Charles Waddell Chesnutt (June 20, 1858 – November 15, 1932) was an African-American author, essayist, political activist, and lawyer, best known for his novels and short stories exploring complex issues of racial and social identity in the post-Civil War South. Two of his books were adapted as silent films in 1926 and 1927 by the African-American director and producer Oscar Micheaux. Following the Civil Rights Movement during the 20th century, interest in the works of Chesnutt was revived. Several of his books were published in new editions, and he received formal recognition. A commemorative stamp was printed in 2008.
During the early 20th century in Cleveland, Ohio, Chesnutt established what became a highly successful court reporting business, which provided his main income. He became active in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, writing articles supporting education as well as legal challenges to discriminatory laws.
Early life Chesnutt was born in Cleveland, Ohio to Andrew Jackson Chesnutt and Ann Maria (née Sampson) Chesnutt, both "free persons of color" from Fayetteville, North Carolina. His paternal grandfather was known to be a white slaveholder. He considered himself to be an African-American, acknowledging that he was additionally "seven-eighths" White. Given his appearance and background, Chesnutt could "pass" as a white man, and could have been legally permitted to claim said status, but never chose to do so. By the 1920s, the one drop rule was formally codified into law in many Southern states,The one-drop rule was part of Virginia's Racial Integrity Act in 1924. officially classifying him as a "Negro" on account of his known ancestry.
After the end of the Civil War and resulting emancipation, in 1867, the Chesnutt family returned to Fayetteville; Charles was nine years old. His parents ran a grocery store, in which Chesnutt worked part-time, but it failed because of his father's poor business practices and the struggling economy of the postwar South. In his early adolescence, Chesnutt was left to take care of his mother and siblings at home, due to his mother's failing health and eventual death. During this time, he published his first story in a small newspaper.
In addition to his responsibilities at home, Chesnutt attended school in Fayetteville called the Howard School, and by the age of 14, he had become a pupil-teacher there due to financial needs. This school was one of many founded for black students by the Freedmen's Bureau during the Reconstruction era. As a teacher, Chesnutt was extended many new job offers, but difficulties of the time period, such as funding and methodological disagreements, caused many of them to be withdrawn.
Throughout the remainder of his youth, Chesnutt continued to study and teach. According to Fayetteville historian Bruce Daws, Chesnutt was also a teacher in Charlotte, North Carolina, from 1873 to 1876, and also taught in schools near Spartanburg, South Carolina. In 1877, he was promoted to assistant principal of the normal school in Fayetteville, one of a number of historically black colleges established for the training of black teachers. By 1880, he became the school's principal and Chief Executive Officer upon the death of the former principal, Robert Harris. After becoming principal, Chesnutt inspired many remarkable qualities in his students. He later resigned from his position in 1883, when he moved to New York City to pursue a writing career.
Marriage and family In 1878, a year after he was employed at the normal school, Chesnutt married fellow teacher Susan Perry, a young African American from a respected family. Five years later, they moved to New York City, hoping to escape the prejudice and poverty of the Southern United States. By 1898, they had three daughters, named Helen, Ethel, and Dorothy, and one son named Edwin. Their second daughter, Helen Maria Chesnutt, became a noted classicist and published a biography of her father, in which she attempted to avoid extraneous emotion, seeking to provide a detailed telling of her father's life as accurately as she could.
Legal and writing career Chesnutt wanted to pursue a literary career, which he desired for the sake of providing for his family, as well as improving race relations with social commentary and literary activism. After spending six months in New York City, Chesnutt came to the conclusion that he could not raise a family there, and so the Chesnutts moved to Cleveland. In 1887, in Cleveland, Chesnutt studied the law and passed the bar exam. Chesnutt had learned stenography as a young man in North Carolina, and used this skill to establish what became a lucrative court reporting (legal stenography) business, which made him "financially prosperous".
Chesnutt also began writing stories, which were published by top-ranked national magazines. These included The Atlantic Monthly, which in August 1887 published The Goophered Grapevine, his first short story. It was the first work by an African American to be published by The Atlantic. In 1890, he tried to interest Walter Hines Page of Houghton Mifflin in his novel A Business Career, completed that year. Page said he needed to establish his reputation more before publishing a novel but encouraged him. Dealing with white characters and their society, this novel was found among Chesnutt's manuscripts and eventually published in 2005.
His first book was a collection of short stories entitled The Conjure Woman, published in 1899. These stories featured black characters who spoke in African American Vernacular English, as was popular in much contemporary southern literature portraying the antebellum years in the South, as well as the postwar period.
