A NEGRO LOOKS AT RACE PREJUDICE

BY JAMES WELDON JOHNSON

I ONCE heard a Negro say, "It's no dis-
grace to be black, but sometimes it's
mighty inconvenient." That expresses
the general attitude of Negroes in the
United States regarding their situation on
account of race prejudice. Undoubtedly,
the thought that Negroes are naturally
ashamed of their color furnishes white
people with a pleasing expansion of self-
esteen. I can understand how the idea that
the primary urge of the millions of colored
people in the United States to be white or
at least whiter would add to the swollen
condition of the Nordic superiority com-
plex; but, speaking out of a lifetime ex-
perience as a Negro, I know the idea is
false. The American Negro is not innately
ashamed of his color. Such efforts as he
makes to approach the American color
standard are due fundamentally to strong
economic and social urges. One thing the
Negro has learned so well that it has sunk
down into his subconsciousness, and that
is that the United States puts a higher
premium upon color or, better, lack of
color than upon anything else. Few Ne-
groes there are who have not brains enough
to analyze their capabilities and reach the
sound conclusion that the only thing stand-
ing between them and a good job as a
plumber or a higher position as an execu-
tive is a shade or two of complexion.

Now, in the little over three hundred
years that the Negro has been in America
his complexion has undergone consider-
able lightening; however, the most of it
has been accomplished not by any artificial
means but with the voluntary coöperatión
of the whites through a well-known bio-
logical process. The artificial practices of

today do not evidence any innate shame of
race or color; rather do they signify an
effort to circumvent the handicapping in-
convenience and what is often the actual
danger of being black in these United
States. They are, indeed, more or less the
manifestation of a natural defense adapta-
tion. These tendencies are being studied by
the scientific-minded and much written
about by others. The others draw a num-
ber of deductions—most of them deroga-
tory to the Negro—from the fact that
among urban colored people the darker
men show a general tendency to marry
lighter women. The true deduction to be
drawn, when all the facts are considered,
is that these men are doing merely what
is quite natural and in no small degree in-
escapable. And I cannot see where they are
making any greater sacrifice of self-respect
than the rich of this great democracy who
purchase for their children's children the
advantages which they think titled ances-
try and aristocracy carry.

During the major portion of my life
I have given voluntary and compulsory
study to this question of race prejudice in
the United States. I have looked at it from
many angles. I have taken in a close-up of
it in the heart of the darkest South. I have
viewed it in perspective from across the
seas. Yet, I must confess, the longer I study
it the more paradoxical and absurd it
seems. And, contrary to what many people
may think, the closer the view the greater
the paradoxicality and absurdity. What
now, is the honor point on the escutcheon
of Southern aristocracy? In a word, what
is the *sine qua non* of a background of social
prestige below the Mason and Dixon line?

52

Johnson, James Weldon

American Mercury

May 1928

from claude mckay

t

53

The one and only answer is, the Black Mammy. I have met and talked with a great many Southern white people, and I make the conservative estimate that not one in ten of those who make any pretension to family and good breeding has ever failed to mention and stress his having had a black mammy—at farthest, one generation back. And what does having had a black mammy mean? It means having spent the greater part of one's infancy and childhood in the arms of a black woman and, perhaps, having nursed at a black breast.

## II

Of course, most white people who boast of black mammies are romancing. Naturally, Negroes had black mammies, but black mammies for white people were expensive luxuries and, comparatively, few had them. But even for those of the Simonpure aristocracy who were fortunate enough to have black mammies it strikes me as being in bad taste to be continually calling attention to the fact. I was born in the South, in Jacksonville, Fla., and when I was born my mother was too sick to nurse me. On the corner, in the next block, there lived a Southern white family—and not poor white trash—in which a girl baby was born a few days before. The white mother took me and nursed me during the whole period of my own mother's inability to do it. And so I may say that I had a white mammy; and it may be something to be proud of, but it has never occurred to me to go around bragging about it. Between my white mammy and me there existed a tender relationship through all my childhood; and after I was grown and had left the South, I never, up to the time of her death, went back to my old home without paying her a visit and taking her a small gift.

It is in the South, where race prejudice is the force that moves and regulates and determines the whole social order, where it is the very corner-stone of civilization,

that we find it manifested in the most contradictory extremes. It can be said that nobody loves the Negro more or hates him as much as do the Southern whites. Their reactions run from affectionately allowing some faithful old black servitor to tyrannize the whole family all the way to making a Roman holiday by baptizing some young Negro with gasoline and setting him on fire.

The great American taboo is miscegenation, and the nerve center of the national agony about it is in the South. One Southern regular can put to flight any number of pro-Negro volunteers by firing this broadside: "Would you want your daughter or your sister to marry a nigger?" And, by the way, that is a question which deserves closer analysis than it has yet received. It has been the custom to yield the field before it or reply with some such volley fired in the air as: "Men can be brothers without being brothers-in-law." Some day somebody is going to take that flabbergasting question as a thesis and write a book on race prejudice in the United States that will not omit the most important factor in the whole problem, the factor of sex. But I was going to say that although miscegenation is not only taboo but is also a great bugaboo in the South, it is Dixie Land that has been the chief station for the experiment in race mingling. When I lived in Jacksonville I knew several families whose white and black branches mutually acknowledged the blood tie, and between whom there was a friendly relationship among the half brothers and sisters and the cousins and the uncles and the aunts. Moreover, there is not a Negro over thirty years old and familiar with the South who does not know of the same sort of thing.

Considerable effort is made to create the belief that this intermixture is due only to the lowest class of whites. This is on a par with the report which came out of the Great War that it was only the most disolute women of Europe, the dregs and lees of womankind, who looked with

5

55

white person's parlor is seriously held by
a great many white Americans, but it is
sure to get a laugh in any group of intelli-
gent Negroes. They do carry a heavy bur-
den and have their periods of lamentation
and indignation, but the fact is, Negroes,
no matter what their class, do very little
moping for any reason whatsoever; they
find it too easy to have a good time.

Others must occasionally wonder how,
considering all the conditions, they can
enjoy themselves so fully. Indeed, we Ne-
groes are sometimes ashamed that we can
so utterly enjoy ourselves; we somehow
feel it is a reflection on our intellectuality.
When white people get into the social life
of cultured Negroes on terms of equality—
and that is not an entirely easy thing to do
—they must be amazed at the degree of
spontaneous gaiety indulged in by these
sorely oppressed people. I have said that
Negroes are sometimes ashamed that they
can so utterly enjoy themselves, but the fact
remains that they do enjoy themselves. I
have not found among them the hollow
pretense of having a good time, which I am
sure I have at times detected among white
people. It may be, in the final analysis of
life, that the Negro here possesses a capacity
not to be ashamed of but to be envied.

