Charles W. Chesnutt
Encyclopedia
Short Stories
Short Stories may refer to:*A plural for Short story*Short Stories , an American pulp magazine published from 1890-1959*Short Stories, a 1954 collection by O. E...
exploring complex issues of racial and social identity in the post-Civil War
Civil war
A civil war is a war between organized groups within the same nation state or republic, or, less commonly, between two countries created from a formerly-united nation state....
South
South
South is a noun, adjective, or adverb indicating direction or geography.South is one of the four cardinal directions or compass points. It is the opposite of north and is perpendicular to east and west.By convention, the bottom side of a map is south....
, where the legacy of slavery and interracial relations had resulted in many free people of color
Free people of color
A free person of color in the context of the history of slavery in the Americas, is a person of full or partial African descent who was not enslaved...
who had attained education before the war, as well as slaves and freedmen of mixed race. Two of his books were adapted as silent films in 1926 and 1927 by the director and producer Oscar Micheaux
Oscar Micheaux
Oscar Devereaux Micheaux was an American author, film director and independent producer of more than 44 films...
. Chesnutt also established what became a highly successful legal stenography business that provided his main income.
Early life
Chesnutt was born in Cleveland, OhioCleveland, Ohio
Cleveland is a city in the U.S. state of Ohio and is the county seat of Cuyahoga County, the most populous county in the state. The city is located in northeastern Ohio on the southern shore of Lake Erie, approximately west of the Pennsylvania border...
, to Andrew Chesnutt and Ann Maria (Sampson) Chesnutt, both "free persons of color" from Fayetteville, North Carolina
Fayetteville, North Carolina
Fayetteville is a city located in Cumberland County, North Carolina, United States. It is the county seat of Cumberland County, and is best known as the home of Fort Bragg, a U.S. Army post located northwest of the city....
. His paternal grandfather was known to be a white slaveholder and, based on his appearance, Chesnutt likely had other white ancestors. He claimed to be seven-eighths white, although he identified as African-American. Chesnutt could "pass
Passing (racial identity)
Racial passing refers to a person classified as a member of one racial group attempting to be accepted as a member of a different racial group...
" with relative ease for a white man, although he never chose to do so. In the eighteenth century and in many southern states at the time of his birth, Chesnutt was considered legally white. Under the one drop rule that became adopted in the 1920s in most of the South,The one-drop rule was made part of Virginia's Racial Integrity Act in 1924. he was classified as "legally" black.
After the Civil War
American Civil War
The American Civil War was a civil war fought in the United States of America. In response to the election of Abraham Lincoln as President of the United States, 11 southern slave states declared their secession from the United States and formed the Confederate States of America ; the other 25...
, the Chesnutt family returned to Fayetteville when Charles was nine years old. His parents ran a grocery store, but it failed because of Andrew Chesnutt's poor business practices and the struggling economy of the postwar South. By age 13 Charles was a pupil-teacher at the Howard School, one of many founded for black students by the Freedmen's Bureau during the Reconstruction era.
Education career
Chesnutt continued to study and teach. He eventually was promoted to assistant principal of the normal schoolNormal school
A normal school is a school created to train high school graduates to be teachers. Its purpose is to establish teaching standards or norms, hence its name...
in Fayetteville, one of a number of historically black colleges established for the training of black teachers. It has developed into Fayetteville State University
Fayetteville State University
Fayetteville State University is a historically black, regional university located in Fayetteville, North Carolina, United States. FSU is a constituent institution of the University of North Carolina System and is a member school of the Thurgood Marshall Scholarship Fund.-Academics:The primary...
.
Marriage and family
In 1878, Chesnutt married Susan Perry and they moved to New York CityNew York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
. He hoped to escape the prejudice and poverty of the South
Southern United States
The Southern United States—commonly referred to as the American South, Dixie, or simply the South—constitutes a large distinctive area in the southeastern and south-central United States...
and wanted to pursue a literary career. After six months, the Chesnutts moved to Cleveland.
Legal and writing career
There Chesnutt studied for and passed the bar exam in 1887. Chesnutt had learned stenography as a young man in North Carolina, and he established what became a lucrative legal stenography business in Cleveland.Chesnutt also began writing stories that were accepted by top-ranked national magazines. These included The Atlantic Monthly
The Atlantic Monthly
The Atlantic is an American magazine founded in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1857. It was created as a literary and cultural commentary magazine. It quickly achieved a national reputation, which it held for more than a century. It was important for recognizing and publishing new writers and poets,...
