Charles W. Chesnutt, Marker I-32 - North Carolina Historical Markers on Waymarking.com

Though born in Cleveland in 1858, the grandson of a white man and the son of free blacks, Charles Chesnutt grew up in Fayetteville, North Carolina where his family, having left the South originally in 1856, returned after the Civil War.

Chesnutt attended a school funded by the Freedman's Bureau, and then worked as a teacher and eventually as a school principal in Charlotte and in Fayetteville. Despite his personal success, Chesnutt resented the racial oppression of the South. Believing a more hospitable environment existed in the North, he moved his family to Cleveland in 1884, where he worked first as a court reporter and then as founder of a successful legal stenography company.

Chesnutt also had a passion for writing, and began publishing short stories in 1885. "Dave's Neckliss" was among the first stories written in black dialect by a black author, using the language to convey not only authenticity but also moral complexity. Chesnutt's work dealt primarily with the South, and especially with themes of interracial sex and the phenomenon of people legally defined as "black" whose relatively light skin color enabled them to "pass" as "white."

Chesnutt met with much praise for his early stories, but his powerful and controversial novels met with steadily diminishing readerships. He stopped writing fiction in the early twentieth century, devoting his energies to business and to organizations dedicated to improving the lot of African-Americans. Chesnutt wrote powerful essays on the political and economic exploitation of Southern blacks and served as a member of the General Committee of the NAACP, making him one of the most important commentators on racial issues in the early twentieth century, along with men such as W.E.B. DuBois and Booker T. Washington.

In 1928, the NAACP awarded Chesnutt its Spingarn Medal for his life's work. Charles W. Chesnutt died in 1932.

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