Charles Waddell Chesnutt (June 20, 1858 – November 15, 1932) was an American author, essayist, political activist, and lawyer, best known for his novels and short stories exploring complex issues of racial and social identity in the post-Civil War South.

During the early 20th century in Cleveland, Ohio, Chesnutt established what became a highly successful court reporting business, which provided his main income.

He became active in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, writing articles supporting education as well as legal challenges to discriminatory laws.

[1] His parents ran a grocery store, in which Chesnutt worked part-time,[4] but it failed because of his father's poor business practices and the struggling economy of the postwar South.

[1] As a teacher, Chesnutt was extended many new job offers, but difficulties of the time period, such as funding and methodological disagreements, caused many of them to be withdrawn.

[7] In 1878, a year after he was employed at the normal school, Chesnutt married fellow teacher Susan Perry, a young African American from a respected family.

These stories featured black characters who spoke in African American Vernacular English, as was popular in much contemporary southern literature portraying the antebellum years in the South, as well as the postwar period.

These overturned contemporary ideas about the behavior of enslaved people and their seeking of freedom, as well as raising new issues about African-American culture.

[19] At the same time, there was often distance and competition between the masses of illiterate freedmen making their way from slavery, and families established as free before the war, especially if the latter were educated and property-owning.

[12] His Marrow of Tradition (1901) was based on the Wilmington Massacre of 1898, when whites took over the city: attacking and killing many black people, and ousting the elected biracial government.

[23] Because his novels posed a more direct challenge to current sociopolitical conditions, they were not as popular among readers as his stories,[24] which had portrayed antebellum society.

[25] Although Chesnutt's stories met with critical acclaim, poor sales of his novels doomed his hopes of a self-supporting literary career.

[15] The lead character Uncle Julius, a formerly enslaved man, entertains a white couple from the North, who have moved to the farm, with fantastical tales of antebellum plantation life.

[27] Both collections were highly praised by the influential novelist, critic, and editor William Dean Howells in a review published in 1900 in the Atlantic Monthly titled "Mr. Charles W. Chesnutt's Stories".

[30]The House Behind the Cedars (1900) was Chesnutt's first novel, his attempt to improve on what he believed were inadequate depictions of the complexity of race and the South's social relations.

[32] The issues are expressed chiefly through the trials of Rena Walden, a young, fair, mixed-race woman who joins her brother in another town, where he is already passing for white and established as a lawyer.

[27] The Marrow of Tradition (1901), set fictionally against events like the Wilmington Race Riot, marked a turning point for Chesnutt.

[27] With this and other early 20th-century works, Chesnutt began to address political issues more directly and confronted sensitive topics such as racial "passing", lynching, and miscegenation, which made many readers uncomfortable.

[34] His last novel, The Colonel's Dream (1905), was described as "a tragic story of an idealist's attempt to revive a depressed North Carolina town through a socioeconomic program much akin to the New South creed of Henry W. Grady and Booker T.

A typical sentence from his fiction is a passage from The House Behind the Cedars: "When the first great shock of his discovery wore off, the fact of Rena's origin lost to Tryon some of its initial repugnance—indeed, the repugnance was not to the woman at all, as their past relations were evidence, but merely to the thought of her as a wife."

[31] Starting in the 1960s, when the Civil Rights Movement brought renewed attention to African-American life and artists, a long process of critical discussion and re-evaluation has revived Chesnutt's reputation.

Several commentators have praised Chesnutt's exploration of racial identity, the manner in which he used African-American speech and folklore, and his criticism of the skewed logic put forth by Jim Crow laws.

[43] In 2008, Dante James, a student at Duke University, made a film adaptation of The Doll, one of Chesnutt's short stories.

[49] Chesnutt's views on race relations put him between Du Bois' talented tenth and Booker Washington's separate but equal positions.

As he recounted the history of black achievements and spoke on poverty, Chesnutt cited many specific numbers and statistics in his speech, and called for full African American rights.

He concluded his remarks with the following statement, made 58 years before Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech: Looking down the vista of time I see an epoch in our nation's history, not in my time or yours, but in the not distant future, when there shall be in the United States but one people, molded by the same culture, swayed by the same patriotic ideals, holding their citizenship in such high esteem that for another to share it is of itself to entitle him to fraternal regard; when men will be esteemed and honored for their character and talents.

When hand in hand and heart with heart all the people of this nation will join to preserve to all and to each of them for all future time that ideal of human liberty which the fathers of the republic set out in the Declaration of Independence, which declared that 'all men are created equal', the ideal for which [William Lloyd] Garrison and [Wendell] Phillips and [Sen. Charles] Sumner lived and worked; the ideal for which [Abraham] Lincoln died, the ideal embodied in the words of the Book [Bible] which the slave mother learned by stealth to read, with slow-moving finger and faltering speech, and which I fear that some of us have forgotten to read at all-the Book which declares that "God is no respecter of persons, and that of one blood hath he made all the nations of the earth.

Beginning in 1910, he served on the General Committee of the newly founded National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

[52] He wrote a strong essay protesting the southern states' successful actions to disfranchise black people at the turn of the 20th century.

The Klan was revived following this film, reaching a peak in membership nationally in 1925, as chapters were founded in the urban Midwest and West as well as the South.