There are some whites who, I judge,
suffer from a feeling akin to disgust at any
demonstration of culture on the part of
Negroes. It actually gives them a feeling
of sickness or of rage. It upsets their whole
vegetative nervous system. When they see
a Negro wearing good clothes or living in
a fine house or driving his own automo-
bile they discount the universality of hu-
man nature completely and feel that such
a Negro is giving a monkey-like imitation
of white folks. When they see a Negro in
a hotel or a restaurant they feel that he is
there because he wants to be among white
people, not thinking that he may be just
hungry or wanting a place to sleep. At
any rate, down to the present time, the
thing that widens and deepens the gulf
between blacks and whites, particularly in
the South, is culture on the part of the

blacks. Here is a field for the psychologist,
or, maybe, the alienist; however, I think
it is plain that the crisis in this whole
national malady will not be passed until
culture on the part of Negroes begins to
have the effect of lessening prejudice. There
are signs of this change for the better in
parts of the North. And where this change
has come and social equality along with it
no upheaval in the general order of nature,
cosmic or human, has been noted.

In the South the race elements farthest
apart are the intelligent whites and the in-
telligent blacks. The closest contact is be-
tween the well-to-do whites and the ser-
vant class of blacks. It is through the Negro
servants that the cultured whites get their
information about that world so close to
them and yet so far away, the world of the
well-to-do, cultured Negro. This informa-
tion is given to them sometimes voluntarily
and sometimes under pressure of indirect
and direct queries. And strange, indeed,
are some of the tales they are told.

I wonder if it sounds strange when I say
that I do not object to anyone having prej-
idice, even this particular brand we are
talking about? I should rather, for a man's
own sake, that he had a free mind; but if
he really wants them, he can, so far as I
am concerned, retain and maintain as many
prejudices as he pleases. My faith in the
coming brotherhood of man would scarcely
move an ant-hill. I have no shining hope
that the time is coming when everybody
will just love everybody else for no par-
ticular reason whatever. And if such a time
should come I am not sure it would be
quite as blessed as it has been pictured.
But I do long for and look for the day when
people will not allow their lack of love
or even their hate to interfere with the
rights of other people. This day may be
as distant as the day of universal brother-
hood; nevertheless, to my mind, no happier
era could be wished for. So I am willing to
let every man have his prejudices, if he will
agree not to have them interfere with me.

Once I was coming back from Europe on
board a Cunarder. The steward had assigned

## BELLES LETTRES

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JOSEPHSON, MATTHEW
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FIFTY YEARS
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with introduction by

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Mr. Johnson's poetic ability has merited the recognition of Braithwaite's

"Anthology of Magazine Verse," his poem "The White Witch" being included in the 1915 issue.

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THE CORNHILL COMPANY

69 Cornhill, Boston, Mass.

The Sensational Song of America and Italy.

# “THE YOUNG WARRIOR”

English Poem by J. Weldon Johnson

# “IL GIOVANE GUERRIERO”

Italian Version by Edoardo Petri

The Musical Critic of the New York Tribune, February 28, 1916, says:

"An interesting feature was the singing of Mr. Amato of an Italian patriotic song written by an American Negro. This was HARRY T. BURLEIGH'S "IL GIOVANE GUERRIERO," and it proved to be the sensation of the evening. It was a splendidly spirited martial song, and ought to thrill many an Italian crowd in after years. That an American Negro could write such a song seems strange indeed. It is one of the few really admirable songs America has produced in recent years. All honor to HARRY T. BURLEIGH!"

In Italy the song has produced such an effect that MAESTRO R. ZANDONAI, one of Italy's greatest operatic composers of the present day, has consented to furnish the orchestration for the song to be performed all over Italy—truly a great honor for the American Composer.

This song is published in English and Italian in two keys.

An orchestral accompaniment can be had on hire from the publishers.

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J6335

English and Italian Texts

"THE YOUNG WARRIOR"

Mother, shed no mournful tears,
But gird me on my sword;
And give no utterance to thy fears,
But bless me with thy word.

Now, let thine eyes my way pursue
Where'er my footsteps fare;
And when they lead beyond thy view,
Send after me a prayer.

Still, pray not to defend from harm,
Nor danger to dispel,
But rather that with steadfast arm
I fight the battle well.

Pray that I keep, through all the days,
My heart and purpose strong,
My sword unsullied, and always
Unsheathed against the wrong.

The lines are drawn, the fight is on,
A cause is to be won;
Mother, look not so white and wan,
Give Godspeed to thy son.

—J. Weldon Johnson.

(Copyright, 1915, by G. Ricordi & Co., Inc.)

"IL GIOVANE GUERRIERO."

Madre mia, deh tergi il ciglio,
Temer non déi per me;
L'acciaro porgi al tuo figlio
Che prostrasi al tuo piè.

Il guardo tuo mi segua ognor
Fidente sul cammin,
Finchè del di duri 'l baglior!
E prega al mio destin.

La prece tua chieder non dè
Mercè pel tuo figliuol
Ma ch'egli ognor con salda fè
Difenda il patrio suol!

Prega acciò che baldo il core
E forte abbia la man;
E Dio, Patria, Onore
Sol guide mie saran.

Odi la squilla! Partire io vò!
La causa nostra è santa.
Perchè taci tanto affranta?
Fa cuor, io vincerò!

—Edoardo Petri.

The Young Warrior

Il Giovane Guerriero

Words by
J. WELDON JOHNSON
Italian text by EDOARDO PETRI

Music by
H. T. BURLEIGH

112-06-6 Copyright MCMXV by G. Ricordi & Co. Inc.
All rights of execution, reproduction, translation and transcription are strictly reserved.

JAMES WELDON/JOHNSON

HARRY T. BURLEIGH

J. ROSAMOND JOHNSON

WILLIAM GRANT STILL

WILLIAM C. HANDY

WILL M. COOK

ONE DOOR TO FAME and fortune which the American Negro has opened by himself, without help from freedom marchers, the FBI or National Guardsmen, is the portal leading into the wonderful World of Music. Neither racist nor Bigot has been able to resist the "charms to soothe the savage breast" exuding from the Negro's spirituals, blues and jazz, which have made the music — not only of America but of all the world — what it is today.

Nowhere is there more substantial evidence of the warm welcome accorded the Negro writers of popular songs, and also of concertos and symphonies, than in the membership of the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers. All but a very few American Negro composers and lyricists are enrolled in ASCAP, and the Society boasts as proudly and loudly of William C. Handy, Louis Armstrong, James Weldon Johnson, William Grant Still, Shelton Brooks and Fats Waller as it does of Victor Herbert, George Gershwin, Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, Rudolf Friml, Hammerstein and Rodgers, Jerome Kern and Lerner and Loewe.

When ASCAP was founded fifty years ago, its charter members included Dr. James Weldon Johnson and Dr. Harry T. Burleigh, two Negroes who had already achieved doctorates of music and won high recognition in the field of symphonic and concert music. Dr. Johnson had attained such prominence as a musicologist, journalist, poet and educator that President Theodore Roosevelt appointed him to the diplomatic corps as a consul. Dr. Burleigh toured the concert halls of the United States and Europe, and was twice honored with summons to command performances for King Edward VII in London. He is best remembered as the composer of "Deep River", perhaps the greatest spiritual of all time.

