Charles W. Chesnutt to Catharine D. Lealtad, 1 November 1921
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November 1, 1921.
Miss Catherine D. Lealtad,
Care N. A. A. C. P.,1
70 Fifth Avenue,
New York City.
My dear Miss Lealtad:-
I have your letter of October 28th, with reference to material for a little primer.
I think your memory is inaccurate with reference to my mother2 having attended your great-grandfather's school.3 I never heard of it, and if I recall rightly your great-grandfather and my mother lived in towns several hundred miles apart, he living in Newbern and she in Fayetteville, and I think it unlikely if they ever met, at least in the capacity of teacher and pupil. There were no railroads in those days and a distance of 200 miles was as far then as it is from America to Europe now.
I regret that I am unable to be of any assistance to you in this matter. Mrs. Chesnutt4 and the girls5 join me in kindest regards.
Very sincerely yours,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. She 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. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) began in February 1909, with a Committee on the Negro and "The Call," a statement protesting lawlessness against Black people. In 1910, the organization adopted its current name and in 1912 began publication of a monthly journal, The Crisis, which was edited by W. E. B. Du Bois from 1912 to 1944. Chesnutt's involvement with the NAACP extended over many years, and included serving on its General Committee, attending conferences, presiding at NAACP events in Cleveland, publishing four stories and two essays in The Crisis (1912, 1915, 1924, 1926, 1930, and 1931), and being awarded in 1928 the organization's highest honor, the Spingarn Medal. [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. 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]
5. Chesnutt's daughters Helen and Dorothy were both living with their parents (Helen working as a secondary-school teacher since 1904, and Dorothy since 1919). Dorothy lived there until her husband completed his medical degree in 1931. Helen continued to live with her mother after her father's death, until her mother died in 1940. [back]
