Charles W. Chesnutt to Russell W. Jelliffe, 3 January 1922
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January 3, 1922.
Mr. Russell W. Jelliffe,
2239 East 38th Street,
City.
My dear Mr. Jelliffe:
I received your letter enclosing ticket for basket ball carnival December 26th, and meant to have sent a check before now.1 I enclose my check for five dollars, which will pay for the ticket, and you can assign the balance to any activity connected with the Settlement you may choose.2
Wishing you a happy and successful New Year, I am
Yours very truly, CWC/FLCorrespondent: Russell W. Jelliffe (1891–1980) and his wife Rowena Woodham Jelliffe (1892–1992) were White social workers in Cleveland who were both active in a variety of social justice causes and jointly ran the Playhouse Settlement (later Karamu House) in Cleveland from its founding days (1915–1963). They both attended Oberlin College and the University of Chicago. Jelliffe also served in the Cleveland branches of the Urban League (initially the Negro Welfare Association) and the NAACP. They represented a new approach to social work and charity organizations that emphasized the arts and community-building. Chesnutt knew them personally since his support of founding the Playhouse Settlement in 1914–1915.
1. According to Jelliffe's undated fundraising letter to Chesnutt that prompted this response, the carnival in support of the Playhouse Settlement girls' and boys' basketball teams took place on December 26, 1921, at the clubhouse of the Fraternal Order of Eagles at 2226 East 55th St. Tickets were twenty-five cents, but Chesnutt was asked to purchase a "patron ticket" for $1.00 as a contribution. [back]
2. The Playhouse Settlement was founded in 1915 by Russell and Rowena Jelliffie with the support of the Black community, to help the newly arriving Southern Blacks who came to Cleveland during the Great Migration. As part of the nationwide settlement movement (1880s-1930s), which sought to bring people of different class backgrounds together to provide social services and education in poorer neighborhoods, the Playhouse Settlement stood out because it was desegregated and included arts programming, especially interracial theater productions. Chesnutt had called for a social settlement as early as 1905 and was part of the founding discussions for the Playhouse Settlement in 1914; the Chesnutt family supported various fundraisers for the Settlement House, renamed Karamu House in 1941 and run by the Jelliffes until 1963. For more, see Helen Chesnutt, Charles Waddell Chesnutt: Pioneer of the Color Line (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1952), 262-62, and Frances Richardson Keller, An American Crusade: The Life of Charles Waddell Chesnutt (Provo, UT: Brigham Young University Press, 1978), 245-249. [back]
