Charles W. Chestnutt

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Charles Waddell Chesnutt (June 20, 1858-1932), an African-American writer, essayist, activist, and advocate, best known for his books and short stories in the post-Civil War South's exploration of complex issues of race and social identity.

Two of his books were produced as silent films by 1926 and 1927 by the African-American director and producer Oscar Micheaux.

Following the Civil Rights Movement of the twentieth century, an interest in Chesnutt's work was revived.

Many of his books were published in new editions, and he was not given official recognition.

In 2008, a commemoration stamp was issued. Chesnutt established what became a very profitable court reporting company in Cleveland during the early twentieth century, providing him with his primary income.

He became a member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, writing articles promoting education as well as legal challenges to discrimination laws.

Early life

Chesnutt was born in Cleveland, Ohio, to Andrew Chesnutt and Ann Maria (née Sampson) Chesnutt, both "free people of color" from Fayetteville, North Carolina. His paternal grandfather was known to be a slave holder. He identified as an African American but claimed to be seven-eighths white. Chesnutt could "pass" as a white man, given his majority-European roots, but he never agreed to do so. Chesnutt would have been considered legally white in several southern states at the time of his birth if he had chosen to identify himself as such. By contrast, under the one-drop rule, which was later adopted into law in the majority of South, he would have been classified legally black because of some known African ancestry.

The Chesnutt family returned to Fayetteville in 1867 after the Civil War's and subsequent emancipation; Charles was nine years old. His parents owned a grocery store, but it failed due to his father's ineffective business practices and the postwar South's struggling economy. Chesnutt was a pupil-teacher at the Howard School, one of many founded for black students by the Freedmen's Bureau during the Reconstruction period.

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Education career

Chesnutt continued to study and teach. He was later promoted to assistant principal of Fayetteville, one of a string of historically black colleges established for the preparation of Black teachers. Fayetteville State University was founded as a normal school. During the nineteenth century, freedmen had a priority on education. Former slaved people "embraced education like nothing else," historian David Blight said in an interview. They lined up in droves, old and young, to attend night school rather than going to morning school. The first systems of public education in the South had existed, but they separated them as part of the price of passage. "Entered freed-people's classrooms from a sense of racial commitment that sometimes extended beyond lines of race and color."

Legal and writing career

Chesnutt read the constitution in Cleveland and passed the bar exam in 1887. Chesnutt had discovered stenography as a young man in North Carolina. He established what became a lucrative court reporting (legal stenography) company, which made him "financially rich."

Chesnutt began writing stories that were later published in top-ranked national magazines. The Atlantic Monthly, which published his first short story, "The Goophered Grapevine," in August 1887. It was the first work by an African American to be published by The Atlantic. In 1890, Walter Hines Page of Houghton Mifflin was a young boy who was interested in his book, A Business Career, which was published in 1890. However, Page said he wanted to establish his name before releasing a book, but he encouraged him to do so. This book, which was dealing with white characters and their culture, was discovered among Chesnutt's manuscripts and later published in 2005.

The Conjure Woman was his first book, published in 1899, and it was a collection of short stories. These stories featured Black characters who wrote in African American Vernacular English as well as the postwar period in southern literature, as well as the antebellum period.

He released another short story collection, The Wife of His Youth and Other Stories of the Color-Line (1899), as well as "The Passing of Grandison" and others, that year. These challenged traditional assumptions of slave life and freedom as well as raising new questions regarding African-American culture. Chesnutt's writing was largely supported by Atlantic editors, who had a 20-year association with the magazine.

Chesnutt's stories on racial identity were more difficult than those of many of his contemporaries. He wrote about characters battling with difficult topics of mixed race, "passing," illegitimacy, racial identities, and social groups in his lifetime. Chesnutt explored issues of race and class identity within the Black community, including among long-distance people of color in northern towns in "The Wife of His Youth."

During Reconstruction and late nineteenth-century southern society, the problems were particularly acute. Whites in the South were attempting to reestablish a stalemate in social, economic, and political spheres. With their regaining political clout in the late 19th century, white Democrats in South passed legislation that imposed legal racial segregation and a variety of Jim Crow rules that placed second-class status on Black people. Southern states also passed new constitutions and laws that disfranchised the majority of black people and a large number of poor white people from voting from 1890 to 1910. At the same time, there was often distance and rivalry between families established as free before the war, particularly if they were educated and property-owning, and the mass of illiterate freedmen were escaping slavery.

Chesnutt's short stories continued to be published. He also wrote a biography of abolitionist Frederick Douglass, who had escaped from slavery before the war and become a speaker and abolitionist in the North.

Chestnutt followed the larger book style, which was prompted by Atlantic editors. He wanted to show his more zealous convictions. The Cedars (1900), the magazine's press released his first book, The House behind the Cedars (1900).

Marrow of Tradition (1901) was based on the Wilmington Massacre of 1898, when whites took over the city: assaulting and killing many Black people, as well as dismissing the elected biracial government. This was the first coup d'état in the United States. Eric Sundquist's book "British Culture: The Making of American Culture (1993) described the novel as "probably the most astute political-historical book of its day" both in recounting the massacre and describing the complex social times in which Chesnutt wrote it. Chesnutt wrote several books, but not all of them were released during his lifetime. He has also toured on the national lecture circuit, mainly in northern states.

Since his books represented antebellum society, they were not as popular among readers as his novels, which had portrayed antebellum life, were not as popular among readers. Chesnutt, as one of the period's literary writers, was well-received. For example, Chesnutt was invited to Mark Twain's 70th birthday party in New York City in 1905. Although Chesnutt's books received critical acclaim, poor sales of his books doomed his chances of a self-supporting literary career. In 1905, his last book, The Colonel's Dream, was published, and it chronicled the lives of an ex-Confederate colonel returning to North Carolina with the intention of revitalizing the town.

His play Mrs. Darcy's Daughter was published in 1906, but it was also a commercial failure. Chesnutt wrote and published little between 1906 and 1932, other than a few short stories and essays.

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