, which in August 1887 published his first short story, The Goophered Grapevine. His first book was a collection of short stories entitled The Conjure Woman
The Conjure Woman (stories)
The Conjure Woman is the title of an 1899 collection of seven stories by Charles W. Chesnutt, an important African American writer from the post-Civil War South; it was his first book...
, published in 1899. These stories featured black characters who spoke in dialect, as was popular in much southern literature at the time.
Chesnutt's stories were more complex than those of many of his contemporaries. He wrote about characters dealing with difficult issues of mixed race, "passing
Passing (racial identity)
Racial passing refers to a person classified as a member of one racial group attempting to be accepted as a member of a different racial group...
", illegitimacy, racial identities and social place throughout his career. The issues were especially pressing during the social volatility of Reconstruction and late 19th-century southern society. Whites in the South were trying to reestablish supremacy in social, economic and legal spheres. With their regaining of political dominance through paramilitary
Paramilitary
A paramilitary is a force whose function and organization are similar to those of a professional military, but which is not considered part of a state's formal armed forces....
violence and suppression of black voting, they passed laws imposing legal racial segregation and a variety of Jim Crow rules. From 1890 to 1910, southern states passed new constitutions and laws that disfranchised most blacks and many poor whites from voting. At the same time, there was often distance and competition between families who had long been free people of color
Free people of color
A free person of color in the context of the history of slavery in the Americas, is a person of full or partial African descent who was not enslaved...
, especially if they were educated and property-owning, and the masses of illiterate freedmen making their way from slavery.
Chesnutt continued writing short stories. He also completed a biography of the abolitionist Frederick Douglass
Frederick Douglass
Frederick Douglass was an American social reformer, orator, writer and statesman. After escaping from slavery, he became a leader of the abolitionist movement, gaining note for his dazzling oratory and incisive antislavery writing...
, who had escaped from slavery before the war.
He began to write novels and reflected his stronger sense of activism. His Marrow of Tradition was based on the Wilmington Massacre of 1898
Wilmington Insurrection of 1898
The Wilmington Insurrection of 1898, also known as the Wilmington Massacre of 1898 or the Wilmington Race Riot of 1898, occurred in Wilmington, North Carolina on November 10, 1898 and following days; it is considered a turning point in North Carolina politics following Reconstruction...
, when whites took over the city and threw out the elected biracial government. Eric Sundquist, in his book To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Culture (1993), described the novel as "probably the most astute political-historical novel of its day", both in terms of recounting the massacre and reflecting the complicated social times in which Chesnutt wrote it. Chesnutt wrote several novels and appeared on the national lecture circuit, primarily in northern states.
Because his novels posed a more direct challenge to existing sociopolitical conditions, they were not as popular as his stories. Among the era's literary writers, Chesnutt was well respected. For instance, in 1905, Chesnutt was invited to Mark Twain
Mark Twain
Samuel Langhorne Clemens , better known by his pen name Mark Twain, was an American author and humorist...
’s 70th birthday party in New York City. Although Chesnutt's stories met with critical acclaim, poor sales of his novels doomed his hopes of a self-supporting literary career. His last novel was published in 1905. In 1906, his play Mrs. Darcy’s Daughter was produced, but it was also a commercial failure. Between 1906 and his death in 1932, Chesnutt wrote and published little, except for a few short stories and essays.
Starting in 1901, Chesnutt turned more energies to his stenography business and, increasingly, to social and political activism
Activism
Activism consists of intentional efforts to bring about social, political, economic, or environmental change. Activism can take a wide range of forms from writing letters to newspapers or politicians, political campaigning, economic activism such as boycotts or preferentially patronizing...
. He served on the General Committee of the newly founded National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, usually abbreviated as NAACP, is an African-American civil rights organization in the United States, formed in 1909. Its mission is "to ensure the political, educational, social, and economic equality of rights of all persons and to...
(NAACP). Working with W. E. B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington
Booker T. Washington
Booker Taliaferro Washington was an American educator, author, orator, and political leader. He was the dominant figure in the African-American community in the United States from 1890 to 1915...
