Charles W. Chesnutt to Walter White, 10 February 1932
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February 10, 1932
Mr. Walter White, Secretary, N.A.A.C.P.,
69 Fifth Avenue,
New York City.
My dear Walter:
I have not hurried to answer your letter of February 2nd in re Newton D. Baker1 as a possible appointee to the United States Supreme Court bench, first, because I have been confined at home by illness since receiving your letter, and, second, because of the difficulty of expressing myself upon the subject.
Mr. Baker is an excellent lawyer and a very fine gentleman. We have often met, and our relations have always been friendly and cordial. But Mr. Baker is a Southerner, with all that the word even at its best implies. In saying this, I am not unmindful of the fact that the late Justice White was a Southerner,2 to say nothing of Justice Harlan,3 both of whom, especially the latter, never to my knowledge let the matter of race becloud their judgment or color their decisions.
I have often discussed the race problem with Mr. Baker, and only recently have I had occasion to criticize his attitude. He is a clever advocate, and while he would not consciously, I think, seek to make the worse appear the better part, he can, as Mr. Villard well said in his recent article in The Nation on "The Perfect Secretary of War", make whatever side he takes on a controverted subject, seem right.4
In conversation with him a couple of years ago, he admitted his having signed the agreement of the Shaker Heights Protective Association,5 and gave as his reason the fact that practically all the estate he would leave to his wife and children would be his residence, and that the immediate proximity of a colored neighbor would decrease the value of his property at least one-half—which is probably true enough, I am sorry to say.
Mr. White - page 2
When I cited an Ohio case6 had held invalid a condition of a deed against sale to a person of color, he distinguished between such a condition and an agreement among owners to the same effect, having in mind, I imagine, the Washington case7 with which you are no doubt familiar; and when I insisted that the principle was the same, and the owners' agreement was simply an evasion which the Supreme Court could not tolerate, he frankly disagreed with me, and said he thought they would sustain it. That being so, I leave it to you whether or not Mr. Baker would be a sound man to pass on a case involving such a question.
When Thompson was elected mayor of Chicago over Dever, Mr. Baker was quoted in an interview in I think a St. Louis paper as saying that Thompson had capitalized the ignorance of the Chicago electorate to the extent of thirty or forty thousand Negro votes, to defeat the better candidate.8
The late George Myers,9 who was then alive, took the matter up with Mr. Baker, suggesting, which was true, that even without the colored vote, Thompson would have been elected. Several letters passed between them, but Baker stood his ground, and would not admit any substantial error or misjudgment on his part. Poor George is dead—peace to his ashes!—but I imagine that that correspondence might be interesting. I will call up Mrs. Myers and ask her if she by any chance has any correspondence between her late husband and Mr. Baker.
In a conversation not very long ago with Mr. Baker, as to a probable solution of the race question, I suggested the amalgamation of the races.10 Mr. Baker said that was absurd, unthinkable, and he said it in a tone of voice and with a flash of the eye, which seemed to class it as a akin to incest or sexual perversion. Of course, he probably reflected the opinion of ninety-nine white people out of a hundred, but in the event of a general law forbidding the intermarriage of the races, which is always possible, I again leave to you whether it would be safe to have the question decided by a judge with such a preconceived opinion.
I freely admit that I am prejudiced against Southerners in all matters involving questions of race. Their attitude toward the inviolability of their race, in spite of visible and increasing evidence to the contrary, is like that
Mr. White - page 3
of a devout Catholic to the infallibility of the pope.
It is a matter on which I imagine we think alike, and it is somewhat difficult to write about, especially where it concerns a man to whom I am indebted for many business favors. I wish it distinctly understood that even the little that I have said here is in confidence, and that my name is not to be mentioned in connection with any expressions of opinion you may publish. I am like Mr. Baker to this extent, that I am still in business, and would not like to have my interests jeopardized, even in a good cause, by talking too much.
I am sorry to see that the N.A.A.C.P. got out of the Scottsboro case11, so that my failure to make a substantial contribution did not affect the matter any.
