Charles W. Chesnutt and Fayetteville State University

    Chesnutt's life and experience was also closely linked to Fayetteville State University. Chesnutt's father, Andrew Jackson Chesnutt, along with six other men formed the Howard School in 1867 for the purpose of educating the Black children in the area. Ten years after its establishment, the Howard School was selected by the State of North Carolina to be the first state supported normal school for Black Children. The Howard School was chosen among the 15 other communities that petitioned to be the site of the new school. Even then Governor Zebulon Vance visited the school and was impressed. Charles was a teacher at the Normal School beginning in 1877 and when the Principal Robert Harris died in late 1879, Charles assumed the principalship, a position he held until 1883.

    A copy of Chesnutt's report at the end of the 1879-1880 school year offers a glimpse into the conditions he faced. The school served 106 students, 57 males and 49 females, which came from 21 counties in NC. He says that the conduct of the students was good. "The presence of so many grown men, who are spending their time and scanty savings in striving to get an education, imparts a tone of earnestness to the school, which distinguishes it from either public school or a college."  The Literary Society, he reports, is a valuable adjunct to the school; he says that all the students are members of the Temperance Society. He recommends that the course of study be raised to include algebra, Latin, and rhetoric. He makes reference to agitation that was stirred up against the school in the last session, but says all of that has subsided. He assures the superintendent of public schools that "the better class of colored people have had nothing to say against the Normal School, but, on the contrary, have been so anxious to get their children entered, that we have been obliged to raise the standard of admission...." He says further, the "white citizens of Fayetteville have given the school their hearty commendation, and the teachers are indebted to them for many expressions of approval and encouragement."

    During the time that he was employed at the Normal School, Chesnutt was an avid reader. We know from his journal that at age seventeen he was reading about subjects ranging from Latin and algebra to natural philosophy and bookkeeping, and authors such as Goldsmith, Dickens, Shakespeare, Fielding, Dumas, Moliere, and Homer. One journal entry attests to his love for literature:

What a blessing is literature, and how grateful we should be to the publishers who have placed its treasures within reach of the poorest. Shut up in my study, without the companionship of one congenial mind, I can enjoy the society of the greatest wits and scholars of England, can revel in the genius of her poets and statesmen, and by a slight effort of imagination, find myself in the company of the greatest men of earth. March 7, 1882 (30-31)

    While serving as Principal of the Normal School, Chesnutt was impressed by the popular success of Albion Tourgee's Fool's Errand, which had earned the author $20,000. This led Chesnutt to write the following passage in his journal:

... why could not a colored man. who has lived among colored people all his life, who is familiar with their habits, their ruling passions, their prejudices, their public and private ambitions, their religious tendencies and habits; -- why could not a colored man who knew all this, and who besides, had possessed such opportunities for observations and conversation with the better class of white men in the South, as to understand their modes of thinking; who was familiar with the political history of the country, and especially with all the phases of the slavery question -- why could not such a man... write as good a book about the South as Judge Tourgee has written?

    Chesnutt expresses a similar sentiment when he writes (May 29, 1880):

Fifteen years of life in the South, in one of the most eventful eras in history, among a people whose life is rich in the elements of romance, under conditions calculated to stir one's soul to the very depths -- I think there is a fund of experience, a supply of material, which a skillful pen could work up with tremendous effect.

    In 1883, he left Fayetteville to live briefly in New York before settling in Cleveland, where he lived the rest of his life. A journal entry of March 7, 1882 gives us the basis of this decision.

I get more and more tired of the South. I pine for civilization and companionship. I sometimes hesitate about deciding to go, because I am engaged in good work, and have been doing, I fondly hope, some little good. But... I think I could serve my race better in some more congenial occupation. And I shudder to think of exposing my children to the social and intellectual proscription to which I have been a victim.

So despite the good work he was doing at the Normal School, he decided that the North would provide better opportunities for him and his family.

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