Today on Martin Luther King day, I received an email from the Library of America with a link to their publication of Charles W. Chesnutt’s Stories, Novels, and Essays.
Charles W. Chesnutt was a African American writer who wrote about the time during and after Reconstruction in the American South.
So, I checked him out. There was an interesting one called The Conjure Woman and I also found that he had written a historical novel, called The Marrow of Tradition, surrounding fictional events that commented on the spread of propaganda and sensationalism which help lead to the race riots that occurred in Wilmington, North Carolina in 1898.
A race riot had occurred in Wilmington, North Carolina? I live in North Carolina, visited Wilmington, and this was news to me. Amazingly, it was only in 2006 that the official report of the Wilmington Insurrection of 1898 was completed. The only instance of a municipal government being overthrown in US history.
