Draft letter from W. E. B. Du Bois to Charles W. Chesnutt, 30 October 1926
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October 30, 1926.
Mr. Charles W. Chesnutt,
1646 Union Trust Building,
Cleveland, Ohio.
My dear Mr. Chesnutt:
We were very glad to give full space to your excellent article.1 I am sorry about the one typographical error, but when we succeed in publishing an article with only one error we count ourselves unusually lucky.
We are going to review Mr. Van Vechten's book in the next CRISIS.2
My best regards to you and the ladies.
Very sincerely yours, WEBD/DWCorrespondent: 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. Carl Van Vechten (1880–1964) was a photographer, novelist, and music and drama critic, an influential figure in New York literary circles in the 1920s, and a patron of the Harlem Renaisssance. He was also a collector of books on Black Americana. DuBois's negative review of Van Vechten's novel Nigger Heaven appeared in The Crisis 33, no. 2 (December 1926): 81–82. [back]
