Charles W. Chesnutt to Booker T. Washington, 9 December 1901
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NOT ANSW'D 12/10
CHAS. W. CHESNUTT,
ATTORNEY-AT-LAW,
1005 WILLIAMSON BUILDING.
CLEVELAND, O. December 9, 1901.
My dear Mr. Washington:-
Permit me to acknowledge receipt of your letter of December 5th, dated from the Crawford House, Boston, and to thank you very much for your cordial interest in "The Marrow of Tradition,"1 and your kindly effort to secure for it a wide reading. I imagine that such people as Mr. and Mrs. Trask could do a great deal for a book among their friends and acquaintances; for, after all, it is the good word passed along from mouth to mouth which constitutes the best advertising for any book, or man, or cause.
"The Marrow of Tradition" is making its way gradually. It has not yet set the world on fire, but it is being read by a great many thoughtful people, and I hope, for several reasons that they ‸number may increase. Mr. Howells paid his respects to it in the North American Review for December,2 and it has been widely and favorably commented upon by the newspaper press.
I had a letter from my daughter the other day, and she is still filled with enthusiasm, and seems to enjoy her work at Tuskegee very much indeed.3
Cordially yours, Chas. W. Chesnutt.Correspondent: Booker T. Washington (1856–1913), one of the most well-known Black activists of the early 20th century, was born into slavery in Virginia. In 1881, he became the president of what would become the Tuskegee Institute, advocating widely as a speaker and writer for technical education for Blacks, whose entry into American industry and business leadership he believed to be the road to equality. His political power was significant, but because he frequently argued for compromise with White Southerners, including on voting rights, he was also criticized by other Black activists, especially by W. E. B. Du Bois.
1. The Marrow of Tradition was published by Houghton, Mifflin & Company in October 1901. The novel was a thinly veiled account of the Wilmington Massacre of 1898, a White supremacist coup that overthrew an interracial city government, targeted Black elected officials, killed between 60 and 300 Black citizens, and terrorized several thousand who fled the city and never returned. [back]
2. In a review essay, William Dean Howells condemned The Marrow of Tradition as "bitter" and as having "more justice than mercy in it" ("A Psychological Counter-Current in Recent Fiction," North American Review, no. 541 [December 1901]: 872–88). [back]
3. Ethel Perry Chesnutt Williams (1879–1958), Chesnutt's eldest daughter, graduated from Smith College in June of 1901 and worked as an instructor at Tuskegee for the academic year 1901–1902. In the fall of 1902, she married her fiancé, Edward C. Williams (1871–1929), then head librarian at Western Reserve University in Cleveland. Their only child was Charles Waddell Chesnutt Williams (1903–1940). After several years spent in Cleveland in 1909, the Williamses moved to Washington, D.C., where Ethel continued to live and work after her husband's death in 1929; in the early 1930s, she was working as a social worker (home visitor) for Associated Charities of Washington, a poverty-relief umbrella organization. By 1939, she had remarried; her spouse was Rev. Joseph N. Beaman (1868–1943). [back]
