Charles W. Chesnutt to Nathan C. Newbold, 24 May 1922
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May 24, 1922.
Mr. M. C. Newbold,
509 West 121st Street,
New York City.
My dear Sir:
Replying to your letter of May 4th, which a press of business has caused me to neglect until now, I am sorry to say that while I at one time taught in North Carolina and was principal of the State Colored Normal School at Fayetteville in the 80's,1 I am unable at this time to tell you anything about the education of colored people in North Carolina prior to the Civil War. I know, however, that there were schools for free colored people and that my father and mother both attended them and that both of them were fairly well taught. Slaves got their education such as they got, as they could. I was told that my mother2 had surreptitiously taught slaves, which was against the law. My father died in North Carolina in January, 1921. Had your inquiry come along prior to that period, I might possibly have got you some information from him. He was 88 years old.3
After the close of the Civil War, in Fayetteville, N. C., where I was living at the time, schools were first established by the Freedmen's Bureau, which later on were taken over by the State and the school supported from public funds, with some assistance from the Peabody Fund.4 In the same town and others there were missionary schools established, mainly as I recall by the Presbyterian Church, North. The colored people themselves contributed more or less to these missionary schools.5
Robert Harris, formerly of Cleveland, Ohio, was the first colored teacher in the Freedmen's Bureau School at Fayetteville, N. C., continuing at the head of the public school there after it was taken over by the State, and when the State Normal School at Fayetteville was opened, became and continued principal of that school until his death some years later, when I succeeded him. His brother, Cicero R. Harris, who later became a bishop of the A. M. E. Zion Church, and who died a year or two ago, was his earnest and efficient collaborator in this work, teaching with him in Fayetteville for some years, and later serving as principal of the colored public school at Charlotte, N. C.6 Both these were men of high school education, acquired in Cleveland, Ohio, and were men of splendid moral character and high ideals, and did much to establish standards of conduct and aspiration among their people. Hoping that this information may reach you in time to be of any service you can make of it,7 I am
Yours very truly, CWC/FLCorrespondent: Nathan Carter Newbold (1871–1957) was a White educator and civil servant from North Carolina who became the first state agent for Black schools in 1913. In 1920, he created the Division of Negro Education, acting as its director from 1921 to 1950. Throughout his career, he pursued graduate work in education, including at Columbia University's Teachers' College.
1. Chesnutt was recommended to Nathan C. Newbold as a source because of his early career as an educator in North Carolina's Black schools. He was an assistant at the Peabody School in Charlotte (1874–1877) and a teacher at the North Carolina State Colored Normal School in 1877 and served as its principal (1880–1883) before leaving for Ohio. His father, Andrew Jackson Chesnutt, had been part of the effort to found the Howard School, the forerunner of the Normal School and Chesnutt's own secondary school, in 1867. [back]
2. Chesnutt's mother, Ann Maria Sampson (1835–1871) from Fayetteville, North Carolina, left for Ohio with her mother, Chloe, in the 1850s, married Andrew Jackson Chesnutt (1833–1920), also from Fayetteville, in 1857 in Cleveland, and did not return to North Carolina until after the Civil War. She and her mother were possibly born enslaved, but by 1850 were listed as free Blacks in the U.S. census. [back]
3. Andrew Jackson Chesnutt (1833–1920), also known as A. J., was the father of Charles W. Chesnutt. Born in North Carolina, A. J. Chesnutt’s parents were a White man named Waddell Cade (c. 1775–1865) and a Black (identified as mulatta in census records) woman, Anna (Ann) M. Chesnutt (c. 1813–1880). A. J. Chesnutt moved to Cleveland, Ohio, in the 1850s and married Ann Maria Sampson (1832–1871), also from North Carolina. They had six children, three boys and three girls, of whom Charles Chesnutt was the oldest. The Chesnutt family moved to Fayetteville, North Carolina, after the Civil War, where A. J. Chesnutt served as county commissioner and a justice of the peace for Fayetteville (1868–1870), while farming and running a grocery store. After the death of his wife, A. J. Chesnutt married her cousin, Mary Ochiltree. [back]
4. Two schools were founded in Fayetteville in 1866, the Phillips School for elementary school students and the Sumner School for intermediary grades. These were initially funded by the Freedmen's Bureau, a federal agency established in 1865 to provide for the formerly enslaved, and the American Missionary Association (AMA), a nondenominational group founded in 1846 to support abolition, racial equality, Christian principles, and Black education. In 1867, seven Black Fayetteville leaders, including Chesnutt's father, Andrew Jackson Chesnutt, purchased the land for the Howard School, which merged the Phillips and Sumner schools. It opened in 1869, primarily with support from the local African Methodist Episcopal Zion (AMEZ) church and the Peabody Education Fund, established in 1867 by a White Northern philanthropist to provide support for education in the South. Funding from the Freedmen's Bureau and the AMA for the Howard School ceased in 1870 and 1872, respectively. When it became the State Colored Normal School in 1877, state funding led to more formalized training of Black teachers. [back]
5. Chesnutt may have in mind the small, poorly funded rural Black schools of North Carolina where he sought employment in the summers of 1874 and 1875 , as recorded in his early journals. Since Peabody funding went primarily to "well-regulated" schools like Fayetteville's Howard School and there was almost no state funding available, church organizatins and local Black communities scraped together minimal resources for such schools. See The Journals of Charles W. Chesnutt, ed. Richard H. Brodhead (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 1993), 7, 42, 59–83. [back]
6. Robert William Harris (1839–1880) and his younger brother, Cicero Richardson Harris (1844–1917), were Black educators who had a tremendous impact on Black education in North Carolina. Like Chesnutt's, their family had ties to both Fayetteville and Cleveland; both graduated from Cleveland's Central High School. In 1866, the brothers went to Fayetteville to teach and lead the Phillips and Sumner Schools. When the Howard School opened in 1869, Robert became its principal, secured continued funding, and oversaw its designation as the State Colored Normal School. Cicero was ordained in the African Methodist Episcopal Zion (AMEZ) Church in 1872, became the principal of the Peabody School in Charlotte, North Carolina, and helped found Charlotte's AMEZ seminary (the forerunner of Livingstone College). In 1888 he became a church bishop. Chesnutt attended their Fayetteville schools and became their protégé, working as a teacher first under Cicero (1874–1877) and then Robert (1877–1879). After Robert's death, Chesnutt succeeded him as the principal of the State Colored Normal School (1881–1883). [back]
7. Nathan C. Newbold may have used the material he gathered for a report or speech, but his print publications on Black education in North Carolina did not appear until the 1930s: The Report of the Governor's Commission for the Study of Problems in the Education of Negroes in North Carolina (Raleigh, 1935) and Five North Carolina Negro Educators (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1939). [back]