When the emancipation came, the Negro, starved for education and culture, was not content with becoming a banjo-plunker or piano-pounder but reached out for perfection in the highest types of music. Within two decades after the guns of the Civil War were silenced, Negroes were enrolled in conservatories, studying the great masters and displaying a talent for composing and arranging symphonies and concertos. At the same time, these same talented men were composing songs in the popular idiom, some of which became tremendous hits. The eminent Dr. James Weldon Johnson joined his younger brother, J. Rosamond Johnson, in writing "Under the Bamboo Tree", a popular hit sixty years ago and still oft-heard on radio and TV today. James P. Johnson, composer of "Symphonie Harlem" and "African Drums", laid aside his sonatas, operettas and ballets to write the sensational "Charleston", which set off the dancing craze in the Roaring Twenties. His "Old Fashioned Love" was almost as big a hit at the same time.

Other Negro composers, such as William Grant Still, confined their efforts to the classical arena. Dr. Still, winner of several fellowships and holder of many honorary degrees, dipped into the realm of popular music to arrange and conduct for radio and television, but remained steadfast to his loftier ambitions. He was the first Negro in the United States to conduct a major symphony orchestra when he held the baton in a con-

cert given in the Hollywood Bowl by the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Among the works of this prolific composer are four symphonies, three ballets, several symphonic poems and a wealth of chamber music and concert songs.

Julia Perry is one of the outstanding women composers in ASCAP. After earning a master of music degree at Westminster Choir College, she was awarded a scholarship in operatic conducting at Juilliard, served as coach in the opera workshop at Columbia University and studied in France where she won first prize with a violin sonata. Her compositions include two operas, a symphony, ballet scores and choral and chamber music.

But the Negro's most forceful impact has been on the music of the masses. Without his unique contribution our nation's popular songs might still be the drab imitations of the old British and Teutonic tunes that the early settlers brought to the shores of New England and Virginia and transported across the Appalachians, whose echoes are still heard in the current so-called folk-songs. It was the Southland's slave, singing his sorrows in the cotton fields, who eventually flavored American music with new refreshing ingredients. Stephen Foster captured the essence of the music born on the plantations and gave it to the North's minstrels, and the white man's children learned to sing "Old Folks At Home", "Massa's in the Cold Cold Ground" and "My Old Kentucky Home" from songbooks in their schoolrooms.

IT IS INTERESTING to speculate how one of the early slaves may have cajoled his master into letting him have a broken-down old banjo on which he learned to strum chords and improvise melodies; or how he managed to obtain a pair of shoes in which he imitated the white man's clog dance and evolved from it the graceful soft-shoe shuffle and tap dance which culminated in the artistry of Bill Robinson. And one can picture the first colored porter mopping the floor in an empty saloon in the early dawn, surreptitiously fingering the keys of a battered piano, excitedly discovering the chords and eventually learning to play with a new syncopated beat called ragtime — with which Irving Berlin started on the road to success.

Certain it is that the Negro had to get his musical education the hard way, as did the immortal Bill Handy. Handy was born in 1873 in a shacktown called Florence, Alabama. His father was a clergyman, and so was his grandfather, in slave days. He got his early schooling at home and became a school teacher. To eke out a livelihood he worked in the iron mines. Music was his love and a beat-up cornet became his instrument. Not content with playing it by ear, he somehow managed to learn to read music. He played with a small group of colored musicians at the Chicago World's Fair in 1893, and his cornet solo brought him a job and featured billing with Mahara's Minstrels. Handy became an expert orchestral arranger, and he was always glad to share what he learned with the growing number of colored musicians hungering for musical education. He worked arduously for their welfare and progress in the formation of the National Association of Negro Musicians and of the National Association of American Composers and Conductors.

CAB CALLOWAY

DUKE ELLINGTON

LOUIS ARMSTRONG

THOMAS 'FATS' WALLER

ANDY RAZAF

SHELTON BROOKS

But to compose was Bill Handy's greatest ambition, and he began early in his career to write instrumentals and songs with an individuality that quickly won him the admiration of fellow-musicians and the plaudits of the public. "Beale Street Blues", "Memphis Blues", "Harlem Blues" and, above all, "St. Louis Blues" brought him the well-merited title of "Father of the Blues". He gave the laments of his persecuted brethren a format and interpretation which lifted them to the heights of musical composition. The sound of "St. Louis Blues" has been heard in symphony concerts in Carnegie Hall and in other classic centers all over the world.

"The death of William Christopher Handy, or Bill, as he preferred to be called", ASCAP President Stanley Adams said recently, "has left a vacant chair in our ranks that no one will ever fill. Many of our famous members enjoy the respect and admiration of their colleagues. Bill Handy's innate gentility, kindliness and modesty won him a love that is earned by very few."

Blind in the last years of his life, Bill devoted himself to the W. C. Handy Fund for the colored blind. At his death there was mourning all over the nation, particularly in cities where he had lived at one time or another. In Memphis a school honors him and a public square was dedicated to his memory. ASCAP was privileged to participate in the erection of the Handy monument of which Memphis is so proud.

WITH THE SPREAD of the music hall and the advent of the vaudeville theatre in the Spanish-American War era, the Negro achieved a new status as an entertainer. White minstrels in black-face had been portraying him, sometimes not too flatteringly, on the stage. The Negro undertook to give the public the real article instead of an imitation. Outstanding was the unforgettable Bert Williams, of the team of Williams and Walker, who became a highly popular attraction in vaudeville and then starred in their own all-Negro musical revues which triumphantly toured the United States and Great Britain. In London, one of these revues, **In Dahomey**, was chosen to give a command performance for King Edward VII.

When the dapper Walker was incapacitated, Bert Williams went on as a single act and became one of the highest-salaried performers in vaudeville. He later starred in the famed Ziegfeld Follies for many years. Williams wrote many of the comedy songs he sang with unrivalled success. Substantially wealthy at his death, this dignified musician-singer left a magnificent library of literature, history and philosophy in his stately home in Harlem.

Other Negroes following in the footsteps of Williams and Walker in vaudeville needed songs, and they got them from writers of their own racial origin. One of the earliest of these was Will Marion Cook, a contemporary of Bill Handy. Cook, educated in Oberlin College, began as a student of serious music and became a master of the violin. He studied in Europe under Joachim and, later in this country, under Anton Dvorak. His first composing was for an all-Negro show titled **Clorindy** which had a successful run in the New York Casino in 1898. He then wrote the scores for Williams and

Walker, including the music for **In Dahomey**. Two of his many songs were the big popular hits of that era, "Bon Bon Buddy" and "Lovey Joe". His son, W. Mercer Cook, holder of several university degrees and winner of a number of fellowships, became professor of Romance languages in Howard University. He has written many books on the history of the Negro and was decorated by the Haitian government. Reflecting the musical gifts he inherited from his father — and from his mother, Abbie Mitchell, the concert singer — he has written many popular songs, notably "Stop the Sun, Stop the Moon" and "Is I in Love, I Is". Like his father, he became a member of ASCAP.

