‘A Christian Gentleman’: Charles Chesnutt, Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois

“I have a very high ideal of those qualities which apart from his literary attainments and skill in teaching should make up the character of an instructor of youth; and my ideal of a teacher can be tersely but clearly expressed in two words—a Christian Gentleman. By the word Christian, I mean not merely a church-member or outward professor of religion; but one who is imbued with the true spirit of Christ…[He] should be a gentleman. And here I use not the word in its conventional sense. I do not mean that he should be of high birth or great wealth; that he should clothe his person in fine raiment, or his fine speech in fine words: I use the word in its broadest signification—one who has a proper respect of himself, and a proper regard for the rights and opinions of others and at the same time knows how to act in order that other people may know that he respects himself and them.”-Charles Chesnutt, “Etiquette (Good Manners),” A Speech delivered to the Normal Literary Society, Fayetteville, North Carolina (1881).

Though not the first African American novelist—William Wells Brown holds that title, with his 1853 publication Clotel—Charles Chesnutt is largely considered the first African American novelist of national importance. In addition to a compilation of short stories including “The Wife of His Youth,” featured in his 1899 The Wife of His Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line and a short story compilation, The Conjure Woman published in the same year, Chesnutt published three novels: The House Behind the Cedars (1900), The Marrow of Tradition (1901) and The Colonel’s Dream (1905).

Each of Chesnutt’s novels dealt prominently with depictions of the “Color Line.” Notably, The Marrow of Tradition was a fictional recounting of the Wilmington North Carolina Massacre in 1898, and his The Colonel’s Dream depicted a white protagonist from the north whose vision for reforming the South failed his high almost romanticized ambitions. (This was the very first novel written by an African American writer that possessed a central figure and narrative revolving around whites.) All the same, in the speech given to the Normal Literary Society in Fayetteville, NC while Chesnutt was then serving as a principal, he shared a recurring theme in his speeches and essays—ethical manners and morality.

Charles Chesnutt who abandoned his literary career and eventually went on to various trades was a constant and often unheralded interlocutor with both Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois. The steady stream of written correspondence between Chesnutt, Washington and Du Bois involved Chesnutt’s publications in Du Bois’s Crisis Magazine—as well as his challenges to Du Bois on varying racial matters of the day—and his personal and friendly—but often political disagreements—with Booker T. Washington. All the same, the three shared their interests (alongside many African American leaders of the period) in not only protesting on behalf of African Americans but seeking ethical and reformation within.

These three along with 4 other African American writers the most notable of which were Paul Laurence Dunbar and T. Thomas Fortune agreed to jointly publish The Negro Problem appearing in 1903 and it was edited by Booker T. Washington. In it, each author wrote from their various perspectives, admittedly, championing their own programs: Washington for Industrial Education, Du Bois for “The Talented Tenth,” and Chesnutt the disenfranchisement of the Negro vote.

All the same, in spite of Chesnutt’s call for political action, he argued in back of it the ethical and moral character of leadership that ought undergird all African American leadership. And this theme, though latent in his novels, was his view expressed in essays, correspondence and speeches like the excerpt above. Moreover, it echoed and reverberated throughout Chesnutt’s personal and public life, which inevitably placed at him at odds at times with both Du Bois and Washington. For Chesnutt’s view of a ‘Christian gentleman’ would not be constrained to either the left or the right—not one or the other but both—declaring right or wrong without respect to political or personal approbation.