, he became one of the early 20th century's most prominent activists and commentators.
Chesnutt contributed some short stories and essays to the NAACP's official magazine, The Crisis, founded in 1910. He did not receive compensation for the publication of these pieces. He wrote a strong essay protesting the southern states' moves to disfranchise blacks at the turn of the century, but their new constitutions and laws survived appealed to the United States Supreme Court, which held that the conditions imposed (of new electoral registration requirements, poll taxes, literacy test
Literacy test
A literacy test, in the context of United States political history, refers to the government practice of testing the literacy of potential citizens at the federal level, and potential voters at the state level. The federal government first employed literacy tests as part of the immigration process...
s and similar conditions) applied to all residents. reviews.
In 1917, Chesnutt protested and successfully shut down showings in Ohio of the controversial film Birth of a Nation, which the NAACP officially protested across the nation.
Chesnutt died on November 15, 1932, at the age of 74. He was interred in Cleveland's Lake View Cemetery
Lake View Cemetery
Lake View Cemetery is located on the east side of the City of Cleveland, Ohio, along the East Cleveland and Cleveland Heights borders. There are over 104,000 people buried at Lake View, with more than 700 burials each year. There are remaining for future development. Known locally as "Cleveland's...
.
Legacy and honors
- 1928, Chesnutt was awarded the NAACP's Spingarn MedalSpingarn MedalThe Spingarn Medal is awarded annually by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People for outstanding achievement by an African American....
for his life's work. - 2002, the Library of AmericaLibrary of AmericaThe Library of America is a nonprofit publisher of classic American literature.- Overview and history :Founded in 1979 with seed money from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Ford Foundation, the LoA has published over 200 volumes by a wide range of authors from Mark Twain to Philip...
published a major collection of Chesnutt's work in its American author series. - On January 31, 2008, the United States Postal ServiceUnited States Postal ServiceThe United States Postal Service is an independent agency of the United States government responsible for providing postal service in the United States...
honored Chesnutt with the 31st stamp in the Black Heritage Series.
Writing
In terms of style and subject matter, the writings of Charles Chesnutt straddle the divide between the local colorRegionalism (literature)
In literature, regionalism or local color refers to fiction or poetry that focuses on specific features – including characters, dialects, customs, history, and topography – of a particular region...
school of American writing and literary realism
American realism
300px|thumb|[[Ashcan School]] artists & friends at [[John French Sloan]]'s Philadelphia Studio, 1898American realism was an early 20th century idea in art, music and literature that showed through these different types of work, reflections of the time period...
.
One of Chesnutt's most important works was The Conjure Woman
The Conjure Woman (stories)
The Conjure Woman is the title of an 1899 collection of seven stories by Charles W. Chesnutt, an important African American writer from the post-Civil War South; it was his first book...
(1899), a collection of stories set in postbellum North Carolina
North Carolina
North Carolina is a state located in the southeastern United States. The state borders South Carolina and Georgia to the south, Tennessee to the west and Virginia to the north. North Carolina contains 100 counties. Its capital is Raleigh, and its largest city is Charlotte...
in which Uncle Julius, a freed slave, entertains a white couple from the North with fantastical tales of antebellum plantation life. Julius's tales feature such supernatural elements as haunting, transfiguration, and conjuring that were typical of folk tales. While Julius's tales recall the Uncle Remus tales published by Joel Chandler Harris
Joel Chandler Harris
Joel Chandler Harris was an American journalist, fiction writer, and folklorist best known for his collection of Uncle Remus stories. Harris was born in Eatonton, Georgia, where he served as an apprentice on a plantation during his teenage years...
, they differ in that Uncle Julius' tales offer oblique or coded commentary on the psychological and social impact of slavery and racial inequality. While controversy exists over whether Chesnutt's Uncle Julius stories reaffirmed stereotypical views of African Americans, most critics contend that their allegorical critiques of racial injustice were surely not lost on some readers. Only seven of the Uncle Julius tales were collected in the The Conjure Woman. Chesnutt wrote a total of fourteen Uncle Julius tales, which were later collected in The Conjure Woman and Other Conjure Tales, published in 1993.
