"written with the heart's blood": An Unpublished Novel by Black Activist James Samuel Stemons, 1900

Abstract

Abstract: This article traces the efforts of Philadelphia Black activist James Samuel Stemons to publish his 1900 autobiographical novel, "Jay Ess." The novel depicts the challenges faced by its protagonist to leave his subsistence-level farming life in Nicodemus, Kansas—founded during the Exoduster movement of the 1880s—to seek industrial employment in a major city. Stemons's copious correspondences with his sister, Mary Stemons Johnson; editors; publishers; and Progressive Era luminaries trace his attempt to position his arguments about industrial labor as a corrective to both Booker T. Washington's emphasis on vocational training and W. E. B. Du Bois's insistence on higher education for the talented tenth. However, the novel's lack of an Horatio Alger-like "rags to riches" trajectory—typified in Washington's Up From Slavery narrative—and its lack of the empirical evidence characteristic of Du Bois's published work led to repeated rejections by would-be publishers.