Another prominent figure who took many a bow when the spotlight was turned on the Negro composer and entertainer in the early 1900's was the versatile J. Rosamond Johnson, who forsook his early career in classical music for vaudeville and the popular musical stage. He wrote songs for and acted in successful Negro revues which produced some of the most remembered hits of that era. In the latter years of his remarkable career, which brought him equal popularity in England, he played in **Porgy and Bess**, **Mamba's Daughters** and **Cabin in the Sky**. Old-timers recall nostalgically his performance in the Cole and Johnson revue, in which he introduced his "Under the Bamboo Tree", "My Castle on the Nile" and "Congo Love Song".

BUT IT WAS IN the Roaring Twenties — the Jazz Age of bobby-sox, speak-easies, bath-tub gin and Scott Fitzgerald — that the Negro songwriter and musician took over and really rocked the popular music world. "St. Louis Blues" and "Charleston" became twin national anthems. Jazz, born in St. Louis zoomed into Gargantuan stature, and with giant steps via Chicago stormed into Harlem and nearby Broadway. White songwriters, musicians and singers rushed uptown to listen and learn. In the Cotton Club, Connie's Inn, the Savoy and other hot spots they heard Cab Calloway singing his "Minnie the Moocher" and "Zaz Zuh Zaz", Duke Ellington playing his "Solitude", "Mood Indigo", "Sophisticated Lady" and other melodiously-rich songs which stamped him as one of America's top-notch popular composers, while Count Basie drove the dancers into a frenzy with his "One O'clock Jump". In the band of Fletcher Henderson, another composer, the boys from Broadway got their first earful of Louis (Satchmo) Armstrong's cornet. And they heard Mamie Smith, Trixie Smith, Bessie Smith, Billie Holliday and Ethel Waters singing with a new rhythm in a new style far different from what they were accustomed to.

The white writers listened intently and went back to Tin Pan Alley to imitate, which some did quite successfully. The publishers hurried to sign contracts and give advances to colored composers. One of these was Maceo Pinkard, who prospered on the royalties from "Sweet Georgia Brown", "Them Thar Eyes", "Gimme a Little Kiss, Will Ya — Huh?" and numerous other hits. Another was Thomas (Fats) Waller, who started as a boy organist in the church of which his father was pastor. He played the piano in small night clubs, the organ in small and palatial motion-picture houses, made records and piano rolls, played vaudeville in England, Scotland, Norway, Sweden and Denmark,

LANGSTON HUGHES

EUBIE BLAKE

NOBLE SISSLE

WALTER BISHOP

FORD DABNEY

HARRY BROOKS

and appeared in Hollywood movies. He finally teamed up with Andy Razaf, and together they wrote Satchmo Armstrong's "Honeysuckle Rose", "Ain't Misbehavin'" and "Keeping Out of Mischief".

Andy Razaf's real name is Andreamentania Paul Razafinkeriefo. He was born a Grand Duke; Queen Ranavalone III of Madagascar was his aunt. He started out to be a poet and author, but turned to songwriting with great success. He wrote the lyrics for *Blackbirds of 1930*, which had a long run on Broadway, and several other colored musical shows. His list of hits, one of the most impressive in the ASCAP catalog, includes "Sposin", "Stompin' at the Savoy", "Make Believe Ballroom", "My Fate Is in Your Hands", "Knock Me a Kiss" and "12th Street Rag".

In Chicago, where 12th Street was as fertile musically as Lenox Avenue, music publisher Will Rossiter had already made a fortune on two songs he acquired from a colored youth named Shelton Brooks who wrote both words and music. The first was "Some of These Days", the other "Darktown Strutters' Ball". Another publisher gartnered his "Walkin' the Dog".

AMONG THE YOUNG white composers who frequented the hot spots of Harlem were the already famous George Gershwin and a novice named Harold Arlen, and there can be no doubt that their visits had considerable influence on their subsequent compositions. It was soon thereafter that Gershwin wrote his classic "Rhapsody in Blue". Arlen grabbed an opportunity to write the music for a Cotton Club revue, and out of it came "Stormy Weather", "I Love a Parade" and "I've Got the World on a String". Most of his music has been characterized as a blending of the Negro's music with Arlen's Hebrew musical heritage. It may well be so. Israel is not far from Africa.

Jimmy McHugh, another of ASCAP's top composers, does not hesitate to acknowledge his debt to Harlem for the rhythmic inspiration of "I Can't Give You Anything But Love, Baby", "Digga, Digga, Doo", "On the Sunny Side of the Street", "I'm in the Mood for Love" and others of his numerous standard hits.

Only a voluminous book could record the Negro's accomplishments in music in the century since his emancipation, but no treatise on the subject could be complete without mention of Langston Hughes. Hughes, a distinguished poet, author and playwright, whose poems, "Freedom Road" and " Songs to the Dark Virgin ", have been set to concert music, wrote the lyrics for the musical version of *Street Scene* and the libretti of the operas, *Troubled Island and The Barrier*.

And more than passing mention must be made of Eubie Blake and Noble Sissle who, if they had written nothing else, rate a large laurel for "I'm Just Wild About Harry". They wrote many more great songs, particularly for the musical revues titled *Shuffle Along* and *Blackbirds*. A star attraction as a vaudeville team, both enlisted in the First World War and eventually became members of the famous 369th Infantry Regiment Band headed by Lt. James Reese Europe, of whom it was said that his band music took the ache out of the infantryman's corns, and made marching a pleasure. At Europe's

death, Sissle was commissioned and replaced him. Blake toured with the U. S. O. for five years in the Second World War. Sissle became President of the Negro Actors Guild.

One of the most popular younger writers of ASCAP is Jamaica-born Walter Bishop, who is a director of the American Guild of Authors and Composers (AGAC) and active in its administration. He got his first musical training in a Federal music project, then entered New York University. After serving in the Army in World War II, he began his career as a songwriter and clicked with "The Devil Sat Down and Cried". Others that followed are "It's a Military Secret", "Swing, Brother, Swing" and "Bop Goes My Heart".

WHEN ASKED FOR a complete list of the Negro songwriters in ASCAP, President Stanley Adams replied that this was impossible "since in our records we do not identify our members by race or creed. I am happy to say the royalty checks that go out to members who I happen to know are colored are quite sizeable, and I wish them all more hits and bigger checks. And I might add that I am proud to have been a collaborator of Fats Waller, a great composer and a delightful associate."

Never, since the advent of ragtime, jazz and the blues, has the impact of the Negro composer's melody and rhythm on the current popular musical scene been as obvious and as potent as it is today. The beat of Elvis Presley's rock-and-roll was born, as he was, down South. Out of it came the rhythmic tidal wave of the Beatles and their imitators which has swept into every corner of the globe.

Anyone who remembers the Harlem of the Roaring Twenties will recognize in the frug and its kindred dances so popular with today's teen-agers — and the socially elite Jet Set — the head-shaking and hip-swinging of the fiery chorus girls who introduced it in the Cotton Club revues. Likewise the singing style of the present-day recording stars, white as well as colored, bears an unmistakable resemblance to the spiritual vocal nuances which Ethel Waters, Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, Nat Cole and Harry Belafonte injected into their renditions of popular ballads.