With regards and best wishes. Cordially yours, 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. Newton D. Baker (1871–1937) was a White lawyer and Democratic politician born in West Virginia. He earned a law degree from Washington and Lee University in Virginia, and practiced law in West Virginia and then in Cleveland, Ohio, where he founded a prestigious corporate law firm, Baker, Hostetler, and Sidlo, in 1916. In Cleveland, he served as city solicitor (1901–1909) and mayor (1912–1915), then as U.S. Secretary of War (1916–1921). In early 1932 he was interested in being a presidential candidate, but did not publicly announce; his name was also circulated as a potential U.S. Supreme Court nominee. [back]
2. Edward Douglass White Jr. (1845–1921) was born in Louisiana, fought for the Confederacy, served in the Louisiana State Senate, the U.S. Senate (1891–1894), and the U.S. Supreme Court (1894–1921), holding the role of Chief Justice the last ten years. He was not a proponent of civil rights for Blacks, joining the majority in such decisions as Plessy v. Ferguson, but he wrote the decision in Guinn v. United States (1915), which invalidated the grandfather clause that had been used to disenfranchise Blacks. [back]
3. John Marshall Harlan (1833–1911) was born in Kentucky to a slave-holding family. He served in the Union Army, joined the Republican Party after the War, and was the Republican nominee for Governor in 1871 and 1875. In 1877, he was appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court, where he served until his death. Harlan was deeply egalitarian, and Chesnutt admired his jurisprudence. In a 1908 speech, "The Courts and the Negro," Chesnutt reviewed in detail Harlan's dissents in several major Supreme Court decisions that curtailed civil rights for Blacks, including the Civil Rights Cases (1883), Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), in which Harlan was the sole dissenter, Giles v. Harris (1903), and Berea College v. Kentucky (1908). Harlan's defense of civil rights for Blacks led a Cleveland association of Black lawyers to use his name, and in 1928 Chesnutt gave a speech to the John Harlan Law Club. Chesnutt and the other lawyers in the John Harlan Law Club may also have known that Justice Harlan had a half-brother who was Black. Robert James Harlan (1816–1897) was born enslaved, legally freed in 1848, and became active in the Republican Party in Ohio in 1870. The two brothers remained in contact until Robert's death. [back]
4. Oswald Garrison Villard (1872–1949) wrote a sharply critical review of Newton D. Baker: America at War for The Nation, describing Baker as "a man of great executive ability and marked eloquence, but without fixed principles or political philosophy." Villard also noted Baker's southern background and that Baker's father fought with for the Confederacy during the Civil War. See Villard, "The Perfect Secretary of War," Nation 134 (27 January 1932): 117–119. [back]
5. The Shaker Heights Protective Association was formed in 1925 after the sale of a home in the Shaker Heights neighborhood to Black surgeon Dr. Edward A. Bailey. Incorporated in 1912, Shaker Heights was designed by the Van Sweringen Company with restrictions that prohibited industrial uses; specified home design, size and cost; and sought to prevent the sale of homes to Blacks. In 1925, the company adopted a covenant that required company approval of all sales, or a waiver by any purchaser that included signatures of the majority of owners of the surrounding lots. Newton D. Baker, the former Cleveland mayor, who lived in Shaker Heights, supported the new restrictions. The NAACP published a press release December 4, 1925, entitled "Newton D. Baker Ex-War Secretary on Cleveland Segregation Committee." White's February 2, 1932, letter to Chesnutt asks about Baker's record on residential segregation, noting that he remembers Baker signing a pamphlet as a member of the Shaker Heights Protective Association. [back]
6. The Second District Court of Appeals for Ohio ruled on at least two cases involving discriminatory residential covenant practices. In Williams et al. v. Commercial Land Co. (1931), the court ruled against a deed that prohibited the leasing and selling properties to "any colored person." A similar ruling was made in Bulen v. Rice (1931). Neither case, however, involved a deed entered into by property owners (Williams v. Commercial Land Co., 10 Ohio Law Abs. 314 (1931), Case Law Access Project, Harvard Law School, https://cite.case.law/ohio-law-abs/10/314/; Bulen v. Rice, 11 Ohio Law Abs. 175 (1931), Case Law Access Project, Harvard Law School, https://cite.case.law/ohio-law-abs/11/175/). [back]
7. In 1926, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Corrigan et al. v. Buckley to uphold the discriminatory covenant in a Washington, DC, neighborhood that made the selling of a house to a Black family a void contract. The ruling supported the legal rights of property owners to enforce discriminatory agreements, and it rejected constitutional grounds for challenges to racially restrictive covenant practices. [back]
8. In 1927, Republican William H. Thompson (1869–1944) was elected for a second term as Mayor of Chicago over Democrat William Emmett Dever (1862–1929). An article in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, "Thompson Called Flaming Demagogue: Chicago Mayor Reproach to Citizens, Ex-Secreta[r]y of War Says," printed a quote from Newton D. Baker: "In Chicago a flaming demagogue organized the ignorance of that city in the form of 300,000 or 400,000 blacks and took over the municipal government....The Chicago election result last spring was a reproach to the educated citizens who could have prevented it" (St. Louis Post-Dispatch 80, no. 65 [11 November 1931]: 22.). [back]
9. George A. Myers (1859–1930) was a Black politician and barber in Cleveland, Ohio. In 1892, 1896, and 1900 he was a delegate to the Republican National Convention, and his support for William McKinley earned him offers of political appointments; Myers refused these appointment for himself but gained positions for four other African Americans. Myer's barber shop was in the Hollenden Hotel, and by 1920 it had 35 employees (barbers, porters, ladies' hairdressers, manicurists, etc.). Meyer sold the shop to the hotel in 1930. Chesnutt's reference to Myer's wife is probably to his second wife, Maude Stewart Myers (1875–1940). [back]
10. Chesnutt discusses an "amalgamation of the races" in the "Future American" series published in the Boston Evening Transcript,"What the Race is Likely to Become in the Process of Time," "A Stream of Dark Blood in the Veins of Southern Whites," and "A Complete Race-Amalgamation Likely to Occur," as well as in his 1905 address to the Boston Literary and Historical Association, the shortened version of which, "Race Prejudice; Its Causes and Its Cure," which was published in Alexander's Magazine, Vol.1 (July 1905), pp.21-26 [back]
11. In Scottsboro, Alabama, in 1931, nine Black teenagers were falsely accused of raping two White women, and eight of the "Scottsboro boys" were sentenced to death. The NAACP labor department was just being formed, and the International Labor Defense, known for having ties to the Communist Party, took control of the case. In 1932, because of its involvement, the attorney hired by the NAACP, Clarence Darrow, withdrew, which is what White references here. Spurred by criticism of inaction, within a year the NAACP formed the Scottsboro Defense Committee with the International Labor Defense, which quit the committee when the case lost publicity. Through a long series of legal battles, the defendants' lives were saved, with the NAACP winning freedom for the last of the nine defendants in 1976. [back]
