Charles W. Chesnutt to Booker T. Washington, 19 October 1908
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CHAS. W. CHESNUTT
1105 WILLIAMSON BUILDING
CLEVELAND, O.
Cleveland, Ohio, Oct. 19, 1908.
Dr. Booker T. Washington,
Tuskegee Institute, Ala.,
My dear Doctor Washington:-
I was reading yesterday in a copy of the Boston Transcript for October 12, I think was the date, an account of a lynching in Mississippi, where the victims were left hanging beside the railroad track where you would pass on your way from one town to another.1 The statement was coupled with utterances ascribed to Mr. Vardaman2 and others that if you made half a dozen more speeches in Mississippi there would be a good many more lynchings.3
I was very sorry to read this. Things must be in a very bad way down there when even your helpful and pacific utterances create such a feeling. I very much fear that the South does not mean, if it can prevent it, to permit education or business or anything else to make of the Negro anything more than an agricultural serf.
I see Georgia has disfranchised the Negro.4 I wonder how much further the process will go before there is a revival of a liberal spirit. I try to be optimistic about these matters, but conditions are not encouraging.
Yours very truly, 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. On October 11, 1908, two Black brothers, Jim and Frank Davis, were lynched by a White mob in Lula, Mississippi, after they allegedly shot a railroad conductor after an altercation, as they were returning from Helena, Arkansas, where Booker T. Washington had given a speech earlier in the day. The Boston Evening Transcript featured a brief report about the events ("Two Negroes Lynched," October 12, 1908: 9). [back]
2. James Kimble Vardaman (1861–1930) was a self-described White supremacist Mississippi Democrat who ran on a platform of Black voter suppression. He served in the Mississippi House of Representatives (1890–1896), as governor (1904–1908), and as U.S. Senator (1913–1919). Chesnutt references him in several unpublished speeches as an example of a racist Southern politician; see "The Race Problem" (1904) and "Age of Problems" (1906), in Charles W. Chesnutt: Essays and Speeches, ed. Joseph R. McElrath, Jr., Robert C. Leitz, III, Jesse S. Crisler (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999): 196–204 and 238–252. [back]
3. An account of the October 11, 1908 lynching in Lula, MSin The Issue, James K. Vardaman's weekly paper based in Jackson, MS, threatened that "The Lula incident is only the beginning." The article also reiterated the disputed claim, known to Chesnutt from his news sources, that the bodies of the victims "were permitted to hang until Booker Washington passed the town in his private car the next morning." Cf. "The Bitter Fruit of Booker's Coming." The Issue, Saturday, 17 October 1908, p.1. [back]
4. 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]