And it takes no musicologist to discern in the following partial list of Negro composers and their contributions the debt owed them by their colleagues not only in the United States but all over the world.

LOUIS ARMSTRONG "Ol' Man Mose", "Sugar Foot Stomp"

BENNIE BENJAMIN "I Don't Want to Set the World on Fire", "Oh, What It Seemed to Be"

MARGARET BONDS "Five Spirituals", "Ballad of the Brown King", "The Negro Speaks of Rivers", "Peter, Go Ring Dem Bells"

HARRY BROOKS "What Did I Do to Be So Black and Blue?", "Ain't Misbehavin'"

J. TIM BRYMN "Please (Go Way and) Let Me Sleep", "Shout, Sister, Shout"

BENNY CARTER "Blues in My Heart", "Cow Cow Boogie", "Key Largo"

CHARLES CARPENTER "You Can Depend on Me", "A Lover Is Blue", "Now You Know"

NAT (KING) COLE "Straighten Up and Fly Right", "I'm a Shy Guy", "Calypso Blues"

ORNETTE COLEMAN "Night Song", "Tomorrow Is the Question", "When Will the Blues Leave?"

CHARLES L. COOKE "I Wonder Where My Lov-
ing Man Is Gone", "Blame It On the Blues",
"Goodbye Pretty Butterflies"

HENRY CREAMER "After You've Gone", "If I Could Be With You, One Hour Tonight", "Dear Old Southland", "Way Down Yonder in New Orleans", "Strut Miss Lizzie"

FORD T. DABNEY "Shine", "Oh You Devil"

BOB DAVIS "I Guess I'll Have to Get Along Without You", "I Ain't Gonna Worry (Bout a Soul)", "Could It Be Love?"

EDDIE DURHAM "John's Idea", "Every Tub",
"Good Morning Blues"

ANDY GIBSON "The Great Lie", "The Huckle Buck", "Geechy Joe"

JOSEPH W. GREY "Runnin' Wild", "Pickin' the Blues Away", "I Got the Fever"

ERSKINE HAWKINS "Tuxedo Junction", "You Can't Escape From Me", "Gin Mill Special"

DONALD HEYWOOD "I'm Coming Virginia", "Come Along, Miss Mandy", "Home Beyond the River"

DUBOSE HEYWOOD Musical versions of *Porgy and Bess* and Mamba's *Daughters*

IRENE HIGGINBOTHAM "Hartem Stomp", "That Did It", "Destination Unknown", "A Little Love Is Better Than None", "The Last Thing at Night", "Good Morning, Heartache"

EARL HINES "Ever'thing Depends on You", "Rosetta", "Deep Forest", "Jelly, Jelly"

JOHNNY HODGES "I'm Beginning to See the Light", "Mood to Be Wooed", "Hodge Podge"

CLAUDE HOPKINS "I Would Do Anything for You", "Deep Dawn", "Low Gravy"

J. C. JOHNSON "Believe It Beloved", "Don't Let Your Love Go Wrong", "Three Kisses"

PETE JOHNSON "Roll 'em, Pete", "Boogie Woogie Prayer", "Wee Baby Blues"

CLARENCE JONES "One Wonderful Night", "Swanee in Spring", 'Walkin' Thru' Mocking-bird Lane"

QUINCY JONES Score for *The Pawnbroker*

RICHARD M. JONES "All Night Blues", "29th and Dearborn", "Remember Me?"

SCOTT JOPLIN "Maple Leaf Rag", "Sunflower Rag", "Euphonic Sounds"

JOE JORDAN "Lovey Joe", "Oh, Say! Wouldn't It Be a Dream!", "I Want to Sing About You"

MEADE (LUX) LEWIS "Yancey Special", "Boogie Woogie Prayer", "Honky Tonk Train Blues"

R. C. MCPHERSON (CECIL MACK) "Charleston", "Please (Go Way and) Let Me Sleep", "Josephine, My Jo", "Shine", "Teasing", "Good Morning Carrie", "He's a Cousin of Mine", "You're in the Right Church But the Wrong Pew"

TEDDY MCRAE "You Showed Me the Way", "Back Bay Shuffle", "Traffic Jam"

FLOURNOY E. MILLER "You Can't Lose a Broken Heart", "Keep 'Em Guessing", "Peace Sister Peace"

PHIL MOORE "My Dreams Are Getting Better All the Time", "I'm Gonna See My Baby", "Shoo Shoo Baby"

FERDINAND J. MORTON (JELLY ROLL) "The Jelly Roll Blues", "Milenberg Joys", "King Porter Stomp"

JAMES R. MUNDY "Take It Easy", "Swingtime in the Rockies", "Bolero at the Savoy"

CLARENCE MUSE "River of Freedom", "Old Saint Peter Is Color Blind", "I Heard a Blind Man Singing"

FRED NORMAN "Hot Foot Shuffle", "Monkey Business", "Smoke House"

LORENZO PACK "You Must Be Blind", "I Bet You Do", "Are You Foolin'?"

AVERY PARRISH "Because of You", "So Tired", "After Hours"

EDNA BELLE PINKARD "You're in Wrong With the Right Baby", "Does My Sweetie Do?", "Make Those Naughty Eyes Behave"

ARMAND JOHN PIRON "I Wish I Could Shimmy Like My Sister Kate", "Mamma's Gone Goodbye", "Brown Skin"

ROGER J. RAMIREZ "Lover Man, Oh, Where Can You Be?", "Mad About You", "I Just Refuse to Sing the Blues"

DON REDMAN "How'm I Doin'?" "How Can I Hi De Hi?", "If It Ain't Love"

LEON T. RENE "When the Swallows Come Back to Capistrano", "When it's Sleepytime Down South", "Someone's Rocking My Dreamboat"

OTIS J. RENE, JR. "When it's Sleepytime Down South", "Someone's Rocking My Dreamboat", "Dusty Road"

C. LUCKEY ROBERTS "Moonlight Cocktail", "Railroad Blues", "Shy and Sly"

EDGAR M. SAMPSON "Stompin' at the Savoy", "If Dreams Come True", "Lullaby in Rhythm"

CHRIS SMITH "Ballin' the Jack", "Good Morning Carrie", "You're in the Right Church but the Wrong Pew", "He's a Cousin of Mine"

BILLY STRAYHORN "Take the 'A' Train", "Chelsea Bridge", "Clementine"

WILBUR SWEATMAN "Down Home Rag", "Old Folks Rag", "Battleship Kate"

WILLIAM (BILLY) TAYLOR "A Bientot", "Cool and Caressing", "Day Dreaming"

JUAN TIZOL "Caravan", "Perdido", "Congo Brava"

CLARENCE TODD "Papa De-Da-Da", "Ooh, Look-a There! Ain't She Pretty?", "Love Grows on the White Oak Tree"

JO TRENT "Muddy Waters", "My Kinda Love", "Maybe I'm Wrong Again"

LEONARD WARE "Hold Tight", "Ooh Wee, Ooh Wee, the Bumble Bee", "Heh, Heh, Little Doggie"

RANDY WESTON "Little Niles", "Earth Birth", "J. K. Blues"

CLARENCE CAMERON WHITE *Ouanga* (opera), "Bandanna Sketches", "From the Cotton Fields", "On the Bayou"

MARY LOU WILLIAMS "Foggy Bottom", "Lonely Moments", "You Know Baby"

SPENCER WILLIAMS "I Ain't Got Nobody", "Shim-Me-Sha Wobble", "Everybody Loves My Baby", "I've Found a New Baby", "Snake's Hips", "Basin Street Blues", "Careless Love", "When Lights Are Low"

Jack Yellen, a noted American songwriter who has been a member of the Board of Directors of the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers since 1951, turned to music in 1917 after a career as a reporter on the Buffalo Courier. A few of his famous hits are "Happy Days Are Here Again", "Down By the O-Hi-O", "I Wonder What's Become of Sally", "Ain't She Sweet" and "Hard Hearted Hannah".

