Albion W. Tourgée to Charles W. Chesnutt, [1895, after 3 September]
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Chas. W. Chesnutt:
My dear Sir: Yours with check for $15.- and new addresses of 10[?] subscribers received. No doubt what you say in explanation of the colored people's cause is entirely correct. The causes are not ‸so important as the fact. It seems to me needful that they should embrace every chance to acquire white association—become familiar to white people's thought as operative, business, literary and every other sort of associates. I think it would have been worth almost everything to have had a colored associate Editor on the Basis, &c, &c.
The distrust and jealousy among the most successful prevents their taking hold of any such thing. They insist on going alone and then find fault because they are not helped along and given better terms. I am sorry for it, but I can't help it. The
Well, I suppose it is much better for me. To show you the contrast, however, let me say that a good woman has lately put into my hands quite a sum to be used for the Basis, "because it is an effective champion of the rights of all without regard to race or color."
We are getting on nicely and may be said to have safely passed the shallows.
Yours T
Correspondent: Albion Winegar Tourgée (1838–1905) was a White activist, author, and judge. During Reconstruction, he settled in North Carolina and became an advocate for racial equality. Tourgée wrote his bestselling autobiographical novel, A Fool's Errand (1879), before moving to Mayville, New York, in 1881. He published fifteen more novels in the next seventeen years, and several times attempted to found magazines, often inviting Chesnutt to serve as editor. In 1891, he founded the National Citizens' Rights Association, an organization devoted to equality for African-American citizens, and in 1896 served as Homer Plessy's lead counsel in the U.S. Supreme Court case Plessy v. Ferguson (1896).
