Georgia Douglas Johnson to Charles W. Chesnutt, 10 October 1922
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1461- S. St. N. W.
Wash. D.C.
Oct. 10-22
My dear Mr Chestnut,-
I am very desirous of obtaining the names & addresses of the Cleveland teachers (colored) Can you advise me to whom I should apply. I wish to have folders sent like the inclosure.1
I met you once at Oberlin2
at Mrs Scotts, where I was stopping.3 You have forgotten me tho doubtless. I am hoping great things from my book and would be glad of your criticism after you have read it.4
Correspondent: Georgia Douglas Camp Johnson (1877[?]—1966) was a Black American poet, playwright, and activist. Originally from Rome, Georgia, she was educated at Atlanta University's Normal School, Oberlin College, and the Cleveland College of Music. She returned to Georgia and was an assistant principal before she got married in 1903. In 1910, she and her husband, attorney Henry Lincoln Johnson (1870—1925), moved to Washington, D. C., where she began to write poems, first published in 1916 in the NAACP's monthly magazine, The Crisis. A community of Black writers in Washington aligned with the Harlem Renaissance met regularly at her home. For a time after her husband's death, she held an appointed government position (1925—1934) and became active in the Writers League Against Lynching with a series of anti-lynching plays, while continuing to write poetry and music.
1. The (lost) enclosed folder may have concerned Johnson's new poetry collection, mentioned later in the letter, or to her political activism; it is not clear why she asked for the addresses of teachers specifically. [back]
2. Oberlin College in Oberlin, Ohio, founded in 1833, was famous for its early admission of Black Americans and (as of 1837) of women. Founded by abolitionists and part of the Underground Railroad in the 1850s, it developed a reputation as one of the most progressive U.S. institutions of higher education. Many prominent Black activists gave lectures there, including Booker T. Washington beginning in 1897. Chesnutt's parents briefly resided in Oberlin in the late 1850s and early 1860s, before their return to Cleveland and then to North Carolina after the Civil War. Chesnutt spoke there in November 1908 at an early Niagara Movement conference. He also later delivered the speech "The Negro in Present-Day Fiction" there, probably in 1929. See Charles W. Chesnutt: Essays and Speeches (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 516–529. [back]
3. Johnson had attended Oberlin College around 1900 to study music; Chesnutt's family had ties to Oberlin, Ohio, ever since his parents had lived there when he was an infant. It is not known when Chesnutt and Johnson met there. [back]
4. Johnson was just about to publish her second poetry collection, Bronze: A Book of Verse, with Boston publisher H. J. Brimmer in November 1922. [back]
