The Marrow of Tradition

Charles W. Chesnutt based this 1901 novel on the Wilmington coup of 1898, when white supremacists overthrew the elected biracial government of a North Carolina city and killed dozens of Black residents. In the fictional town of Wellington, he follows two families, one white and one Black, bound together by blood and by a buried history. A newspaper editor foments racial violence for political gain while Dr. William Miller, a Black physician, watches Jim Crow tighten around his life and his work. The story builds toward a riot and a wrenching moral reckoning between the families. Sharp and unflinching, it stands among the strongest American protest novels of its era. Free PDF and EPUB editions are available here.