Ethel Chesnutt Williams to Charles W. Chesnutt, 25 April 1932
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COLEMAN JENNINGSPRESIDENT CORCORAN THOM
VICE-PRESIDENT JOHN B. LARNER
TREASURER WALTER S. UFFORD
GENERAL SECRETARY THE ASSOCIATED CHARITIES SOCIAL SERVICE HOUSE, 1022 ELEVENTH STREET N.W. WASHINGTON, D. C. TELEPHONE: DISTRICT 6883 MRS. ETHEL C. WILLIAMS, VISITOR OFFICE HOURS: 10-12 A. M. SECOND DISTRICT OFFICE April 25th, 1932 Dear Dad:—
I went last evening to the Republic theatre1 to see "Veiled Aristocrats" a movie play adapted from "The House Behind the Cedars."2 It was quite modern in its ending — Rena, instead of dying, meets Frank in a big auto, and he takes her back to Fayetteville, to matrimonial bliss. She puts her head on Frank's shoulder and says "Don't wake me up until I reach Fayetteville" and all ends happily.3 It was played by an all colored cast. Rena, her brother, and Miss Molly took their parts very well.4
It was not artistic, like the story, however. Your beautiful English and the soul of the tale were lacking. It was a speaking movie and the actors voices were all harsh, as they probably are naturally. It was not so bad though, when you consider the handicaps colored actors have.
I do not know anything about Myron McAdoo. I would not ask anyone about him and had not heard.5
As you can imagine, in times like these, the work at the Associated Charities has been very heavy. My district, the second, has the poorest colored people of the city and there has been no work here for them for a long time.6 Also many have come up from the south with nothing at all, and the funds here are giving out. At the present rate of expenditure, there will be nothing to go on with after August. The Community Chest failed to raise the necessary
COLEMAN JENNINGS
PRESIDENT
CORCORAN THOM
VICE-PRESIDENT
JOHN B. LARNER
TREASURER
WALTER S. UFFORD
GENERAL SECRETARY
THE ASSOCIATED CHARITIES
SOCIAL SERVICE HOUSE, 1022 ELEVENTH STREET N.W.
WASHINGTON, D. C.
TELEPHONE: DISTRICT 6883
MRS. ETHEL C. WILLIAMS, VISITOR
OFFICE HOURS: 10-12 A. M.
SECOND DISTRICT OFFICE
fund's and further efforts, to raise it have failed. All the social agencies in the city are facing a serious deficit for the last last months of the year. The government is trying to decrease expenses and about five thousand government workers here are fearing dismissal. The social agencies tried to get Congress to appropriate $600,000 but that failed. That was to help the unemployed. The very poor have, up to date, had rent, food, milk, coal, clothing, and other necessities furnished free, but if funds give out, they will suffer.
The Communists here, too, are steadily causing commotion. There is something to what they say, too, but I dislike the way they use the lowest and most ignorant alley type as tools.7 I do not know how it will all work out but it probably will work out some way.
Meanwhile I am doing my best to help and am too tired when that is finished to worry much about anything.
Washington is very beautiful just now. It would be nice if you and Mother8 could come, down to the N.A.A.C.P. convention, here the week of May 16th.9 There are all sorts of excursions on the railroads now. Some people came up from Savannah, Sunday, for $6.00 round trip. If you can manage, try to come. It would do us all good.
Charlie has had a hard winter but he has had lots of company.10 I hope you are feeling well. You will soon be going to Idlewild which will be nice.11
Best love to you and the others. Ethel.Correspondent: Ethel Perry Chesnutt Williams (1879–1958), Chesnutt's eldest daughter, graduated from Smith College in June of 1901 and worked as an instructor at Tuskegee for the academic year 1901–1902. In the fall of 1902, she married her fiancé, Edward C. Williams (1871–1929), then head librarian at Western Reserve University in Cleveland. Their only child was Charles Waddell Chesnutt Williams (1903–1940). After several years spent in Cleveland in 1909, the Williamses moved to Washington, D.C., where Ethel continued to live and work after her husband's death in 1929; in the early 1930s, she was working as a social worker (home visitor) for Associated Charities of Washington, a poverty-relief umbrella organization. By 1939, she had remarried; her spouse was Rev. Joseph N. Beaman (1868–1943).