In 1899 Chesnutt published his The Wife of His Youth and Other Stories of the Color-Line
The Wife of His Youth and Other Stories of the Color-Line
"The Wife of His Youth" is the title story of Charles W. Chesnutt's short story collection, The Wife of His Youth and Other Stories of the Color-Line, first published in 1899, the same year Chesnutt published his short story collection, The Conjure Woman. William Dean Howells reviewed The Wife of...
, a collection of short stories in the realist vein. Both collections were highly praised by the influential novelist, critic and editor William Dean Howells
William Dean Howells
William Dean Howells was an American realist author and literary critic. Nicknamed "The Dean of American Letters", he was particularly known for his tenure as editor of the Atlantic Monthly as well as his own writings, including the Christmas story "Christmas Every Day" and the novel The Rise of...
in a review published in the Atlantic Monthly, entitled "Mr. Charles W. Chesnutt's Stories".
The House Behind the Cedars
The House Behind the Cedars is a 1927 silent race film directed, written, produced and distributed by the noted director Oscar Micheaux. It was adapted from the 1900 novel of the same name by the African-American writer Charles W. Chesnutt, who explored issues of race, class and identity in the...
(1900) was Chesnutt’s response to what he believed were inadequate depictions of the complexity of race and the South's social relations. He wanted to express a more realistic portrait of his region and community drawn from personal experience. He was also concerned with the silence around issues of passing and miscegenation, and hoped to provoke political discussion by his novel.
The Marrow of Tradition
The Marrow of Tradition
The Marrow of Tradition is a historical novel by African-American author Charles Chesnutt first published in 1901.-Plot introduction:A fictional retelling of the rise of the white supremacist movement, specifically as it aided the fomentation of what was originally referred to as the “race riots”...
(1901), a novel featuring the Wilmington Race Riot, marked a turning point for Chesnutt. In his early 20th-century works, he began to address political issues more directly and confronted sensitive topics such as racial "passing"
Passing (racial identity)
Racial passing refers to a person classified as a member of one racial group attempting to be accepted as a member of a different racial group...
, lynching
Lynching
Lynching is an extrajudicial execution carried out by a mob, often by hanging, but also by burning at the stake or shooting, in order to punish an alleged transgressor, or to intimidate, control, or otherwise manipulate a population of people. It is related to other means of social control that...
, and miscegenation
Miscegenation
Miscegenation is the mixing of different racial groups through marriage, cohabitation, sexual relations, and procreation....
, which made many readers uncomfortable. Many reviewers condemned the novel's overt politics. Some of Chesnutt's supporters, such as William Dean Howells
William Dean Howells
William Dean Howells was an American realist author and literary critic. Nicknamed "The Dean of American Letters", he was particularly known for his tenure as editor of the Atlantic Monthly as well as his own writings, including the Christmas story "Christmas Every Day" and the novel The Rise of...
, regretted its "bitter, bitter" tone. Middle-class white readers, who had been the core audience for Chesnutt's earlier works, found the novel's content shocking and some found it offensive. It sold poorly.
Overall, Chesnutt's writing style is formal and subtle, demonstrating little emotive power. 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." Chapter XX, Digging up roots.
The Harlem Renaissance
Harlem Renaissance
The Harlem Renaissance was a cultural movement that spanned the 1920s and 1930s. At the time, it was known as the "New Negro Movement", named after the 1925 anthology by Alain Locke...
eclipsed much of Chesnutt's remaining literary reputation. New writers regarded him as old-fashioned and pandering to racial stereotypes. They relegated Chesnutt to minor status.
Starting in the 1960s, when the civil rights movement
Civil rights movement
The civil rights movement was a worldwide political movement for equality before the law occurring between approximately 1950 and 1980. In many situations it took the form of campaigns of civil resistance aimed at achieving change by nonviolent forms of resistance. In some situations it was...
brought renewed attention to African-American life and artists, a long process of critical discussion and re-evaluation has revived Chesnutt's reputation. In particular, critics have focused on the writer's complex narrative
Narrative
A narrative is a constructive format that describes a sequence of non-fictional or fictional events. The word derives from the Latin verb narrare, "to recount", and is related to the adjective gnarus, "knowing" or "skilled"...
technique, subtlety, and use of irony
Irony
Irony is a rhetorical device, literary technique, or situation in which there is a sharp incongruity or discordance that goes beyond the simple and evident intention of words or actions...