An Event — To be published in September

# The Book of American Negro Spirituals

Edited with an Introduction by
JAMES WELDON JOHNSON
Secretary of The N. A. A. C. P.

Musical Arrangements by
J. ROSAMOND JOHNSON
and additional numbers by LAWRENCE BROWN

HERE at ist is the authoritative, permanent book of America Negro Spirituals compiled by the best Negro musicians an edited by a man who has made a life study of these songs.

The book contains the words and music of about seventy spirituals, arranged for piano and voice without loss of any of their original quality. They can be played and sung just as the Negro have been singing them for hundreds of years. Deep River, Oshua Fit de Battle ob Jericho, Go Down Moses, Stan'till Jordan, Little David, Swing Low Sweet Chariot, Somebody's Knockin' at Yo' Do', Steal Away to Jesus, all the'd favorites and many never before set down are in this bo.

2

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THOMAS P. ROBINSON

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READING WITH CHILDREN

BY ANNE T. EATON

(See also back cover)
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-BERTHA MAHONY MILLER

47

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THE VIKING BOOK OF POETRY OF THE
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48

PAGE 7

ANNA LOUISE STRONG

My Native Land

This book is about the American people by an American world-traveler. After several years' absence, Anna Louise Strong, in her fifties, returned to her native America, and set out in a borrowed car to see the country. Beginning in a California county, she tells how the people's lives are involved with the operations of government and business—in relief work, CCC, FSA, county aid, education, in labor organizations and self-help projects. Moving on to the state as a whole, she observes the channels through which the people express their will and the methods by which they are balked. She travels to the Northwest to Coulee Dam and a lumber camp; turns eastward through the badlands to Minnesota; goes down through the farms and across to the industrial centers. Thence she drops down to visit the South, with its extremes of share-cropping and TVA, and pauses in Virginia on her return to look back over the nation's past, and in Washington to appraise the New Deal. Her trip ends in New England with a vision of the future.

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STRONG, ANNA LOUISE
PERSONAL NARRATIVE

MY NATIVE LAND
320 pages 5⅝ x 8⅔

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PAGE 8

THE
AUTHORS CLIPPING BUREAU

ROBERT LUCE, President
P. O. Box 2616, Boston, Mass

Clipping from

In connection with the fiftieth anni-
versary of the Emancipation Proclama-
tion, a poem is published in the New
York Times by one of the emancipated

race. It is an eloquent plea for the
rights of the black man—and an exhorta-
tion to courage and patience. "While
there would be hesitation in pronounc-
ing this poem a work of genius," says
*The Times* editorially, "there would be
difficulty in explaining why it did not
deserve to be so described." This is
overpraise. Many stanzas are common-
place and none have either supreme
beauty or supreme power. But there
are feeling and eloquence, especially in
the stanzas which we reprint below and
which constitute about one-half of the
poem. The author has been for seven
years in the consular service of the
United States and is a graduate of the
Atlanta University:

FIFTY YEARS OF EMANCIPATION.

By JAMES W. JOHNSON.

O brother mine, to-day we stand
Where half a century sweeps our ken,
Since God, through Lincoln's ready hand,
Struck off our bonds and made us men.

This land is ours by right of birth,
This land is ours by right of toil;

We helped to turn its virgin earth,
Our sweat is in its fruitful soil.

Where once the tangled forest stood,
Where flourished once rank weed and
thorn,

Behold the path-traced, peaceful wood,
The cotton white, the yellow corn.

To gain these fruits that have been
earned,

To hold these fields that have been
won,

Our arms have strained, our backs have
burned,

Bent bare beneath a ruthless sun.

That Banner, which is now the type
Of victory on field and flood—

Remember, its first crimson stripe
Was dyed by Attucks' willing blood.

And never yet has come the cry—
When that fair flag has been assailed—

For men to do, for men to die,
That we have faltered or have failed.

We've helped to bear it, rent and torn,
Through many a hot-breathed battle
breeze;

Held in our hands, it has been borne
And planted far across the seas.

And never yet, O haughty Land—
Let us, at least, for this be praised—

Has one black, treason-guided hand
Ever against that flag been raised.

Then should we speak but servile words,
Or shall we hang our heads in shame?

Stand back of new-come foreign hordes,
And fear our heritage to claim?

No! Stand erect and without fear,
And for our foes let this suffice—

We've bought a rightful sonship here,
And we have more than paid the price.

Because the tongues of Garrison
And Phillips now are cold in death,

Think you their work can be undone?
Or quenched the fires lit by their

breath?

Think you that John Brown's spirit
stops?

That Lovejoy was but idly slain?

Or do you think those precious drops

From Lincoln's heart were shed in
vain?

That for which millions prayed and
sighed,

That for which tens of thousands
fought,

For which so many freely died,
God cannot let it come to naught.

# The Changing Status of Negro Labor

James Weldon Johnson, Field Secretary, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, New York

I am down to speak on the changing status of Negro labor. It might be well, in a dozen words, to trace the change in the status of the Negro during his history in this country, because it has a bearing on what I wish to say on the topic assigned to me. The Negro in America has passed through four distinct and well marked epochs. The first began with the landing of twenty-odd naked savages on the shores of Virginia in 1619. The second had for its duration the great war in which he gained his physical freedom. The third was marked by the change in the organic law of the land which conferred upon him the rights of citizenship. And today he is going through a fourth epoch, an epoch which began with the hurling of the German armies through Belgium; an epoch in which he sees the beginning of his economic and industrial emancipation; an epoch which is big with spiritual meanings for him, because in it must be answered more fully than ever before the question, "Can full and unlimited democracy be realized for all the people, or is the hope of it a mere dream?"

We shall not attempt to review these epochs historically, or to trace the course of opinion regarding the Negro from the time when it was a question as to whether or not he had a human soul and could be made susceptible to religious teaching, or whether or not he had sufficient gray matter in his skull to master the rudiments of learning and the intricacies of English speech, or whether or not he would revert to barbarism if given his freedom, down to the present time, when it is a question as to whether or not he shall be admitted to full participation in American democracy. There is no longer anything to be gained from discussing the Negro problem academically. Once it was popular, and still is among some backward people, to discuss theoretically whether the Negro is capable of advancement. The very shifting of the ground of controversy concerning the race renders any such discussion obsolete. We shall then go at once to the influences now at work on the Negro and to the efforts that he himself is making.

