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Charles Waddell Chesnutt was born on June 20, 1858, in Cleveland, Ohio. During the nation’s antebellum period, Ohio was a Free state where slavery was illegal. Chesnutt’s parents were free Black people who had moved to Cleveland from Fayetteville, North Carolina, before the Civil War and returned to Fayetteville after the war to care for an elderly parent.
In Cleveland, Chesnutt was educated at a school for Black children established by the Freedmen’s Bureau. Its principal noted Chesnutt’s academic abilities and encouraged him. After completing his education, Chesnutt became an educator, often working with impoverished children whose educational needs were not well supported by the teaching methods of the day. Growing weary of the still-fierce discrimination against Black people in the former Slave states of the South, Chesnutt left teaching. Continuing to educate himself by extensive reading, he moved to New York to work as a reporter and writer. He later returned to Cleveland. He had begun writing stories, and while raising a young family, he also taught himself law. After passing the bar exam, Chesnutt began a successful court reporting business.
Although he couldn’t make a sufficient living on writing alone, Chesnutt’s desire to publish was strong. He began submitting his work, including to outlets that at the time were considered hard to break into. When one of his stories was published in Atlantic Monthly in 1887, Chesnutt’s writing gained wide attention. This magazine had the power to create celebrity, and doors began to open for Chesnutt. His collections of short stories, The Conjure Woman and The Wife of His Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line, were published in 1899 by the well-regarded Houghton Mifflin. Chesnutt’s growing reputation as a writer of stories and opinion pieces brought him the opportunity to write a biography of the great abolitionist Frederick Douglass, and several novels followed this work.
Chesnutt was gradually able to devote more time to his lifelong interest in and advocacy for racial uplift. During his years as an educator, he was optimistic that people of African and mixed racial heritage would soon be treated as respected citizens and should prepare themselves to participate fully in the American endeavor. But as he grew older, Chesnutt felt discouraged that race relations were still so fraught and that, especially in the South, brutal discrimination was still the experience of many Black people. In some opinion pieces, he expressed hope that a gradual blurring of the color line would lead to better economic, political, and educational conditions. But what he witnessed and read about during the years of Reconstruction and the rise of Jim Crow led him to believe that color prejudice, sometimes even within Black communities, would prove difficult to erase.
By the time of his death on November 15, 1932, in Cleveland, Ohio, Chesnutt had cemented his reputation as one of the first great and widely known Black American writers of fiction and nonfiction. In 1928, he was awarded the NAACP’s prestigious Spingarn Medal, given for the “highest achievement” in “any honorable field” of work, an honor shared with people such as W. E. B. Du Bois (1920), Martin Luther King, Jr. (1957), and Maya Angelou (1994).
