Summary Of Charles Chesnutt's The Marrow Of Tradition

In The Marrow of Tradition, Charles Chesnutt tells the story of social inequity in the Reconstruction period of the late 1800s. He uses a variety of distinct characters, reaching from high-minded white extremists to vindictive blacks. There is an overall theme of racism and how it affected both whites and blacks after the civil war, specifically in the South and the Wilmington Massacre. This book is about slavery and the exploitation of black people made this novel interesting. “You are mistaken, sir, in imagining me hostile to the Negro...On the contrary, I am friendly to his best interests. I give him employment; I pay taxes for schools to educate him, and for court-houses and jails to keep him in order. I merely object to being governed

The violence that was going on against the black community was rooted from the political gain due to a massive amount black voters in Southern states. White men in the south felt that they’re economic and social supremacy was ending and being taken over by black supremacy. Black supremacy was the reason for violence at riots and it was the reason of the anxiety from white males. The riot discussed in the novel was a mere replica the North Carolina race riots also known as Wilmington Massacre of 1898. The riots were categorized as a coup d’état. During the book and the actual riots there was the practice of lynching and racial violence for every age. Chesnutt was firm on making the acts of the Wilmington Massacre well known through his book because of the unbearable that happened to black people after the civil war. “Suspicion was at once directed toward the negroes, as it always is when an unexplained crime is committed in a Southern community. The suspicion was not entirely an illogical one. Having been, for generations, trained up to thriftlessness, theft, and immorality, against which only thirty years of very limited opportunity can by offset, during which brief period they have been denied in large measure the healthful social stimulus and