The Marrow of Tradition
First Edition ©2002
This teaching edition of Charles W. Chesnutt’s 1901 novel about racial conflict in a Southern town features an extensive selection of materials that place the work in its historical context. Organized thematically, these materials explore caste, gender, and race after Reconstruction; postbellum laws...
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This teaching edition of Charles W. Chesnutt’s 1901 novel about racial conflict in a Southern town features an extensive selection of materials that place the work in its historical context. Organized thematically, these materials explore caste, gender, and race after Reconstruction; postbellum laws and lynching; the 1898 Wilmington riot upon which the narrative is based; and the fin de siecle culture of segregation. The thematic sections are rich with documents such as letters, photographs, editorials, speeches, legal decisions, journalism, and essays from leading periodicals of the era. The writers represented include such well-known figures as W. E. B. DuBois, Booker T. Washington, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, as well as fascinating, half-forgotten characters like the black newspaper editor Alexander Manly and the white supremacist Thomas Dixon. The editors’ introductions and selection headnotes provide additional background for understanding the mythology of race and Chesnutt’s penetrating examination of its mechanisms and consequences.
Table of Contents
About the Series
About This Volume
Illustrations
PART ONE
The Marrow of Tradition: The Complete Text
Introduction: Cultural and Historical Background
Chronology of Chesnutts Life and Times
A Note on the Text
The Marrow of Tradition [1901 Houghton Mifflin edition]
PART TWO
The Marrow of Tradition: Cultural Contexts
1. Caste, Race and Gender After Reconstruction
Philip Bruce, from The Platinum Negro as a Freeman
Tom Watson, from "The Negro Question in the South"
William Dean Howells, from An Imperative Duty
Booker T. Washington, "Atlanta Exposition Speech" from Up from Slavery
Charles W. Chesnutt, from "The Future American"
W.E.B. DuBois, from "The Conservation of Race"
Theodore Roosevelt, from "Birth Reform, from the Positive, not the Negative Side"
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, from Women and Economics
Fannie Barrier Williams, from "The Intellectual Progress of the Colored Woman"
Roscoe Conklin Bruce, from "Service by the Educated Negro"
2. Law and Lawlessness
Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution
George Washington Cable, from "The Freedmans Case in Equity"
Plessy v. Ferguson (1896): excerpts from brief by Albion Tourgee, majority opinion by Justice Henry Billings Brown, and the dissenting opinion by Justice John Marshall Harlan
"Suffrage and Eligibility to Office," Article VI, amendment to the North Carolina State Constitution
Ida B. Wells, from Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All its Phases
"Lynched Negro and Wife First Mutilated," Vicksburg (Mississippi) Evening Post February 8, 1904
"Victims Family Begs to See Negro Burned," Atlanta Constitution October 2, 1905
"Belleville is Complacent Over Horrible Lynching,: New York Herald June 9, 1903
Jane Addams, from "Respect for Law," Independent
Ray Stannard Baker, from "A Race Riot and After," Following the Color Line
George H. White, from a speech before the United States House of Representatives, February 23, 1900
3. The Wilmington Riot
Alexander Manly, editorial printed in Literary Digest, 1898
Rebecca Latimer Fulton, speech reported in The Wilmington Star
From the "White Mans Declaration of Independence" (or, Wilmington Declaration of Independence), from Appletons Cyclopaedia
Anonymous letter to William McKinley, 13 November 1898
Charles Chesnutt, from letter to Walter Hines Page, 1898
Jane Cronly, "An Account of the Race Riot in Wilmington, N.C."
4. Segregation as Culture: Etiquette, Spectacle, and Fiction
Wilmington Messenger article, rpt in Raleigh New and Observer, 8 September 1899
Photograph of "Old Plantation" Midway booth at the 1896 Cotton States Exposition in Atlanta, Georgia
From The Cotton States and International Exposition program
Tom Fletcher, from 100 Years of the Negro in Show Business
"Old" and "New" Negro photographs juxtaposed, from Frances Benjamin Johnstons The Hampton album.
Charles Chesnutt, Literary Memoranda
Charles Chesnutt, "Po Sandy"
Thomas Dixon, from The Leopards Spots
Williams Dean Howells, from "A Psychological Counter-Current in Recent Fiction" North American Review
Bibliography
About This Volume
Illustrations
PART ONE
The Marrow of Tradition: The Complete Text
Introduction: Cultural and Historical Background
Chronology of Chesnutts Life and Times
A Note on the Text
The Marrow of Tradition [1901 Houghton Mifflin edition]
PART TWO
The Marrow of Tradition: Cultural Contexts
1. Caste, Race and Gender After Reconstruction
Philip Bruce, from The Platinum Negro as a Freeman
Tom Watson, from "The Negro Question in the South"
William Dean Howells, from An Imperative Duty
Booker T. Washington, "Atlanta Exposition Speech" from Up from Slavery
Charles W. Chesnutt, from "The Future American"
W.E.B. DuBois, from "The Conservation of Race"
Theodore Roosevelt, from "Birth Reform, from the Positive, not the Negative Side"
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, from Women and Economics
Fannie Barrier Williams, from "The Intellectual Progress of the Colored Woman"
Roscoe Conklin Bruce, from "Service by the Educated Negro"
2. Law and Lawlessness
Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution
George Washington Cable, from "The Freedmans Case in Equity"
Plessy v. Ferguson (1896): excerpts from brief by Albion Tourgee, majority opinion by Justice Henry Billings Brown, and the dissenting opinion by Justice John Marshall Harlan
"Suffrage and Eligibility to Office," Article VI, amendment to the North Carolina State Constitution
Ida B. Wells, from Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All its Phases
"Lynched Negro and Wife First Mutilated," Vicksburg (Mississippi) Evening Post February 8, 1904
"Victims Family Begs to See Negro Burned," Atlanta Constitution October 2, 1905
"Belleville is Complacent Over Horrible Lynching,: New York Herald June 9, 1903
Jane Addams, from "Respect for Law," Independent
Ray Stannard Baker, from "A Race Riot and After," Following the Color Line
George H. White, from a speech before the United States House of Representatives, February 23, 1900
3. The Wilmington Riot
Alexander Manly, editorial printed in Literary Digest, 1898
Rebecca Latimer Fulton, speech reported in The Wilmington Star
From the "White Mans Declaration of Independence" (or, Wilmington Declaration of Independence), from Appletons Cyclopaedia
Anonymous letter to William McKinley, 13 November 1898
Charles Chesnutt, from letter to Walter Hines Page, 1898
Jane Cronly, "An Account of the Race Riot in Wilmington, N.C."
4. Segregation as Culture: Etiquette, Spectacle, and Fiction
Wilmington Messenger article, rpt in Raleigh New and Observer, 8 September 1899
Photograph of "Old Plantation" Midway booth at the 1896 Cotton States Exposition in Atlanta, Georgia
From The Cotton States and International Exposition program
Tom Fletcher, from 100 Years of the Negro in Show Business
"Old" and "New" Negro photographs juxtaposed, from Frances Benjamin Johnstons The Hampton album.
Charles Chesnutt, Literary Memoranda
Charles Chesnutt, "Po Sandy"
Thomas Dixon, from The Leopards Spots
Williams Dean Howells, from "A Psychological Counter-Current in Recent Fiction" North American Review
Bibliography
Authors
Charles W. Chesnutt
Nancy Bentley
Nancy Bentley is Undergraduate English Chair at the University of Pennsylvania.
Sandra Gunning
Sandra Gunning is Associate Professor of English at the University of Michigan.
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