. Several commentators have noted that Chesnutt broke new ground in American literature with his innovative explorations of racial identity, use of African-American speech and folklore, and the way in which he exposed the skewed logic of Jim Crow strictures. Chesnutt's longer works laid the foundation for the modern African-American novel.
Several of Chesnutt's novels have been published posthumously. In 2002, the Library of America
Library of America
The Library of America is a nonprofit publisher of classic American literature.- Overview and history :Founded in 1979 with seed money from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Ford Foundation, the LoA has published over 200 volumes by a wide range of authors from Mark Twain to Philip...
added a major collection of Chesnutt's fiction and non-fiction to its important American authors series, under the title Stories, Novels And Essays: The Conjure Woman, The Wife of His Youth & Other Stories of the Color Line, The House Behind the Cedars, The Marrow of Tradition, Uncollected Stories, Selected Essays (Werner Sollors, ed.).
Race relations
Chesnutt's views on race relations put him between Du Bois' talented tenth and Booker Washington's separate but equalAtlanta Compromise
The Atlanta Cotton States and International Exposition Speech was an address on the topic of race relations given by Booker T. Washington on September 18, 1895...
positions. In a speech delivered in 1905 to the Boston Historical and Literary Association and later published as an essay, titled "Race Prejudice; Its Causes and Its Cure," Chesnutt imagined a "stone by stone" dismantling of race antagonism as the black middle class grew and prospered. Filled with numbers and statistics, Chesnutt's speech/essay chronicled black achievements and black poverty. He called for full civil and political rights for all African Americans.
He had little tolerance for the new ideology of race pride. He envisioned instead a nation of "one people molded by the same culture." He concluded his remarks with the following statement, made 58 years before Martin Luther King's I Have a Dream
I Have a Dream
"I Have a Dream" is a 17-minute public speech by Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered on August 28, 1963, in which he called for racial equality and an end to discrimination...
speech--
Adapted in film
- 1926, The Conjure WomanThe Conjure WomanThe Conjure Woman is a 1926 race film directed, written, produced and distributed by Oscar Micheaux. The film, which stars Evelyn Preer, is based on the 1899 short story collection by the African American writer Charles W. Chesnutt....
(film version by Oscar MicheauxOscar MicheauxOscar Devereaux Micheaux was an American author, film director and independent producer of more than 44 films...
) - 1927, The House Behind the CedarsThe House Behind the CedarsThe House Behind the Cedars is a 1927 silent race film directed, written, produced and distributed by the noted director Oscar Micheaux. It was adapted from the 1900 novel of the same name by the African-American writer Charles W. Chesnutt, who explored issues of race, class and identity in the...
(film version by Oscar Micheaux) - 2008, the Emmy AwardEmmy AwardAn Emmy Award, often referred to simply as the Emmy, is a television production award, similar in nature to the Peabody Awards but more focused on entertainment, and is considered the television equivalent to the Academy Awards and the Grammy Awards .A majority of Emmys are presented in various...
-winning film producer and filmmaker at Duke UniversityDuke UniversityDuke University is a private research university located in Durham, North Carolina, United States. Founded by Methodists and Quakers in the present day town of Trinity in 1838, the school moved to Durham in 1892. In 1924, tobacco industrialist James B...
Dante James produced a short dramatization of Chesnutt's short story The DollThe Doll (2008 film)The Doll is a 2008 film based on a short story of the same name written by author Charles W. Chesnutt, Dante J. James from a screenplay written by James and Joy Kecken. It stars Clayton LeBouef, Monique Brown, Jan Forbes, and Carter Jahncke...
. The short story was adapted for the screen as part of a course entitled “Adapting Literature, Producing Film”. The film premiered at the San Diego Black Film FestivalSan Diego Black Film FestivalThe San Diego Black Film Festival is one of the largest black film festivals in the country. It is held in southern California recognizes African American and movies and production. The festival was founded in 2003, and takes place every year during the last week of January in San Diego, California...
on January 31, 2008, where Clayton LeBouefClayton LeBouefClayton LeBouef is an African American actor, best known for his recurring role as Colonel George Barnfather in Homicide: Life on the Street...
won an award for "Best Actor". It also won "Best Short Film" at The Sweet Auburn International Film Festival, and the "Short Film" award at the Hollywood Black Film FestivalHollywood Black Film FestivalThe Hollywood Black Film Festival, dubbed the "Black Sundance," is an annual six-day film festival held in Los Angeles, California dedicated to enhancing the careers of new and established black filmmaking professionals by bringing their work to the attention of the film industry, press and public....
