Wendell Phillips Dabney to Charles W. Chesnutt, 3 September 1931
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DABNEY PUBLISHING COMPANY
AND
OFFICE OF THE UNION1
420 McAllister Street
CINCINNATI, OHIO
September 3, 1931.
Mr. Charles W. Chestnutt,
Cleveland, Ohio.
My dear Mr. Chestnutt:
I do not know whether you have captured all the fish at Idlewilde or whether you still are angling for them.2 At any rate, I shall be in Cleveland Saturday and possibly Sunday.
If you are in town, I shall pay my respects unless, from the different things I have said concerning you, it will be dangerous for me to do so.
Kindest Regards to you and all the family,
Hastily Yours, Dabney WPD:SCorrespondent: Wendell Phillips Dabney (1865–1952) was a Black activist, musician and journalist. Originally from Richmond, Virginia, he moved to Ohio in 1883 to study at Oberlin, and then to Cincinnati in 1894. He worked for the city of Cincinnati from 1895 until 1923 and was the founder, editor, and publisher of the Black weekly paper The Union (1907–1952). Chesnutt and Dabney knew of each other in the 1920s, but only their 1930s correspondence survives.
1. The Union was a Cincinnati-based Black weekly newspaper founded in 1907 by Wendell Phillips Dabney (1865–1952), who edited it until his death. Initially affiliated with the Republican Party, it identified as Independent after 1925. [back]
2. Starting in 1922, the Chesnutts spent every summer until Chesnutt's death in Idlewild, in Lake County, Michigan, about 380 miles northwest of Cleveland. Idlewild was a popular lakeside resort for hundreds of Black families from the urban Midwest from the 1910s to the 1960s, when racism excluded them from many resort towns. In the spring of 1924, Chesnutt purchased a plot of land, where he had a summer home built in 1925. [back]
