Charles Waddell Chesnutt Association

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A Dedication

This Website is dedicated to the memory of William, G. Pickens, co-founder of the Charles Waddell Chesnutt Association. William G. Pickens earned his B.A in English at Morehouse College in 1948, his M.A. in English at Atlanta University in 1950, and his Ph.D. at the University of Connecticut in 1969.

Dr. Pickens, Professor of English and former Chair of the Department of English and Linguistics at Morehouse College, made an indelible impact on his students. He taught linguistics, British literature, composition, and world literature with a flair and scrupulous dedication. His teaching and mentoring contributed to the success of his many protégés throughout the country.

Pickens was a Phi Beta Kappa and belonged to a number of scholarly organizations including the Toni Morrison Society, the Langston Hughes Society, and the American Association of Speech. Pickens was the first editor of the Chesnutt Grapevine, the Charles W. Chesnutt Association’s newsletter. Dr. Pickens has been greatly missed since his passing in 1998; the success of the Chesnutt Association is a tribute to his memory.

Recent Chesnutt Bibliography

Monograph
McWilliams, Dean. Charles W. Chesnutt and the Fictions of Race. Athens, GA: U of Georgia P, 2002.

Essays
Birkle, Carmen. “’There is Plenty of Room for Us All’: Charles W. Chesnutt’s America.” Holding Their Own: Perspectives on the Multi-Ethnic Literatures of the United States. Eds. Dorothea Fischer
Hornung and Heike Raphael-Hernandez. Tubingen, Germany: Stauffenburg, 2000. 241-58.
Brook, Thomas. “The Legal Argument of Charles W. Chesnutt’s Novels.” REAL (2002): 311-34.
Byerman, Keith. “Black Voices, White Stories: An Intertextual Analysis of Thomas Nelson Page and Charles Waddell Chesnutt.” North Carolina Literary Review 8 (1999): 98-105.
Callahan, Cynthia A. “The Confounding Problem of Race: Passing and Adoption in Charles Chesnutt’s The Quarry.” MFS 48.2 (2002): 314-40.
Genre, Christopher D. “Racial Identity in Paul Marchand, F. M. C.: The Law and Society.” Xavier Review 22.1 (2002): 57-67.
Johanningsmeier, Charles. “What We Can Learn from a Better Bibliographical Record of Charles W. Chesnutt’s Periodical Fiction.” North Carolina Literary Review 8 (1999): 84-96.
“The Literary Canonization of Charles Chesnutt.” Journal of Blacks in Higher Education 37 (2002): 48-99.
Mondie, Levita. “MFINDA—Beyond an Ecocritical Discourse in the African American Literary Tradition: The Case of Charles Chesnutt’s The Conjure Woman. In Process: A Journal of African American and African Diasporan Literature and Culture 2 (2000): 155-77.
Raynaud, Claudine. “’Mask to Mask. The Real Joke’: Surfiction/Autofiction, or the Tale of the Purloined Watermelon.” Callaloo 22.3 (1999): 695-712.
Watson, Reginald. “The Tragic Mulatto Image in Charles Chesnutt’s The House Behind the Cedars.” CLA Journal 46.1 (2002): 48-71.

Dissertations
Charlton, Jennie Sue. Passing Fancies from the Victorian Age: Revisionary African American Romances in the Works of Harper, Chesnutt, Fauset, and Hurston. Diss., Howard U, 2001. DA 63 (2002): 3040795A.
Johnson, Ken Peter. The Contemporaneous Response to Charles W. Chesnutt: A Study of the Book Reviews. Diss., Florida State U, 2000. DA 61 (2001): 9980741A.
Mason, Jennifer Adrienne. Civilized Creatures: Animality, Cultural Power, and American Literature, 1850-1901. Diss., U of Texas, Austin, 2000. DA 61 (2001): 9993265A.
Williams, Julian Lance. The “Other” Awakening: American Character, Pragmatism, and the Assassinations of Kate Chopin and Charles Chesnutt. Diss., Columbia U, 2001. DA 62 (2001): 9999793A.