## Migration Northward

The present war set in motion a great many blind forces; that is,

Copyright 1918 by the

National Conference of Social Work

In complete *Proceedings* of the annual meeting, cloth bound, $2.50.

Pamphlet 137. Price 5 cents.

Reduction on quantity orders. Write for descriptive list of publications.

315 Plymouth Court, Chicago, Ill.

1

forces whose course was not foreseen when they were first unloosed and
whose effect cannot now be controlled. These forces are at work all
over the world, and many of them are operating directly upon the
American Negro.

The most striking example of how some of these forces are operat-
ing upon the Negro is shown in the "exodus" from the South. As we
know, when the war came it took thousands of men out of the indus-
trial and labor fields in the North back to the colors of their native lands
in Europe, and cut off the supply normally furnished by immigration,
thus creating what might be called a vacuum in the industrial world.
This resulted in a steadily increasing stream of Negroes from the South
rushing into the North to fill the vacuum that had been produced. They
have gone up by the thousands and tens of thousands and hundreds of
thousands, until today the number is roughly estimated to be anywhere
between half a million and seven hundred and fifty thousand.

At first there were many complaints about the shiftlessness of
Negro labor; and it is true that a number of Northern employers, ac-
customed to steady workmen, had good cause for complaint. And there
was a reason: the rush of Negroes northward was started by the rail-
roads sending labor recruiting agents South and having them spread the
news that they had free transportation for as many men as wanted to
go north to work at so much per day; these notices gave only a day
or two to those who wished to take advantage of the offer. As a result,
many of the most shiftless and unreliable of the race, attracted by the
prospect of a trip North, were gathered in. The steady, reliable class
would demand more time and more definite information before they
would be willing to pull up and leave. However, by a natural process,
this condition is being rectified. Since the first great rush, the people
coming North are more and more largely of the steady, reliable class.
This is due to the fact that agents are no longer recruiting wholesale in
the South. The people who have come North and secured jobs are writ-
ing back to their relatives and friends to come on. This is by far the
better method, for in most cases, those who write have their eyes on a
job for those who come. This process is selective, and is already pro-
ducing a steady flow northward of the best element of colored working
people, who become adjusted economically and socially as soon as they
arrive.

They are being engaged in many lines of industry, especially in the
steel and allied industries, where large numbers from the southern iron
districts are finding work in which they are already skilled. The demand
is so great that notices of jobs for wages ranging from $3.00 to $6.00 a
day are frequently read in the colored churches of northern cities. The
opinion regarding Negro labor is constantly rising, and many employers
are testifying that it is as good as any they ever had. And so the Negro
has this chance, the first in his history, to get his hand upon the thing
by which men live, to become for the first time a real factor in the world
of labor. He has at last come into what is rightfully his own, the op-

2

portunity that has heretofore been denied him and given to the stranger.

But the Negro comes up against a problem he has never had to face
before, and that is union labor. In the North, in almost every field the
unions shut him out, and he finds himself in the position of an in-
dependent or a scab. Many colored men skilled in their trades have had
to turn to common labor because they were not allowed to join the
unions. So after all, this thing we call the Negro problem and which
we have thought of as a problem of the South is today coming before
the North; and it is going to be curious to see just how the North will
meet it.

Heretofore the Negro has had two choices,—that of living in the
South where most of his manhood and civil rights were denied him, but
where economically his condition was secure; or that of living in the
North where his rights were guaranteed him, but where his economic
condition was always precarious. In this attitude toward the Negro, the
North has been almost as cruel as the South; for although the South,
to use a figure of speech, denied him life, it offered him bread; while
the North offered him life, but refused him that whereby he might live.
Many problems connected with the shifting of Negro labor from the
South to the North are to be met, and if they are met in a spirit of fair-
ness and helpfulness the movement will exert a stronger influence on
the status of the race than anything that has happened in its history since
the adoption of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments; it will
mark the beginning of a great advancement not only in the economic
status of the race, but also in its intellectual and political status.

Revelations of Army Statistics

The Negro himself stands almost amazed at some of the things that
are coming especially to him out of this war. For example, ever since
his emancipation there have been circulated what were reputed to be
statistics on the Negro's health, showing that he was dying of consump-
tion much more rapidly now than in the days before the war, and in-
ferring that Negroes never had consumption before the war. The truth
is, people did not know what Negroes died of before the war. And there
have been insidious reports subtly spread about the physical condition of
colored men. The Negro could not disprove these things, and people
generally believed them because they were put forth as statistics. He
stood helpless before the mass of figures compiled and given out, the
results of observations that were necessarily limited and often prejudiced.

Now comes the great war, and the government summons three
million of its young men between the ages of 21 and 31 from all over
the country and submits them to identically the same physical examina-
tion, and what are the results? To secure the number of white men re-
quired for the army, out of every 100 men examined, 25 were accepted;
and to secure the number of black men required for the army, out of
every 100 men examined, 36 were accepted. Here was an experiment
conducted on so grand a scale that the figures cannot be questioned or

3

doubted; these figures have become a part of the records of the govern-
ment, and they prove, to say the least, that the young Negro manhood
of America is just as fit and just as clean as the young white manhood
of America.

I must confess that I myself had been impressed by the old statistics
that have been handed around so long; so when I saw the records pub-
lished by Dr. I. W. Brewer of the Medical Reserve Corps relative to
the physical and mental condition of 165,000 applicants for the regular
army, in which all of the diseases and the rejection rate per thousand
were given in detail, I admit that some of the figures astonished me.
I found that the rate of white men rejected for tuberculosis was higher
than the rate of colored men, the figures being respectively 19.2 and 12.8;
I found that the rate of white men rejected for alcoholism was higher
than the rate of colored men, the figures being 34.1 and 7.8; I found
that the rate of white men rejected for diseases of the genito-urinary
system was higher than the rate of colored men, the figures being 25.4
and 23.2. And—I do not state it as a laughing matter—I found the
rate of white men rejected for weakmindedness higher than the rate of
Negroes. But a bigger surprise still. You know there is a joke about
the Negro that is older than the Constitution itself, but I found that
the rate of white men rejected for flat feet was higher than the rate
of Negroes.

But all of these changes are merely phases of the great transforma-
tion that is being wrought in the entire race by the forces set in motion
by the war. The most vital and far-reaching change is the one that has
been wrought within the Negro himself. He has been seized by the
spirit that has taken hold of all the submerged classes of the world. He
is looking with wider, but wiser eyes at what is happening. He has seen
the breaking up and the melting down of the old civilization. He be-
lieves that something new and something better is going to be moulded,
and I tell you he has made up his mind to have a hand in moulding this
new thing that is coming to the world so that it may be a little nearer
to the desires of his own heart.

