Charles W. Chesnutt to Booker T. Washington, 28 May 1904
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19-1
CHAS. W. CHESNUTT
1005 WILLIAMSON BUILDING
CLEVELAND, O.
May 28, 1904.
Dr. Booker T. Washington,
Tuskegee, Ala.
My dear Dr. Washington:-
I am in receipt of your favor enclosing copy of letter from Mr. Ogden, and of your reply thereto.1 I have sent to Mr. Ogden a complete statement of what I learned in reference to Thomas,2 and a copy of my correspondence with The Macmillan Company in reference thereto,3 with the suggestion that I will be glad to have Mr. Schurz4 make use of any part of it in reply to Mr. Page.5 I had thought of writing something of the sort myself, but I am very glad to see it undertaken by some one of greater prominence and influence.
I lectured in Washington the other day to the Bethel Literary and Historical Association upon the Elements of Citizenship.6 I approached it at a different angle from that which you ordinarily take, directing myself to the legal and ethical basis of citizenship rather than to its practical working out. I have seen in some newspaper since, the statement that I had attacked you in my utterances.7 The only reference which I made to you was I think entirely complimentary, and if our points of view would conflict at all, that is of course a matter for legitimate argument. Your friend Whitfield McKinlay who was present at the lecture, can tell you what I said, if it should be a matter of any interest to you.8
Sincerely 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. Robert Curtis Ogden (1836–1913) was a prominent White businessman from Philadelphia involved with the Wanamaker department stores, and an influential philanthropist advocating for education in the South. He served on the Southern Education Board, organized annual tours to Southern schools beginning in 1901, and was a trustee at the Hampton Institute in Virginia (1894–1913) as well as at the Tuskegee Institute (1901–1913, serving as president of the Board until 1907). A major supporter and correspondent of Booker T. Washington, he asked Washington for information about William Hannibal Thomas in the spring of 1904, and Washington passed Ogden's letter on to Chesnutt, who sent Ogden a detailed report of his 1901 research into Thomas, which he had sent to Walter Hines Page and Booker T. Washington in May of 1901. [back]
2. William Hannibal Thomas (1843–1835) was the Black author of The American Negro: What He Was, What He is, and What He May Become, published by Macmillan in 1901. Chesnutt, one among many Black activists who criticized Thomas's book, researched Thomas's academic, legal, and personal records, and urged Macmillan to withdraw the book from publication. Chesnutt discussed the book at the end of "The White and the Black" in March 1901 and reviewed it in detail in "A Defamer of His Race" in April 1901. When Thomas Nelson Page drew on Thomas's dubious evidence in his three-part series "The Negro: The Southerner's Problem," published in the spring of 1904 in McClure's Magazine, Chesnutt shared his research and his correspondence with Macmillan with the philanthropist Robert C. Ogden. [back]
3. The American branch of the originally British publishing company Macmillan, established in New York 1869, was purchased by the Brett family in 1896, and existed independently until the mid-20th century. Run by George Platt Brett, Sr. (1858–1936) from the 1890s on, the press was publishing major new American fiction by Jack London and Ellen Glasgow at the time when Chesnutt protested as defamatory their 1901 publication of The American Negro: What He Was, What He is, and What He May Become by William Hannibal Thomas. [back]
4. Carl Schurz (1829–1906) came to the U.S. from Germany as a political refugee from the revolutions of 1848–1849. He served as a general in the Union Army, and at the end of Reconstruction warned that without federal oversight, discrimination against Blacks in the South was going to continue—a liberal position he maintained into the 1900s, which made Chesnutt see him as an important White ally. He served as a Republican U.S. Senator from Missouri (1869–1875) and as U.S. Secretary of the Interior (1877–1881). He was a well-known political writer and sometime editor for the New York Evening Post and other publications into the twentieth century. An editorial in McClure's Magazine in January 1904, "Can the South Solve the Negro Problem?" was apparently the trigger for Thomas Nelson Page's article series in March, April, and May in the same magazine. Chesnutt evidently assumed or hoped that Schurz would reply to Page with another article. [back]
5. Thomas Nelson Page (1853–1922) was a White writer and lawyer from Virginia who glorified the antebellum South in his fiction and nonfiction, beginning with his "Marse Chan" stories published in Century Magazine. Chesnutt frequently criticized Page's writings; see Chesnutt's retrospective assessment in "Post-Bellum—Pre-Harlem" (1931). [back]
6. The Bethel Literary and Historical Association organized lectures in a number of cities from 1881 to the 1910s that were aimed at Black audiences. Chesnutt delivered several lectures, including at the DC branch ("Literature in Its Relation to Life," November 21, 1899; "Elements of Citizenship," May 10, 1904; "Rights and Duties," October 6, 1908, and "Lincoln: An Appreciation," October 7, 1913). Three Bethel lecture typescripts survive at least in partial form and are reprinted in Essays and Speeches (109–116; 252–262; 349–352), but no manuscript for "Elements of Citizenship" from 1904 has been found. [back]
7. Chesnutt likely alludes to the coverage of his Washington, D. C. lecture in the Cleveland Gazette on May 21, 1904. The summary of the lecture does not mention Booker T. Washington by name, but claimed that Chesnutt cautioned that leadership of the Black community "should not be connected with an institution whose economic needs would require him to barter human rights and liberties for donations of money and endowments" ("Chesnutt v. Washington," Cleveland Gazette, May 21, 1904: 1). [back]
8. Whitefield J. McKinlay (1852–1941) was a Black teacher, businessman, and politician from Charleston, South Carolina, who served as a state legislator during Reconstruction and moved to Washington, DC, in the 1880s, where he was prominent among the Black elite, especially as a real estate broker. He was a close friend of Booker T. Washington, who stayed at his home when in DC He later worked to preserve Black records for the Association of Negro Life and History (later the Association for the Study of African American Life) alongside Carter G. Woodson. [back]
