in Palestine) was described in the Old Testament's Book of Joshua (6:1–27) as the result of the Israelites' blowing their trumpets after walking around the city walls for seven days; both here and later in Black activism, this victory without battle was used as an argument for protesting noticeably, but non-violently. [back]
6. On September 20, 1906, two days before the Atlanta Riot began, Booker T. Washington gave a speech addressed to a mostly Black audience at Mount Olivet Baptist Church in New York City, advocating for celebrating Black achievement instead of dwelling on incidents of racial discrimination. Chesnutt implies that a case could be made against Washington personally as being to blame for the riot because of this speech. [back]
7. Clarence Alphonse Powell (life dates unknown) graduated in 1892 from the Tuskegee Institute and taught agricultural studies in North Carolina before becoming an agent (i.e. fundraiser) for the Tuskegee Institute in or around 1906. [back]
8. Most likely a reference to the self-published booklet Letters from Tuskegee: Being the Confessions of a Yankee first published in 1904, but reissued in May 1906 in a second edition with excerpts of press coverage, under the pseudonym Ruperth Fehnstoke. The author, Stanton Becker von Grabill (1871?–1950) was a pianist who lived in Tuskegee, Alabama, from ca. 1903–1906 and wrote to attack both the Tuskegee Institute and Booker T. Washington, accusing the school of a string of sexual scandals and Washington of encouraging race mixing (amalgamation). Washington was aware of the booklet, but did not comment publicly on it. [back]
9. Booker T. Washington's Putting the Most into Life was a collection of six of his "Sunday Evening Talks," intended to give life advice to Tuskegee students. It was printed as a 60-page booklet in September 1906 (New York City: Thomas Crowell). Washington sent Chesnutt and his wife a copy on October 25, 1906. [back]