1. The Republic Theatre opened in 1921 in the Black shopping district on U Street in Washington, D.C. It seated between 1,100 and 1,300, and was one of the city's largest movie theaters for Black audiences in 1920s and 1930s. [back]
2. The House Behind the Cedars (Houghton Mifflin, 1900) was Chesnutt's first published novel. House evolved over more than a decade from a short story, "Rena Walden," first drafted in the late 1880s. It was the only novel by Chesnutt to be serialized, once in 1900-1901 in the monthly Self Culture and again in 1921-1922 in the Black weekly Chicago Defender. House was also his only novel to be adapted to film (1924 and 1932). [back]
3. Veiled Aristocrats (1932) was the second film adaptation of Chesnutt's The House Behind the Cedars by Oscar Micheaux (1884–1951), a sound remake of his 1927 silent movie that had used Chesnutt's title. The movie's title comes from a 1923 novel by Gertrude Sanborn (1881–1928), but the plot of the movie is taken from Chesnutt's novel, updated to the 1920s. For this second version, the Micheaux Film Corporation did not approach Chesnutt about movie rights, even though it had not fully paid for the rights for the first movie. It was filmed in Montclair, New Jersey, in the summer of 1931 with an all-Black cast. [back]
4. Like other Micheaux films, Veiled Aristocrats (1932) featured an all-Black cast, including Lorenzo Tucker (1907–1986), the "Black Valentino," as John Walden/Warwick, Laura Bowman (1881–1957) as his mother Molly, and Lucille Lewis (life dates unknown) as Rena. Carl Mahon (1906–1992) played Frank Fowler, and Laurence Chenault (1877–1943), who had played a White "aristocrat" in Micheaux's 1924/1925 film adaptation The House Behind the Cedars, was cast in this remake as Judge Straight. [back]
5. Myron McAdoo (1893–1960), son of North Carolina freedman Orpheus Myron McAdoo (1858–1900), became famous as a singer and impresario. He joined the Jubilee Singers led by Frederick Jeremiah Loudin (1836–1904) and then formed his own Virginia Concert Company and Jubilee Singers. The Chesnutts knew the family personally, through Mattie Allen McAdoo (1868–1936), Orpheus' wife and Myron's mother, who was from Ohio. During World War I, Myron McAdoo protested the racist treatment of Black soldiers like himself at Camp Lee, Petersburg, Virginia. He became a Second Lieutenant in 1918, later moved to Boston and got married there in 1923; he still lived in Boston at the time of his death. In 1932 the Cleveland Gazette reported a rumor that he had been found guilty of dealing drugs in New York; this was apparently untrue (see Cleveland Gazette [March 26, 1932]: 3). [back]
6. Associated Charities (and Community Chests) were umbrella organizations that locally pooled and distributed private charitable donations in many larger cities in the early 20th century and employed the earliest social workers. The president of Associated Charities of Washington, D. C., in the 1930s, Coleman Jennings (1892–1978), was a well-known White philanthropist. Ethel Chesnutt Williams (1879–1958) oversaw the predominantly Black second district of the city's Associated Charities as early as 1931; see "'Hard Times' Rush Community Chest," Evening Star (March 12, 1931): 9. [back]
7. Chesnutt possibly initiated the conversation about Communism with Ethel because he had recently received a questionnaire from Lessie O. Toler (1904–1960), who was working on an M.A. thesis on "The Negro and Communism" (completed 1932); see Toler's request from April 14, 1932, and Chesnutt's response, April 26, 1932. [back]
8. 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]
9. The 23rd annual convention of the NAACP was held May 17–22, 1932. In attendance were many of Chesnutt's correspondents, including Walter White (1898–1955), then head of the NAACP, W. E. B. Du Bois (1868–1963), and Mary White Ovington (1865–1951). Chesnutt and his wife did not attend. [back]
10. Charles Waddell Chesnutt Williams (1903–1940) was the older of Chesnutt's two grandchildren and the only child of Chesnutt's daughter Ethel and her husband Edward C. Williams. He graduated from Howard University in 1926 with a B.A. and from Howard Law School in 1929, and married Colleen Brooks Williams (1904–2006) the following year. He had a law practice in Washington, D.C., in the 1930s. His only child and Chesnutt's only great grandchild, Patricia, was born in 1931, the year before Chesnutt's death. [back]
11. 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]
