Charles W. Chesnutt to W. E. B. Du Bois, 25 February 1929
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9-2-42
CHARLES W. CHESNUTT
9719 LAMONT AVENUE
CLEVELAND
February 25, 1929
Dr. W. E. B. DuBois,
Editor, The Crisis,1
69 Fifth Avenue,
New York City.
My dear Dr. :
I have your letters concerning the Panafrican Congress. The travel program is very alluring and I have no doubt the congress will be extremely interesting. However, it is entirely out of the question for me to attend it. Neither my health nor my financial condition would enable me to make such a trip.2
As to others who might wish to participate, I confess I am at a loss to suggest any names. Several whom I might have thought of went to Europe on such a trip last summer, among them Councilman Tom Fleming,3 who, unless all signs fail, will soon start for a long vacation in a state resort at Columbus.4 My health has been such this winter that I have n't been able to get around among people and make inquiries. Perhaps Harry Davis could make some suggestions.5
Thanks for the kind words in your other letter about the new edition of "The Conjure Woman". Major Spingarn certainly pays the book and the author a very high compliment.6 Whether any others of my books will be reprinted will depend somewhat, I imagine, on the public's reaction to this new edition. I am at present unable to say anything about the new novel. I am writing it, but it drags somewhat.7 The "Negro" novels get rottener and rottener. "Black Sadie" was bad enough, but the worst I've seen so far is "The Blacker the Berry", I think the title is. Van Vechten's "Nigger Heaven" was a Sunday School tract besides many of them. I am perfectly sure I could n't compete with them in vileness, and that seems to be what is wanted.8
I see Walter White's9 new novel is out and I have ordered a copy of it. In looking through my manuscripts
I find a short story which I enclose and which you might find available for The Crisis.10 It is not a race problem story, although it has an element that might appeal to the author of "The Dark Princess".11 You are at liberty to use it if you find it available.
My family all join me in regards to you and Mrs. DuBois.12
Cordially yours, Chas. W. Chesnutt. CWC:LKCorrespondent: 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. 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. W. E. B. Du Bois was one of thirty-seven delegates to The First Pan-African Conference in 1900, held in London, UK. It spawned a series of later "Congresses" that brought together activists of African descent from around the world to address issues of common concern. Du Bois was involved in organizing several of the Congresses and worked on plans for a Congress to be held in Tunis, Tunisia, in December 1929. That meeting did not materialize, however, and the next Congress, in Manchester, UK, did not take place until 1945, after the end of World War II. [back]
3. Thomas Wallace Fleming (1874–1948) was the first Black politican elected to the Cleveland City Council (1907–1911, 1916–1929). He was a Republican who became a lawyer in 1906 and worked closely with Harry Smith and other local Black politicians and businessmen, co-founding a rival weekly to Smith's Cleveland Gazette, The Cleveland Journal, as well as a real-estate group. He was indicted in 1929 on charges of corruption (which he disputed), resigned, and did not return to politics after his release from prison in 1933. [back]
4. Thomas Fleming had just been found guilty of corruption on February 8, 1929, and sentenced on February 13 to 2 years and 9 months at the Ohio State Penitentiary in Columbus, OH. [back]
5. Harry E. Davis (1882–1955) was a Black lawyer with a degree from Western Reserve University's law school (1908). He became a Republican state legislator in Ohio and served four terms in the lower house of the Ohio General Assembly (1921–1928). From 1928 to 1934, Davis was a member of the Cleveland Civil Service Commission (president 1932–1934). He later served in the Ohio Senate (1947–1948 and 1953–1954), the upper house of the General Assembly. He was in leadership positions in the Cleveland chapters of many racial-justice organizations, including the NAACP, the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, the Black freemasons, and the Black fraternity Sigma Pi Phi. [back]
6. In early 1929, after Chesnutt had received the Spingarn Medal the previous year, Houghton Mifflin reissued Chesnutt's 1899 short story collection, The Conjure Woman. [back]
7. This is a reference to The Quarry, Chesnutt's novel that had been rejected by Alfred Knopf, Inc., in 1928. Houghton Mifflin Co. rejected it in 1930 and it remained unpublished during Chesnutt's lifetime. [back]
8. Thomas Bowyer Campbell's Black Sadie (Houghton Miffin 1928), Wallace Henry Thurman's The Blacker the Berry (Macaulay 1929), and Carl Van Vechten's Nigger Heaven (Knopf 1926) are all loosely associated with "New Negro" literature, but only Thurman was Black. Chesnutt elaborated his objections to these works in a speech he delivered later in 1929 at Oberlin College. See "The Negro in Present-Day Fiction" in Charles W. Chesnutt: Essays and Speeches, eds. Joseph R. McElrath, Jr., Robert C. Leitz, III, and Jesse S. Crisler (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 523–525. [back]
9. 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. [back]
10. "Concerning Father," the last of Chesnutt's stories published in his lifetime, appeared in the May 1930 issue of Crisis. [back]
11. Du Bois's novel Dark Princess (Harcourt Brace 1928) tells the story of a Black American college student who becomes the lover of an Indian Princess. [back]
12. Nina Gomer Du Bois (1870–1950) was a Black woman, originally from Iowa. She met Du Bois at Wilberforce University in Wilberforce, Ohio, and they married in 1896. [back]
