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Harry C. Gahn to Charles W. Chesnutt, 3 November 1921

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  • Source Text: Harry C. Gahn to Charles W. Chesnutt, 3 November 1921, Charles Waddell Chesnutt Papers, Western Reserve Historical Society, MS 3370, box 1, folder 1.
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  HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES OF THE UNITED STATES HARRY C. GAHN 21ST DISTRICT OHIO WASHINGTON OFFICE 433 HOUSE OFFICE BUILDING CLEVELAND OFFICE 1130 WILLIAMSON BUILDING MEMBER OF COMMITTEES ON MERCHANT MARINE AND FISHERIES WAR CLAIMS EXPENDITURES IN DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE Washington, D.C., November 3rd., 1921. Mr. Charles W. Chesnutt, 1105 Wiliamson Building, Cleveland, Ohio. My dear Mr. Chesnutt:

Thanks for your letter of November 1st., relative to the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill.1

I shall give the bill in question my earnest consideration.

Very sincerely yours, Harry C. Gahn.


Correspondent: Harry C. Gahn (1880–1962) was a White lawyer from Ohio who was a Cleveland city council member (1911–1921) and U.S. Congressman for Ohio's 21st district for one term (1921–1923), after which he left Cleveland for Berea, Ohio. A life-long Republican, he worked from 1906–1908 in the law practice of Theodore E. Burton (1851–1929) before entering politics. Gahn, along with the other 21 Ohio representatives (all Republicans) voted for the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill, which then failed in the Senate in December.



1. The Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill was first introduced in 1918 by Leonidas C. Dyer (1871–1957), a White Republican U.S. Congressman from Missouri. In January 1922, it passed in the House, but was then blocked by Democratic filibusters beginning on December 2, 1922. The NAACP had begun its anti-lynching campaign shortly after its founding in the 1910s and began to lobby forcefully for the Dyer Bill in 1918 after initial doubts about its constitutionality. As a member and sometime leader in the organization, Chesnutt would have received regular updates and calls to action about the bill's progress; as it was being debated in November 1921, he wrote to at least two Ohio representatives, Harry Gahn (1880–1962) and Theodore Burton (1851–1929), in support of the bill. [back]

  • Cite (Chicago style): Harry C. Gahn, "Harry C. Gahn to Charles W. Chesnutt, 3 November 1921," The Charles W. Chesnutt Archive, Gen. Ed. Stephanie P. Browner, Matt Cohen, and Kenneth M. Price, accessed November 15, 2024. https://chesnuttarchive.org/item/ccda.corr00814.
  • Source File: ccda.corr00814.xml
  • Document ID: ccda.corr00814
  • Nature of source text: typed letter signed
  • Rights information: The base text of the original item is in the public domain. The text encoding and editorial notes were created and/or prepared by the Charles W. Chesnutt Archive and are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0). Any reuse of the material should credit the Charles W. Chesnutt Archive. [License]
  • Contributors to the digital file: Ballard, Chaun | Anderson, Antje | Weakly, Laura K. | McMullen, Kevin
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