Charles W. Chesnutt to W. E. B. Du Bois, 20 June 1928
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CHAS W. CHESNUTT
HELEN C. MOORE1
CHESNUTT & MOORE
SHORTHAND REPORTERS
1646 UNION TRUST BLDG.
CLEVELAND
June 20, 1928
Dr. W. E. B. Dubois,
Editor, The Crisis,
69 Fifth Avenue,
New York City.
8/9/39
My dear Dr. Dubois:
In response to your telegram received this morning, I am sending you under another cover a photograph. I don't know whether it is the best kind of photograph to make a plate from, but I imagine that can be done. I have been retired from the public eye so long that I have no photographs made especially for reproduction.
It is a very fine photograph, and if you can use it without spoiling it, you can make whatever other use you care to of it afterwards, or else return it to me.
I suppose I ought to write personally to every member of the Committee on Award of the Spingarn Medal and thank them for it.2 I take this occasion, at any rate, to thank you personally and express my appreciation of the honor.
I enclose a couple of cuttings from the Cleveland Plain Dealer which give some intimation of what my friends in Cleveland think about the event and about me. It is a very pleasant expression, indeed flattering.
Cordially yours, Chas W. Chesnutt. CWC:ES Enc.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. Helen C. Moore (1881–1963) was a White shorthand reporter who began working with Chesnutt in 1918. Moore graduated from Cleveland Law College in 1925, earned her Bachelor of Laws from Baldwin-Wallace, and later, at the age of 58, obtained a Bachelor of Arts from Ohio State University. During the last years of Chesnutt's life, she managed their firm, Chesnutt & Moore, and upon his death in 1932, she founded her own firm, Helen Moore & Associates ("Memorial Resolutions," Journal of the Cleveland Bar Association 35 [1964]: 81–100). Most of their surviving correspondence consists of summer updates during periods when either she or Chesnutt were away from the office on their summer vacations. [back]
2. The highest honor of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) is the Spingarn Medal, awarded annually since 1915, for the highest achievement of a living African American in the preceding year. Joel Spingarn (1875—1939), a professor of literature and one of the NAACP founders, was elected board chairman of the NAACP in 1915 and served as president from 1929 to 1939. Charles Chesnutt received this award in 1928. [back]
