Charles Chesnutt's Dilemma: Professional Ethics, Social Justice, and Domestic Feminism in The Marrow of Tradition

Unlike his earlier dialect tales, which were enthusiastically reviewed in the white press, The Marrow of Tradition, his 1901 novel known to be a fictional recreation of the Wilmington, North Carolina race riot of 1898 in which at least nineteen black men and women were murdered, received only a lukewarm response at its publication.1 William Dean Howells called it a "bitter, bitter" book and others commented on its lack of artistry (Pickens 49, 82). Booker T. Washington, long associated with the latter perspective, set forth a strategy that did not challenge white supremacy in, as he said in his famous Atlanta Compromise speech, "all things that are purely social," thus ostensibly providing a space for black self-help and advancement.2 Chesnutt's unease with the accomodationist program of racial uplift is laced throughout his extensive correspondence with Washington and other race leaders as well as in numerous speeches.