That year he published another short story collection, The Wife of His Youth and Other Stories of the Color-Line (1899), which included the title story, as well as "The Passing of Grandison", and others. These overturned contemporary ideas about the behavior of enslaved people and their seeking of freedom, as well as raising new issues about African-American culture. Atlantic editors strongly encouraged Chesnutt in his writing, and he had a 20-year relationship with the magazine.
Chesnutt's stories on racial identity were complex and concerned characters dealing with the difficulties of racialization, "passing", illegitimacy, racial identities, and social place throughout his career. As in "The Wife of His Youth", Chesnutt explored issues of color and class preference within the black community, including among longtime free people of color in northern towns.
The issues were especially pressing during the social volatility of Reconstruction and late 19th-century southern society. Whites in the South were trying to reestablish supremacy in social, economic and political spheres. With their regaining of political dominance through paramilitary violence and suppression of black voting in the late 19th century, white Democrats in the South passed laws imposing legal racial segregation and a variety of Jim Crow rules that imposed second-class status on black people. From 1890 to 1910, southern states also passed new constitutions and laws that disfranchised most black people and many poor white people from voting.Richard H. Pildes, "Democracy, Anti-Democracy, and the Canon", Constitutional Commentary, Vol. 17, 2000. Retrieved March 10, 2008. At the same time, there was often distance and competition between the masses of illiterate freedmen making their way from slavery, and families established as free before the war, especially if the latter were educated and property-owning.
Chesnutt continued writing short stories. He also completed a biography of the abolitionist Frederick Douglass, who had escaped from slavery before the war and become renowned as a speaker and abolitionist in the North. Encouraged by Atlantic editors, however, Chestnutt eventually moved to the larger novel form. He wanted to express his stronger sense of activism. The magazine's press published his first novel, The House Behind the Cedars (1900).
His Marrow of Tradition (1901) was based on the Wilmington massacre of 1898, when whites took over the city: attacking and killing many black people, and ousting the elected biracial government. This was the only coup d'état in United States history. Eric Sundquist, in his book To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Culture (1993), described the novel as "probably the most astute political-historical novel of its day", both in recounting the massacre and reflecting the complicated social times in which Chesnutt wrote it. Chesnutt wrote several other novels, though some of them were published posthumously. He also traveled around and gave regular lectures in different states, primarily going on tour in the north.
Because his novels posed a more direct challenge to current sociopolitical conditions, they were not as popular among readers as his stories, which had portrayed antebellum society. But, among the era's literary writers, Chesnutt was well-respected. For example, in 1905, he was invited to Mark Twain's 70th-birthday party in New York City. Although Chesnutt's stories met with critical acclaim, poor sales of his novels doomed his hopes of a self-supporting literary career. His last novel, The Colonel's Dream, was published in 1905 and detailed the actions of an ex-Confederate colonel returning to his hometown in North Carolina with hopes of reviving the town.
He produced a play called Mrs. Darcy's Daughter in 1906, however, it did not make much money and was deemed a failure. After that, Chesnutt returned his focus to his legal career, though he did continue to write fiction. However, he never found the same level of publishing success that he had earlier in his career.
Writing In style and subject matter, the writings of Charles Chesnutt straddle the divide between the local color school of American writing and literary realism.
One of Chesnutt's important works was The Conjure Woman (1899), a collection of stories set in postbellum North Carolina. The lead character Uncle Julius, a formerly enslaved man, entertains a white couple from the North, who have moved to the farm, with fantastical tales of antebellum plantation life. Julius's tales feature such supernatural elements as haunting, transfiguration, and conjuring, which were typical of Southern African-American folk tales. But Uncle Julius is also telling the stories in ways crafted to achieve his own goals and care for his circle. Retrieved December 8, 2013. Julius' tales are similar to Joel Chandler Harris' collection of folktales, the Uncle Remus tales, but differ in that they indirectly provide commentary on slavery and racial inequality, and the psychological and social effects therein. Controversially, some argue that these stories reinforce African American stereotypes, but for the most part, critics typically agree that the stories are elevated by their allegorical depiction of racial injustice. Seven of the Uncle Julius tales were collected in The Conjure Woman. Chesnutt wrote a total of fourteen Uncle Julius tales, the remainder of which were later collected in The Conjure Woman and Other Conjure Tales, edited by Richard H. Brodhead and published posthumously in 1993.
In 1899, Chesnutt published his The Wife of His Youth and Other Stories of the Color-Line, a collection of short stories in the realist vein. He explored many themes that also were used by 20th-century black writers:especially the prevalence of color prejudice" among blacks, "the dangers of 'passing', the bitterness of mulatto offspring..., the pitfalls of urban life and intermarriage in the North, and the maladministration of justice in the small towns of the South.