.
Selected works
- The Conjure Woman, and Other Conjure Tales (1899)
- The Wife of His Youth and Other Stories of the Color-LineThe Wife of His Youth and Other Stories of the Color-Line"The Wife of His Youth" is the title story of Charles W. Chesnutt's short story collection, The Wife of His Youth and Other Stories of the Color-Line, first published in 1899, the same year Chesnutt published his short story collection, The Conjure Woman. William Dean Howells reviewed The Wife of...
(1899) - Frederick Douglass (1899)
- The House Behind the Cedars (1900)
- The Marrow of TraditionThe Marrow of TraditionThe Marrow of Tradition is a historical novel by African-American author Charles Chesnutt first published in 1901.-Plot introduction:A fictional retelling of the rise of the white supremacist movement, specifically as it aided the fomentation of what was originally referred to as the “race riots”...
(1901) - The Colonel's Dream (1905)
- Mandy Oxendine (written in the 1890s; first published in 1997)
- Paul Marchand, F.M.C. (written in 1921; first published 1998, University Press of MississippiUniversity Press of MississippiThe University Press of Mississippi, founded in 1970, is a publisher that is sponsored by the eight state universities in Mississippi:*Alcorn State University*Delta State University*Jackson State University*Mississippi State University...
) - A Business Career (written in the 1890s; first published 2005, University Press of Mississippi)
- Evelyn's Husband (first published 2005, University Press of Mississippi)
Collected as
- Stories, Novels and Essays: The Conjure Woman, The Wife of His Youth & Other Stories of the Color Line, The House Behind the Cedars, The Marrow of Tradition, Uncollected Stories, Selected Essays (Werner Sollors, ed., Library of AmericaLibrary of AmericaThe Library of America is a nonprofit publisher of classic American literature.- Overview and history :Founded in 1979 with seed money from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Ford Foundation, the LoA has published over 200 volumes by a wide range of authors from Mark Twain to Philip...
, 2002) ISBN 978-1-93108206-8.
Further reading
- Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. and Nellie Y. McKay, eds. The Norton Anthology of African American Literature. 2nd ed. New York: Norton, 2004.
External links
- "Charles W. Chesnutt", Library of America
- "Charles W. Chesnutt", The Atlantic Monthly
- Charles W. Chesnutt, Marrow of Tradition
- Charles W. Chesnutt, The House Behind the Cedars
- The Charles W. Chesnutt Digital Archive, Sarah Browners, Berea College in cooperation with Fisk University Library
- Chesnutt Literary Web, Rutgers University
- Frederick Douglass, Boston: Small, Maynard, 1899, hosted on Documents of the American South, University of North Carolina
- Chesnutt's "Sister Becky's Pickaninny", dramatization on VHS
- The Charles Chesnutt Digital Archive
- Charles W. Chesnutt stamp by United States
- Charles Waddell Chesnutt, Find a GraveFind A GraveFind a Grave is a commercial website providing free access and input to an online database of cemetery records. It was founded in 1998 as a DBA and incorporated in 2000.-History:...
See also
- African American literatureAfrican American literatureAfrican-American literature is the body of literature produced in the United States by writers of African descent. The genre traces its origins to the works of such late 18th century writers as Phillis Wheatley and Olaudah Equiano, reaching early high points with slave narratives and the Harlem...
- The Conjure WomanThe Conjure WomanThe Conjure Woman is a 1926 race film directed, written, produced and distributed by Oscar Micheaux. The film, which stars Evelyn Preer, is based on the 1899 short story collection by the African American writer Charles W. Chesnutt....
(film version by Oscar MicheauxOscar MicheauxOscar Devereaux Micheaux was an American author, film director and independent producer of more than 44 films...
) - The House Behind the CedarsThe House Behind the CedarsThe House Behind the Cedars is a 1927 silent race film directed, written, produced and distributed by the noted director Oscar Micheaux. It was adapted from the 1900 novel of the same name by the African-American writer Charles W. Chesnutt, who explored issues of race, class and identity in the...
(film version by Oscar Micheaux)