W. E. B. Du Bois to Charles W. Chesnutt, 22 June 1926
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June 22, 1926.
Mr. Charles W. Chestnut,
1646 Union Trust Building,
Cleveland, Ohio.
My dear Mr. Chestnut:
Thank you very much indeed for your article on Negro art. We shall publish it just as it is during the next two or three monthsweeks.1
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]
