Charles W. Chesnutt to W. E. B. Du Bois, 1903
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[1903]1
CHARLES W. CHESNUTT
1005 WILLIAMSON BUILDING.
CLEVELAND, O.
1/28/100
My dear Dr. DuBois:-
Replying to your recent favor, I enclose a brief sketch of my rather unexciting career, which you ‸are at liberty to use as you like. I slopped over a little there at the end, but would prefer that you put my ideas, such as you like, in your own words. At their request I have sent the Booklovers' Mag. management a photo, to be used in conjunction with your article.2
Howells' Atlantic article, a year or two ago, on my writings, might help you a little — I am much more interested in my standing as a writer than in what you might say of me individually.3 Horace Traubel,4 Editor of The Conservator, uses me as a text now then; I enclose a few of his reflections.5 I have been unusually busy for a month or more & have not had time
to answer your suggestion about a race paper but will do so soon.6 If there is anything else you want for your article & will suggest it, I will try to send it along.
I am following your work, & wish it godspeed & good results. This Ala. decision is a bad thing, but we shall have to take up a hole in our belts & buckle down to a hard fight.7
If I may, would like to see a proof of what you write about me.
Yours cordially Chas. W. Chesnutt.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. Based on Chesnutt's internal references and the information available about the (currently unlocated) letters that preceded and followed it, this undated letter was written between May 3, 1903 (when Du Bois requested information) and sometime in mid-June, allowing for enough time for Du Bois to respond before Chesnutt wrote again on June 27, 1903. [back]
2. W. E. B. Du Bois's article "Possiblities of the Negro: The Advance Guard of the Race" was published in Booklovers Magazine 2, no. 1 (July 1903): 2–15. In his brief illustrated sketches of accomplished Black men, he juxtaposed poet Paul Lawrence Dunbar (1872–1906) and painter Henry Ossawa Tanner (1859–1937) with Chesnutt (see page 13). The portrait photograph Chesnutt sent to the publishers was reprinted on page 9. [back]
3. William Dean Howells (1837–1920) was a White novelist and critic, seen as the dean of late 19th-century American letters and a champion of literary realism. He served as editor of The Atlantic Monthly (1871–1881) and later, as a continuing contributor, praised Chesnutt's short stories ("Mr. Charles Chesnutt's Short Stories," Atlantic Monthly 85, no. 511 [May 1900]: 699–701). He also reviewed Chesnutt's Frederick Douglass biography ("An Exemplary Citizen," The North American Review 173, no. 537 [August 1901]: 280–288) and The Marrow of Tradition ("A Psychological Counter-Current in Recent Fiction," The North American Review 173, no. 541 [December 1901]: 881–883). Chesnutt and Howells briefly corresponded in 1900. [back]
4. Horace Traubel (1858–1919) was an American poet, essayist, and editor of The Conservator, a journal designed to promote Walt Whitman's works and reputation. Traubel was also a dedicated Socialist and one of the founders of the socialist weekly newspaper The Worker. He is best known for being Walt Whitman's literary executor and author of a nine-volume biography of Whitman's final four years (1888–1892), entitled With Walt Whitman in Camden. [back]
5. Between 1901 and 1907, Horace Traubel discussed Chesnutt's writing several times in The Conservator, a monthly magazine he founded and edited for nearly 30 years (1890–1919). See "The Emancipation of a Race" (12, no. 10 [December 1901]: 154–155) and reviews of The Wife of His Youth (12, no. 12 [February 1902]: 188), The Marrow of Tradition (13, no. 3 [May 1902]: 41–42), The Conjure Woman (13, no. 9 [November 1902]: 138–139), The House Behind the Cedars (14, no. 4 [June 1903]: 60), and The Colonel's Dream (18, no. 9 [November 1907]: 141). [back]
6. In 1903, W. E. B. Du Bois contemplated launching a new journal with a focus on race that could reach a wide audience, and he consulted a number of Black and White allies. After editing the short-lived Moon Illustrated Weekly, which only had a circulation of a few hundred copies (December 1905 to mid-1906) and another magazine that folded after three years, The Horizon: A Journal of the Color Line (1907–1910), Du Bois, under the NAACP's auspices, launched a monthly magazine, The Crisis (1910–present). It had a circulation of 100,000 by 1918, and Du Bois served as editor from 1910 to 1934. [back]
7. On April 27, 1903, the United States Supreme Court decided in Giles v. Harris that a federal circuit court did not have jurisdiction to force state officials in Montgomery County, Alabama, to register Black voters. Alabama, along with several other Southern states, had recently disenfranchised Black voters by a constitutional amendment, which went into effect on January 1, 1903. But Jackson W. Giles, from 1871 to 1901 a registered Black voter in Montgomery County, had asked the federal circuit court to intervene because he (along with over 5,000 other Black voters in the county) had not been allowed to register in 1902, prior to the vote on the new constitutional amendment. Chesnutt closely followed the legal fate of the new disfranchisement amendments and referred to Giles v. Harris directly in his 1903 essay "Disfranchisement of the Negro." The ruling was not overturned until the Voting Rights Act of 1965. [back]
