Catharine D. Lealtad to Charles W. Chesnutt, 28 October 1921
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[1]
NATIONAL ASSOCIATION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF COLORED PEOPLE
70 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK
TELEPHONE WATKINS 80981
October 28, 1921.
Mr. Charles W. Chestnutt,
9717 Lamont Avenue, N. E.
Cleveland, Ohio.
My dear Mr. Chestnutt:
I am searching for material for a little primer for colored children. In an effort to trace the developments of the Negro and Negroid people from prehistoric times, I am getting some material together about Free Negroes in Antei-bellum days.
If I remember rightly your mother2 attended my great grandfather's school.3 In one of Bassett's monographs4 I found a page of material about John Stanley and his slaves and his accumulation of money but nothing about the school, so I wondered if you could give me any personal reminiscences which you may have heard from your mother. For instance, the size of the school, the names of any of the other pupils or their descendants now living, and if perchancge you ever heard where John Stanley received his education.
I would certainly appreciate an immediate reply as I am trying to finish the data on the Ante-bellum period now.
Give my love to Mrs. Chestnutt5, Helen6 and Dorothy.7
Very sincerely yours, Catharine D. Lealtad Assistant Director of Branches. CLD/ALB
[2]
BOARD OF DIRECTORS8
Correspondent: Catharine Deaver Lealtad (1895–1989) was a Black physician and activist born in Cleveland to parents who moved to St. Paul, Minnesota after 1905 for her father's work as an Episcopal minister, and became the first Black student to graduate from Macalester College in 1915. She moved to New York City and worked for the YWCA on a special assignment relating to students of color, for the NAACP, and for the Urban League around 1920. She then attended medical school abroad and became a pediatrician working internationally for the U.S. Army after the end of World War II, and at Harlem's integrated Sydenham Hospital. Through her maternal grandmother, she was distantly related to John Patterson Green (1845–1940) and thus to the Chesnutts, and seems to have known them from childhood.
1. For readability, the remainder of the letterhead is not transcribed in the body of the letter but is included in this footnote as unformatted text. The letterhead can be seen in its entirety in the accompanying image of the letter. The text of the remainder of the letterhead is as follows: "NATIONAL OFFICERS PRESIDENT MOORFIELD STOREY VICE-PRESIDENTS ARCHIBALD H. GRIMKÉ REV. JOHN HAYNES HOLMES BISHOP JOHN HURST ARTHUR B. SPINGARN MARY B. TALBERT OSWALD GARRISON VILLARD JAMES WELDON JOHNSON, SECRETARY WALTER WHITE, ASSISTANT SECRETARY EXECUTIVE OFFICERS MARY WHITE OVINGTON CHAIRMAN OF THE BOARD J. E. SPINGARN, TREASURER DR. W. E. B. DU BOIS, EDITOR OF THE CRISIS ROBERT W. BAGNALL, DIRECTOR OF BRANCHES WILLIAM PICKENS, ADDIE W. HUNTON, FIELD SECRETARIES" [back]
2. Chesnutt's mother, Anne Maria Sampson (1832–1871), 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 1840 were listed as free Blacks in the census. [back]
3. Lealtad's great-grandfather (the father of her mother's mother) was a free Black man named John Stewart Stanly (1799–1857), the son of another free Black man, John Carruthers Stanly (1773–1841). He became a schoolteacher in New Bern, North Carolina, in 1850, after having run a plantation for his father that included seventeen enslaved people in 1840; by 1850, John Stewart Stanly owned three slaves. His family later migrated to Cleveland, where many free Blacks from North Carolina settled, including the Stanlys, the Chesnutts, and their common relatives, the family of John Patterson Green (1845–1940). [back]
4. Lealtad is likely referring to John Spencer Bassett's Slavery in the State of North Carolina (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1899), which, on pages 43–44, discusses the life of John C. Stanly. [back]
5. Susan Perry Chesnutt (1861–1940) was from a well-established Black family in Fayetteville, North Carolina, and worked as a teacher at Fayetteville's Howard School before marrying Chesnutt. They were married from 1878 until his death in 1932 and had four children: Ethel, Helen, Edwin, and Dorothy. Susan led an active life in Cleveland. [back]
6. Helen Maria Chesnutt (1880–1969) was Chesnutt's second child. She earned degrees from Smith College and Columbia University, taught Latin (including to Langston Hughes) at Cleveland's Central High School for more than four decades starting in 1904, co-authored a Latin textbook, The Road to Latin, in 1932, and served on the executive committee of the American Philological Association in 1920. She became her father's literary executor and first biographer. [back]
7. Dorothy Katherine Chesnutt Slade (1890–1954) was the youngest child of Charles and Susan Chesnutt. After attending the women's college at Western Reserve University from 1909 to 1913 and working as a probation officer for two years, she began teaching junior high school French and English at Willson Junior High School in Cleveland. She married John G. Slade (1890–1976) on March 29, 1924; they had one child, John C. Slade (1925–2011), known as Johnnie. [back]
8. For readability, the remainder of the letterhead, which continues on the verso of the page, is not transcribed in the body of the letter but is included in this footnote as unformatted text. This portion of the letterhead can be seen in its entirety in the accompanying image of the letter. The text is as follows: "BOARD OF DIRECTORS Chairman, Mary White Ovington, New York Baltimore Bishop John Hurst Boston Joseph Prince Loud Moorfield Storey Butler R. Wilson Buffalo Mary B. Talbert Chicago Jane Addams Dr. C. E. Bentley Cleveland Harry E. Davis Jersey City Dr. George E. Cannon Los Angeles E. Burton Ceruti Memphis R. R. Church New Haven George W. Crawford New York Rev. Hutchens C. Bishop Dr. W. E. B. Du Bois Rev. John Haynes Holmes Florence Kelley Paul Kennaday John E. Milholland Ella Rush Murray Harry H. Pace Arthur B. Spingarn J. E. Spingarn Herbert K. Stockton Charles H. Studin Philadelphia William English Walling Dr. J. Max Barber St. Louis Dr. William A. Sinclair Springfield Hon. Charles Nagel Topeka Rev. G. R. Waller Washington Hon. Arthur Capper Nannie H. Burroughs Prof. George William Cook Archibald H. Grimké Charles Edward Russell Neval H. Thomas" [back]
