Charles W. Chesnutt to W. E. B. Du Bois, 17 June 1926
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6/33/59
CHAS. W. CHESNUTT
I have found it awfully hard work to answer to my own satisfaction the questions you sent me, and I may not have answered them to yours, or in time for you to make any use of what I have written.1
To keep from repeating things that had been said by your other contributors, I deliberately forgot all they had written. I have a very poor memory, anyway, and while what I have written may be a poor thing, "it is mine own."2
If novels written by colored men were as interesting as The Crisis always is, there would be no doubt of their marked success.
Cordially yours, Chas. W. Chesnutt. CWC/MIf my paper is too long you are at liberty to cut it, judiciously.
C.W.C.Correspondent: William Edward Burghardt Du Bois (1868–1963) was a sociologist, historian, and world-renowned civil rights activist. After completing coursework at the University of Berlin and Harvard University, Du Bois became the first African American to earn a doctorate from Harvard in 1895. He was a professor of history, sociology, and economics at Atlanta University (1897–1910 and again in the 1930s). He was a prominent leader of the Niagara Movement and helped found the NAACP in 1909. As the editor of the NAACP's journal, The Crisis, from 1910 to 1931, Du Bois published four of Chesnutt's short stories as well as two of his essays. See "The Doll" (April 1912), "Mr. Taylor's Funeral" (April/May 1915), "The Marked Tree" (Dec 1924/Jan 1925), and "Concerning Father" (May 1930); and "Women's Rights" (1915) and "The Negro in Art" (November 1926).
1. In the spring of 1926, W. E. B. Du Bois, as the editor of The Crisis, sent out a questionnaire asking a number of writers and publishers how Black people should be represented in art. Select answers were printed the following seven months as a series under the general title "The Negro in Art" (for the first installment and the questions, see The Crisis 31, no. 6 [April 1926]: 278–280). Chesnutt's answers appeared as a short essay. See "The Negro in Art," The Crisis 33, no. 1 (November 1926): 490–493. [back]
2. The reference here is to Act 5 scene 4 of Shakespeare's As You Like It, where Touchstone describes Audrey as "an ill-favored thing . . . but mine own." [back]
