The long process of picking a Democratic presidential nominee drags on, with the next significant primaries on May 6, in Indiana and North Carolina. The United States may elect its first black president this year, but even if Barack Obama doesn’t win in November, his strong showing throughout the primaries so far has ensured that race and questions of racial identity have been a regular part of the political debate.

So, what’s new?, I thought to myself, as I read Charles W. Chesnutt’s 1901 novel The Marrow of Tradition. Written in the wake of what has been called, variously, the “Wilmington (N.C.) race riot of 1898” or the “Wilmington coup d’état,” Chesnutt’s novel takes the events in Wilmington as a starting point for his tale of racial identity, family secrets and political upheaval. 

I am a decidedly amateur student of history and political science, and I recognized as I researched the history behind this novel that it is difficult to explain without wandering into a semantic minefield. Such is the nature of the post-Civil War South and racial politics anywhere.

Suffice to say, in Wilmington, North Carolina, in 1898, Republicans controlled the government and blacks had been elected to many city offices. The Democratic Party, seeking to regain power, used the media and brute mob action to force the elected government to resign, and then effectively established martial law against the black population of the city.

Some of Chesnutt’s relatives lived in Wilmington at this time and he used their stories to frame his tale. It is a brisk, melodramatic novel. The plot is filled with sudden bursts of violence (white on black and vice versa), reversals of fortune, secret wills, detailed preparations for a lynching, a climactic orgy of mob action and, in the final pages, an attempted reconciliation coupled with a frantic race against time.

At the center of the story are Major Carteret and his wife, Olivia. After many years of childlessness, Olivia gives birth to a son, Theodore. Major Carteret is editor of the local paper and the prime instigator of a plot to push blacks out of their public roles and regain power for white people. As Carteret writes in an editorial, “the ballot in the hands of the negro was a menace to the commonwealth” as great as the “commingling” of the black and white races. This “commingling” is obvious throughout the book.

For instance, as the book begins, Olivia Carteret has gone into premature labor after seeing her half-sister, Janet, in town. Janet is the daughter of Carteret’s father and a black servant who stayed with the family after Olivia’s mother died. Janet is married to Dr. Miller, a successful black doctor who has just opened the city’s first hospital to cater specifically to blacks. Dr. Miller was trained by Dr. Price, a white doctor who later in the novel attempts to bring Dr. Miller into the Carteret’s home to perform surgery on the baby. Miller is rebuffed because he is black.

Another “commingling” occurs between Tom Delamere, a young white man who spends a lot of time drinking and gambling, and Sandy, the black servant of a Mr. Delamere, Tom’s grandfather. Mr. Delamere and Mrs. Polly Ochiltree represent the older generation, who remember the South before the war. Delamere, as a character, represents the whites who, in the post-War and Reconstruction period, recognized that blacks were now equal with whites, and all should share in the same basic rights. Mrs. Ochiltree longs for the old days, when blacks and whites each knew their place and stayed in it, though she uses duplicity rather than violence to try to keep the old ways alive.

Major Carteret, using his newspaper office as a base of operations, conspires with two other men, General Belmont and Captain McBane, to find ways to drive the elected black officials out of office and otherwise limit the roles that blacks can play in public life. Although they never meet face to face in the story, McBane and Dr. Miller are in a sense doubles: McBane is a brutal white man who, because of his lowly social standing at birth, will never be accepted into higher society, as he longs for. Miller, highly esteemed by his white peers and a world traveler, would, but for his skin color, be one of the city’s elite citizens.

To give a sense of the political times in which Chesnutt published his book, one of the most popular novelists of the time was Thomas Dixon, whose novel The Leopard’s Spots, which came out a year after Marrow, was the first in a trilogy that also included The Clansman, on which D.W. Griffiths’ movie The Birth of a Nation was based. In Dixon’s fictional world, the villains are Northerners; the heroes are the Ku Klux Klan. Both Chesnutt and Dixon sent copies of their novels to members of Congress, hoping to influence how the federal government reacted to the increasing prevalence of Jim Crow laws in the South.

Chesnutt’s novels never sold well in his lifetime (1858-1932); in fact, he basically wrote nothing the last 30 years of his life. Despite its dips into melodrama, however, The Marrow of Tradition dramatizes a crucial time in American history. The small gains that blacks had achieved in American society during Reconstruction started unraveling at the end of the 19th century, and they would not be regained until the Civil Rights movement took hold in the 1950s.