Charles W. Chesnutt to Ethel Chesnutt Williams, March 29, 1932
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March 19, 19321
My dear Ethel,
I read yesterday in a local colored newspaper that "Myron McAdoo, who formerly lived in Cleveland, and whose mother was connected with the Louden Singers," had been convicted of peddling dope in New York, and sentenced to ten years in a federal penitentiary.2 As I know you are a friend of his mother's, I thought you would probably know whether this statement is true or not.3 If it is, it must be a terrible blow to his mother, to say nothing of his wife and child. If it is not true, somebody is guilty of a most atrocious libel. The last I heard of Myron he was in the Boston post office. I know that times are most terribly hard, and temptation of the weak-minded or weak-moraled terrifically strong.
Please let me know if you know anything about this.
Saw Charlie's name4 in the Baltimore Afro-American the other day, in connection with a motion for a new trial in his murder case -- unless it was another one.5
Family still pegging along, and in their average indifferent health. The girls are looking forward to their summer vacation.6 All join me in love and best wishes.
Sincerely, Mrs. E. C. Williams, 912 Westminster Street, N. W., Washington, D. C.Correspondent: Ethel Perry Chesnutt Williams (1879–1958), Chesnutt's eldest daughter, graduated from Smith College in June 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, the Williamses moved to Washington, D. C., in 1909, 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).
1. This letter was likely written on March 29, 1932, and misdated by Chesnutt. In the letter, he slightly misquotes from a Cleveland Gazette gossip column of March 26, 1932 ("Cleveland: Social and Personal," 3) relating to family acquaintance Myron McAdoo (1893–1960). [back]
2. Myron McAdoo (1893–1960) was the son of North Carolina freedman Orpheus Myron McAdoo (1858–1900), a famous singer and impresario. The Chesnutts knew the McAdoo family personally, through Mattie Allen McAdoo (1868–1936), Orpheus' wife and Myron's mother, who was from Ohio. During World War I, Myron McAdoo protested the racist treatment of Black soldiers like himself at Camp Lee in Petersburg, Virginia. He became a Second Lieutenant in 1918, later moved to Boston, and got married there in 1923; he still lived in Boston at the time of his death. In 1932 the Cleveland Gazette reported a rumor that he had been found guilty of dealing drugs in New York; this was apparently untrue (see Cleveland Gazette, March 26, 1932, 3). [back]
3. Mattie Allen McAdoo (1868–1936), a Black singer and activist, and the mother of Myron McAdoo (1893–1960), was originally from Columbus, Ohio, and after the death of her husband Orpheus Myron McAdoo (1858–1900) lived in Cleveland before moving to Boston, Massachusetts, with her son. She toured with her husband's Virginia Concert Company and Jubilee Singers in the 1880s and 1890s and later performed with her sister Lula Allen (also Allan, 1879–1968[?]). By 1921 she had moved to Washington, D. C., where Ethel Chesnutt Williams also lived and worked; McAdoo was active in the NAACP, the Phillis Wheatley YWCA, and numerous charitable causes. [back]
4. Charles Waddell Chesnutt Williams (1903–1940) was the older of Chesnutt's two grandchildren and the only child of Chesnutt's daughter Ethel and her husband Edward C. Williams. He graduated from Howard University in 1926 with a B.A. and from Howard Law School in 1929, and married Colleen Brooks Williams (1904–2006) the same year. He had a law practice in Washington, D.C., in the 1930s. His only child and Chesnutt's only great-grandchild, Patricia, was born in January 1931. [back]
5. Chesnutt's grandson Charles Williams was assisting Nathan A. Dobbins (1901-1972[?]), a Black attorney from Charles' 1929 graduating class at Howard Law School, in a case in which their client Robert F. Allen was acquitted of murdering a White man, Frank Edwards ("D.C. Man is Freed on Murder Charge," Afro-American [Baltimore, MD], March 19, 1932, 2). [back]
6. Chesnutt's daughters Helen Chesnutt and Dorothy Chesnutt Slade were both high-school teachers; their school year ended at the end of May. In 1932, Charles, Susan, Helen, and Dorothy's 7-year-old son John Chesnutt Slade ("Johnnie") spent July and August at their cabin in Idlewild, Michigan, but Dorothy seems to have stayed in Cleveland. [back]
