Charles W. Chesnutt to Booker T. Washington, 22 November 1907
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CHAS. W. CHESNUTT
1105 WILLIAMSON BUILDING
CLEVELAND, O.
Told him you w'd reply first chance: 11/26:
Cleveland, Ohio, November 22, 1907.
Dr. Booker T. Washington,
Tuskegee, Ala.
My Dear Dr. Washington:-
I wish to thank you, somewhat tardily, for the copy of your "Life of Frederick Douglass,"1 that you were good enough to ✓ send me. It is a very well written and readable volume, although the Bibliography did omit to mention my little volume ✓ upon the same subject, in the Beacon Series of American Biographies, doubtless an oversight.2
I was deeply grieved to learn only a day or two ago of the death of Mr. Cox, who, I imagine, was a very useful man, whom you will find it difficult to replace. If you have it in mind, kindly extend my sympathy to Mrs. Cox when you see her.3
Professor Browne4 sent me the other day a copy of Mr. Carnegie's 5 Edinburgh address, requesting my views upon it.6 It is worthy of all commendation, except that I do not agree with ✓ him, or with you, if you are correctly quoted, that it is the ✓ "wiser course" to let the ballot for the Negro go, substantially, by default.7 We may not be able to successfully resist the current of events, but it seems to me that our self-respect demands an attitude ‸of protest against steadily progressing disfranchisement and consequent denial of civil rights, rather than one of acquiescence. Georgia is gone,8 Oklahoma and Maryland will
CHAS. W. CHESNUTT
1105 WILLIAMSON BUILDING
CLEVELAND, O.
soon fall into line.9 I hope at least that Mason and Dixon's line will prove an impassable barrier.10
But while I differ from you very earnestly and deeply on this point, I must congratulate you on having won over to such active friendship for the Negro, so able and influential a citizen of the world as Mr. Carnegie.
Sincerely yours, Chas. W. ChesnuttCorrespondent: 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. Booker T. Washington's Frederick Douglass: A Biography (Philadelphia: George W. Jacobs & Co., 1906) was actually published in February of 1907. [back]
2. Chesnutt's biography, Frederick Douglass, appeared in the Beacon Series of Biographies of Eminent Americans (Boston: Small, Maynard, 1899). It was the first biography after Douglass's death and the first written by an African American. [back]
3. Julius Robert Cox (1867–1907) was born in Louisville, Kentucky, became a bookkeeper and postal employee in Indianapolis, and eventually worked as Booker T. Washington's traveling secretary from 1904 until his sudden death from appendicitis on November 9, 1907. His wife, Gertrude L. Caldwell Cox, taught fifth grade at the Tuskegee Institute. [back]
4. Hugh M. Browne (1851–1923) was a Black civil rights activist, teacher, and inventor. Educated at Howard University, Princeton University, and in Europe, he taught in Liberia in the 1880s and at Black colleges in the United States from the 1890s until his retirement in 1913. He was an ally of Booker T. Washington but advocated for both academic and industrial education. He was secretary of the Committee of Twelve and corresponded with Chesnutt about Committee matters. [back]
5. Andrew Carnegie (1835–1919), born in Scotland and raised in Pittsburgh, Pennslyvania, was one of the wealthiest men in the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. An industrialist and well-known philanthropist supporting education, the arts, and to some extent social equality, around 1900 he began to support Booker T. Washington's endeavors at the Tuskegee Institute (including financing a Carnegie Library on its campus) and beyond. He was the major contributor to support the printing of pamphlets disseminated by the Committee of Twelve—including his own speech on The Negro in America (1907). [back]
6. On October 16, 1907, Andrew Carnegie (1835–1919) delivered a speech at the Philosophical Institution of Edinburgh. A few months later, The Committee of Twelve published the address (The Negro in America: An Address Delivered Before the Philosophical Institution of Edinburgh, 16th October 1907, [Cheney, PA: Committee of Twelve for the Advancement of the Interest of the Negro Race, 1907]). As a member of the Committee, Chesnutt was asked several times for input on its publication by the committee's secretary, Hugh M. Browne (1851–1923). Chesnutt's main concern was Carnegie's stance on voting rights, which like Booker T. Washington, he was willing to forego until Blacks had become educated citizens. [back]
7. In his speech "The Negro in America," Andrew Carnegie's may have used this phrase, and he may have quoted Washington directly, but the wording is slightly different in the printed version, possibly in response to Chesnutt's criticism, since he was invited to suggest revisions to Hugh M. Browne (1851–1923) before the Committee of Twelve published it. See Andrew Carnegie, The Negro in America: An Address Delivered Before the Philosophical Institution of Edinburgh, 16th October 1907 (Cheney, PA: Committee of Twelve for the Advancement of the Interest of the Negro Race, 1907), 22. [back]
8. 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]
9. Efforts to disenfranchise Black voters via state constitutions were mounted across the South during the last decades of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. These were generally successful, though the results in Maryland and Oklahoma were mixed. Maryland voters defeated three separate constitutional amendments that would have disenfranchised Blacks (1905, 1908, and 1910). In 1915, the U.S. Supreme Court declared grandfather clauses in Maryland and Oklahoma unconstitutional. The Oklahoma legislature responded by passing a law that used a different mechanism to effectively disenfranchise Blacks. [back]
10. The Mason-Dixon line, established by surveyors in the 18th century because of a border dispute during the Colonial Era that involved four states, came to mean more generally the state borders that separated the slave-holding or formerly slave-holding Southern states and the North. [back]
