Charles W. Chesnutt to Walter White, 28 December 1926
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1646 Union Trust Bldg.
December 28, 1926
Mr. Walter White,
c/o N. A. A. C. P.,1
69 Fifth Avenue,
New York City.
My dear Mr. White:
I have your letter of December 16th, containing your gentle hint.
I am ‸goingable to supply you at present with only four of my books, to-wit, "The Colonel's Dream," "The Wife of His Youth," "The Marrow of Tradition," and "The Conjure Woman." "The House Behind the Cedars" I have not yet been able to procure, but I am on the hunt for it. You might inquire yourself of the secondhand New York book sellers. Mr. Van Vechten,2 I imagine, found his copy in that way, as I did not get it for him.
I will autograph and forward the four that I have within a few days.
I enjoyed our evening together very much indeed.3 Don't say anything about that new novel, for it may not materialize.4 What you say, however, about the reception which a new book by me would receive encourages me to see what I can do. Thank you for your offer of services, and I will not hesitate to call upon you if I need to.
Why can't one of us write a book of fiction that will sell like Dr. Durant's "Story of Philosophy"?5 It was published only last spring, and the copy which I have is one of the 72nd thousand. It is a five-dollar book, and I imagine he will get a royalty of at least 20 per cent., which would make 72,000.00—quite a handsome return, one would think, from any kind of a book.
My family join me in holiday greetings to Mrs. White6 and yourself.
Cordially yours,Correspondent: Walter Francis White (1893–1955) was a Black civil rights activist and writer. He began working at the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1918, at its New York City headquarters, as assistant to James Weldon Johnson, the Association's first Black Executive Secretary. He investigated lynchings and riots, sometimes passing for White, and he became Executive Secretary in 1930. He helped desegregate the armed forces after WWII, and under his leadership the NAACP established its Legal Defense Fund. He nominally remained executive secretary until his death in 1955.
1. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) began in February 1909, with a Committee on the Negro and "The Call," a statement protesting lawlessness against Black people. In 1910, the organization adopted its current name and began publication of a monthly journal, The Crisis, under editor W. E. B. Du Bois. Chesnutt's involvement with the NAACP extended over many years, and included attending conferences, presiding at NAACP events in Cleveland, publishing four stories and one essay in The Crisis (1912, 1915, 1924, 1926, and 1930), and being awarded in 1928 the organization's highest honor, the Spingarn Medal. [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. [back]
3. White had visited Cleveland in mid December to speak to the local NAACP and Mount Zion Congregational Church on the state of racialized violence, and in particular the lynchings of Bertha, Demon, and Clarence Lowman in Aiken County, South Carolina, which White himself had investigated and was bringing to national attention (see Walter White, “The Shambles of South Carolina,” The Crisis 33, no. 2 [December 1926] 72–75; and Jessie S. Crisler, Robert C. Leitz, and Joseph R. McElrath, eds., An Exemplary Citizen: Letters of Charles W. Chesnutt, 1906–1932 [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002], 227n2). [back]
4. Chesnutt is probably referring to The Quarry, a novel he completed in 1928 but that was unpublished in his lifetime. [back]
5. Credited with popularizing philosophy, Dr. Will Durant's The Story of Philosophy: The Lives and Opinions of the Greater Philosophers was published in early 1926 by Simon & Schuster after first being published as a string of popular pamphlets in the Little Blue Books series. [back]
6. Leah Gladys Powell White (1893–1979) was a Black woman raised in Philadelphia who worked as a stenographer for the NAACP in New York City and and married Walter F. White in 1922; a brief stage career faltered in 1926. The couple had two children. Their divorce in 1948 was scandalous because of White's affair (and subsequent marriage) with a White South African writer, Poppy Cannon (1905–1975), which led to him stepping down as leader of the NAACP. [back]
