Charles W. Chesnutt to Walter White, 6 September 1930
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September 6, 1930
Mr. Walter White, Acting Secretary,
Nat'l. Ass'n. for the Advancement of Colored People,1
69 Fifth Avenue, New York City,
My dear Walter:
I intended to write you some time ago congratulating you on the successful outcome of your fight against the confirmation of Judge Parker's appointment to the Supreme Court bench. It was a great fight, and you won a notable victory.2 Consider the letter written.
I am writing now in answer to your letter of September 4th, with reference to the candidacy of McCulloch3 for the Senate. Before answering it I called up Harry Davis,4 with whom I have just been talking over the telephone, and he takes the ground suggested in your second paragraph, viz., that because McCulloch had n't been absolutely bad in matters concerning the Negro prior to his vote for Parker, he ought not to be opposed, but I stand where I stood at the time. I telegraphed Senator McCulloch that his vote for Parker would hurt him with the colored votes of Ohio, and my individual vote and such other votes as I can influence in a quiet way shall be cast against him.
Unfortunately there was no one else to vote for in the primaries, which would have been the best place to oppose him, but when the election comes to I shall vote for Mr. Bulkley,5 who is a gentleman and a fine lawyer, who has been a personal friend and a patron of mine for many years. His father6 was an eminent citizen who held a high place in the esteem of Cleveland people, and his son is a chip of the old block.
I sympathize with his views on prohibition, and I have written him that I will support him in the election. I can't imagine him doing anything inimical to the interests of colored people, though of course the party tie is very strong and you can't always tell, but we know what McCulloch did, and though he has explained to Davis the difficulty of his position, he made the wrong decision, and should take the consequence.
I don't see what the colored people owe the Hoover administration, anyway. It has made no effort, so far as I have discovered, to please the colored voters except in the one instance of the Haytian situation, if that was the motive.7 The U. S. diplomats representing Hayti and X Colored man appointed Minister to Liberia since this letter was writtenLiberia are both white men, and if any important presidential offices have been given to colored men they are so few that I do not now recall them.8
Mr. Walter White--2
I think the National Association would stultify itself it isif it supported or did not oppose McCulloch's election to the Senate. Whether it would be worth while for it to conduct an active campaign against him, I don't know.9 Perhaps it could be done better through the local organizations, with the suggestions and advice of the National office. I am not very active in politics or indeed in anything else, but those are my sentiments, for whatever they are worth.
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 in 1912 began publication of a monthly journal, The Crisis, which was edited by W. E. B. Du Bois from 1912 to 1944. Chesnutt's involvement with the NAACP extended over many years, and included serving on its General Committee, attending conferences, presiding at NAACP events in Cleveland, publishing four stories and two essays in The Crisis (1912, 1915, 1924, 1926, 1930, and 1931), and being awarded in 1928 the organization's highest honor, the Spingarn Medal. [back]
2. In 1930, Walter White led the NAACP opposition to President Herbert Hoover's U.S. Supreme Court nominee, John J. Parker (1885–1958). Parker was serving on the U.S. Court of Appeals Fourth Circuit. As a North Carolina Republican gubernatorial candidate in 1920, he had publicly opposed voting rights for African Americans. White testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee against Parker and urged NAACP members to lobby their senators and threaten to withhold future support, which, in the next paragraph, Chesnutt reports having done in a telegraph to his senator, Roscoe Conkling McCulloch. The Senate rejected Parker's nomination, 41–39; the only Senate rejection of a Supreme Court nominee between 1894 and 1968. [back]
3. In 1930, Roscoe Conkling McCulloch (1880–1958), a Republican, was running to retain his seat in the U. S. Senate. In May he had voted, with the minority, in favor of John J. Parker's appointment to the U. S. Supreme Court. The NAACP mounted a campaign against McCulloch, breaking with the tradition of Black support for Republican candidates. In an article against McCulloch White quotes directly from Chesnutt's letter, referring to him not by name but as "a prominent Negro lawyer and the dean of Negro novelists" ("The Test in Ohio," The Crisis, Vol. 37, November 1930, 373). McCulloch lost the election to Robert J. Bulkley. [back]
4. 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]
5. Robert Johns Bulkley (1880–1965) was a White banker, lawyer, and Democratic politician from Ohio, and like Chesnutt a member of the Rowfant Club. He was the leading partner in a prominent law firm (under various names, initially Bulkley, Hauxhurst, Inglis and Saeger), for whom Chesnutt's stenography business sometimes worked. A two-term U.S. Representative for Chesnutt's district (1911–1915), Bulkley won a special election to the U.S. Senate in 1930 after the death of Theodore Burton (1851–1929), where he served for nine years. [back]
6. [back]
7. In early 1930, President Herbert Hoover sent a bipartisan commission to Haiti to consider an early end, scheduled for 1936, to the U.S. military occupation. He had been encouraged to include at least one Black in the commission; instead he appointed an all-White five-man commission, and a separate Black group to study the progress of education in Haiti. The NAACP had opposed the occupation from the beginning, and by the late 1920s, Black opposition had intensified, with many objecting to the subordinate status of the all-Black commission. Chesnutt references the U.S. "take over of the government" in a 1916 speech on the history and politics of race in Latin America ("A Solution for the Race Problem," in Essays and Speeches, eds. Joseph R. McElrath, Jr., Robert C. Leitz, III, and Jesse S. Crisler [Stanford: Stanford UP, 1999], 386). [back]
8. In 1930, the minister to Haiti was Dana G. Munro (1892–1990). In July 1929, the minister to Liberia, the Black diplomat William T. Francis (1870–1929), died in office. The post remained vacant until September 1930, when Hoover appointed another Black diplomat, Charles E. Mitchel (1870–1937?). [back]
9. On October 11, 1930, the Cleveland Gazette reported that the "Cleveland branches of the NAACP have voted to oppose U.S. Senator McCulloch" ("McCulloch-Bulkley Contest Hot!" Cleveland Gazette [October 11, 1930]: 1). [back]