Charles W. Chesnutt Association Members and Officers

Officers of the Association

President, Viktor Osinubi, Clark Atlanta University

Vice President, SallyAnn H. Ferguson, University of North Carolina, Greensboro

Vice President, Bill Hardwick, University of Tennessee, Knoxville

Recording Secretary, Joy Myree, Morgan State University

Treasurer, Ernestine Pickens-Glass, Professor Emerita, Clark Atlanta University

Corresponding Secretary & Awards Chair, Mary Ziegler, Georgia State University

Co-Chairs, Program Committee, Keith Byerman, Indiana State University and
Susan Prothro Wright, Clark Atlanta University

Editor, The Chesnutt Grapevine, Ernestine Pickens-Glass, Clark Atlanta University

Association Charter Membership


William L. Andrew
SallyAnn H. Ferguson
Phyllis F. Lawhorn
Wilfred Samuels
Nimer Abuzahra
Ian Finseth
Janice L. Liddell
Carole M. Shaffer-Koros
David Ross Anderson
Gabrielle Foreman
Joseph R. McElrath
Sheila Smith-McKoy
Timothy Askew
Frances Smith Foster
Susan McFatter Wright
Dolores B. Stephens
Deborah H. Barnes
Henry L. Gates & The Department of Afro-American Studies, Harvard University
Dean McWilliams
Craig D. Vandervere
Margaret D. Bauer
B. Omega Moore
Alma Vinyard
Michele A. Birnbaum
Gwendolyn D. Morgan
Candace J. Waid
Patricia Bond-Hutto
Donald B. Gibson
Patricia W. Morris
Thaddeus Wakefield
Richard H. Brodhead
Alexa B. Henderson
Robert C. Nowatzki
Elizabeth J. West
Marva Bryant
Helen Houston
Joyce Pettis
Loretta G. Woodard
Keith Byerman
Houston Community College,
Ernestine W. Pickens
Annette Zilversmit
Karen Chandler
Central, Library
William G. Pickens
Catherine Boechmann
Carolyn C. Denard
Gloria C. Johnson
John M. Reilly
Charles Duncan
Ken Johnson
James W. Richardson
Tom Morgan
Larry L. Earvin Former SAS Dean, Clark Atlanta University
Alicia A. Kent
Michael Robertson
Antiwan walker
John J. Kucich
Phyllis Briggs-Emanuel Tracie Guzzio
Joy Myree
Anne B. Warner
Lois Brown
Viktor Osinubi
Emily A. Williams
Lita S. Hooper
Larnell Dunkley, Jr
Gwendolyn Jones
LaChanze H. Roberts

Welcome to the Face Book Webpage of the

Charles Waddell Chesnutt Association

Charles Waddell Chesnutt, born June 20, 1858, in Cleveland, Ohio, was the son of free African Americans, Andrew Jackson Chesnutt and Ann Maria Sampson Chesnutt. The Chesnutts migrated to Cleveland from Fayetteville, North Carolina, in the 1850s but returned to Fayetteville after the Civil War. Although Charles Chesnutt spent his youth in Fayetteville, he returned to the city of his birth in 1883. Chesnutt, like his parents before him, left the South to find better opportunities for himself and his family, his wife, Susan Perry Chesnutt, and his children, Ethel, Helen, Dorothy, and Edward.

In Cleveland, Chesnutt became a lawyer, a noted businessman, and an author. An activist, Chesnutt was involved in the initial Niagra Movement, and later was one of the founders of the NAACP. He received the coveted Springarn Award in 1928. Chesnutt’s literary works include two collections of short stories, The Conjure Woman (1899) and The Wife of his Youth and Other Stories (1899); three novels published during his lifetime, The House behind the Cedars (1900), The Marrow of Tradition (1901), and The Colonel’s Dream (1905); a biography, Frederick Douglass (1902); and three recently edited and published novels, The Quarry (1997). Paul Marchand, F. M. C. (1999), and Mandy Oxendine (1999).