Charles W. Chesnutt to Walter White, 1 March 1930
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CHAS. W. CHESNUTT
HELEN C. MOORE
CHESNUTT & MOORE
SHORTHAND REPORTERS
1646 UNION TRUST BLDG.
CLEVELAND
March 1, 1930
Mr. Walter F. White,
90 Edgecombe Avenue,
New York, N. Y.
My dear Walter:
I see from a newspaper item that you have been raised to the rank of the immortals, like Rosseau, Voltaire, Boccaccio, Theodore Dreisser and others too numerous to mention, by having a couple of your books banned by the Boston censors.1 If this statement is true, I hope it will make them sell better than ever.
I presume you read the article in the January Bookman by Mr. John Chamberlain, on Negro writers. I don't know the gentleman's standing as a critic, though I understand he is on the staff of the New York Times Literary Review, but I am glad to see that he gives you and me perhaps the highest place among the colored writers.2
I am awfully sorry that Houghton Mifflin Company stopped the publication of my books, as the "uncovering" of them and of me by Carl Van Vechten3 and others following him might have resulted in the sale of a good many more of them. The new "Conjure Woman" has done very well indeed, and, according to the publishers, has quite justified its reissue, and I hope to persuade them to bring out a new edition of "The House Behind the Cedars".4
Give my regards to Mrs. White, whom I am still hoping to meet. I should probably have been in New York this winter, but the decline in the stock market knocked off a large part of the value of my small holdings, and I have felt too poor to spend the money.5 However, I will get around to it some time,
Cordially yours, Chas. W. Chesnutt CWC:ESCorrespondent: 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. Chesnutt may be referring to an article in the Baltimore Afro-American, which reported that "Herbert W. Fison, white, librarian of the Malden [Boston] public library, wrote last week that books by Walter White, NAACP secretary, are not worthy of being added to the library." The article identified the banned books as White’s novel Fire and Flint (1924) and his account of lynching, Rope and Faggot (1929), which the report described as "the most voluminous and authentic book on lynching in the English language" ("Walter White's Books Banned in Boston," Afro-American [March 1, 1930]: 11). [back]
2. In "The Negro As Writer" (The Bookman, 70 [February 1930]: 603–611), John Chamberlain (1902–1995) discusses Chesnutt's fiction at length, considering his short stories and three published novels. Chamberlain also discusses writers of the 1920s, noting that "The Chesnutt tradition is carried on by Walter White, who has gone to the South for most of his materials." [back]
3. 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]
4. 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]
5. Between the initial Wall Street crash in late 1929 and the mid-1931 banking crises, most U.S. stocks lost ninety percent or more of their value, with effects that cascaded throughout the economy. Chesnutt, who had invested in the stock market and used these investments as collateral for his mortgages, was severely affected by the crash and discussed its effects in many letters between 1930 and 1932. [back]