That change is going on. The Negro is in contact with the current
that is running around the world, and he is striving to see that this war
will mean for him just what it promises—democracy for all the people
of the world.

## Contrast With Lynching

I saw in the papers today, in the same issue, contrasting articles
like these: "General Pershing telegraphs about the valorous conduct of
two Negro soldiers at the front; how in a hand-to-hand conflict with a
number of Germans estimated at more than twenty, fighting with rifles,
hand grenades and bolo knives, they repulsed them. These two Negroes
were sentries on duty, and saved a great many of their comrades from
falling captive." In the same paper I read that following the lynching
of two Negroes at Valdosta, Ga., charged with the murder of a white

4

citizen, another Negro was lynched today charged with implication in
the murder, and then this Negro's wife was lynched for making "un-
wise remarks" about the lynching of her husband, and the mob is search-
ing for a fifth victim.

A short time ago I had the privilege of going with a delegation
which brought this very matter to the attention of the President, and,
speaking for the delegation, I asked that he say some word against
lynching. I called to his attention then that within nine months three
human beings had been burned alive in the single state of Tennessee.
I rehearsed to him the horrible details of a burning which had occurred
only three or four days previously. Jim McIllheron was a young Negro,
twenty odd years of age, who lived near Estill Springs, Tennessee. It
appears that the white boys of that town had a habit of chasing the
colored boys out with rocks. They had chased Jim several times, but
somehow or other he got tired of running, and bought himself a pistol.
The next time they started to chase him he didn't run, but he opened
fire and killed two, wounded a third and got away. Well, they got him
after he had put up something of a fight; and when they brought him
in they brought him on a stretcher, weak from loss of blood, one arm
limp and one of his eyes hanging on his cheek. He was chained to a
stake, and at a fire they heated irons red hot. The first lyncher to get
a hot iron jabbed it at the boy's body; the boy instinctly grabbed it with
his naked hand, and the lyncher pulled it through, taking the burning
flesh off with it. They took those irons and seared his body from head
to foot, into his eyes and down into his throat; they poured oil over
him and burned him alive. This happened on a Sunday afternoon be-
tween church hours, and two thousand American men, women and little
children looked on—and that Sunday was Lincoln's birthday.

We want this country to be a democracy, do we not? And we want
to do our best in winning this war, do we not? Well, I tell you we
can never be a real democracy until such things are remedied. And
we cannot fight our best fight for democracy abroad, while such things
are tolerated at home. Righteous men and women north and south must
rise up in their might and crush out this vile thing which otherwise will
in time undermine all law and order in our land.

You may wonder how I feel about this as a Negro. I do not feel
it merely as a Negro. I feel it doubly as a disgrace and danger to our
country. I feel it as an American citizen. Some years ago I was in
Paris and formed an acquaintance with a young man from Luxembourg.
He spent a great deal of time with me; perhaps he did so because he
was studying English and wanted to try it out on the dog. And he was
studying English because he wanted to come to the United States, which
he had heard was a great country where you could make lots of money
and all that sort of thing. I remember with what pride I told him about
my country and its wonderful opportunites—I was simply an American
citizen then—and I inflamed in him a desire to come. One day he asked
me, "Is it true, did they ever burn a man alive in the United States?"

5

My friends, I would have given anything if I could have answered,
“No!”

A Call for Appreciative Response

The Negro is awake. He is awake to his rights and his wrongs, but he is awake to his duties and responsibilites as well. And although he feels these things keenly, he is not sulking in his tent during this most terrible crisis in the nation's history. He is doing his duty as he has always done it, all the way from Bunker Hill to San Juan Hill, and doing it willingly. He is also bearing his part of the burden; he is buying Liberty Bonds and Thrift Stamps and assisting in Red Cross and Y. M. C. A. work. In Kansas City the colored people have purchased nearly a half million dollars worth of bonds. The Negro is going forward to his duty.

Some may well wonder what it is that sustains these people. I will tell you, there are two things: First, the Negro is American from the soil up. He bears no reserved allegiance to any potentate either on the Congo or the Nile. Second, he has never lost faith in the spirit in which this nation was founded. He believes that spirit, though balked and thwarted, will finally triumph. So he goes forward to his duty, and he offers it as a plea and he flings it as a challenge for the nation to do its duty by him.

So I call upon Americans all over this land, north and south; I call upon you in the name of the high ideals on which this war is being fought and in the name of common humanity; I call upon you in behalf of the race whose three hundred years of labor and loyalty and patience and faith entitle them to just consideration; I call upon you in the name of the black men who are now marching by your side, they who have put aside memories of old wrongs and risen above thoughts of vengeance, who march to war with songs on their lips and visions in their eyes of peace through brotherhood; I call upon you to see to it when they come back, bringing that flag as they have always done, without a single dis-honorable stain upon it, that they receive here in their native land what they are fighting for over there.

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Those twenty pitiful, extra years
Would please you more than the fifty past,
Would they not, Old World?
Well, I hold them up before your greedy eyes,
And snatch them away as I laugh in your face,
Ha! Ha!
Bang—!

The condensed tragedy in this little poem may well give every reader of this volume food for much meditation and resolve, if he has within him any springs of justice and pity. We are always much in arrears in our debts to justice and pity, and yet many of them may be paid so easily. One method is plainly indicated by the kind of reception that the public should give this volume of poems. The deferred claims of justice that might be brought forward by an entire race call for some compounding of the interest paid to any of its representatives. This fact is still more deeply underscored by reading the poem "Brothers," which celebrates the burning and lynching of the Negro in the South:—

In me the down-erushed spirit, the hurled-back prayers
Of wretches now long dead,—their dire bequests.
In me the echo of the stifled cry
Of children for their bartered mothers' breasts.

Enough, the brute must die!
Quick! chain him to that oak! it will resist
The fire much longer than this slender pine.

And now his fiendish crime has been avenged;
Let us back to our wives and children. Say,
What did he mean by those last muttered words,
"Brothers in spirit, brothers in deed are we"?

*(To be concluded.)*

## A Notable By-Product of Emancipation.

ELLEN BURNS SHERMAN.

### I.

THE nations of the earth are so tremendously preoccupied that many events of vast significance pass unheeded. When a city is in flames one cannot expect to interest its residents in the discovery of a new painter or poet, yet the painter and the poet are as surely sent to bear witness to a truth as the man who shoulders a musket to free his brothers in bonds. We cannot all shoot with the same kind of gun; but the poet, the painter and preacher, as well as the embattled farmer, for the cause of liberty may fire shots that will be heard around the world. Even more, by the reduplicating and centrifugal power of the press, those shots, if truly aimed, may carry so far down the centuries that they will help to prevent another war.

Into these musings I have been led by reading "Fifty Years and Other Poems,"* a volume whose pulsing vitality and originality should give it rank among the very best American verse of the year. This would be true whatever the race of its author, James Weldon Johnson. But when one learns that these exquisite lyrics and finely marshalled measures come from a representative of the race freed from bondage fifty years ago, one reads them with a new sense of exultation, so triumphantly do they proclaim that genius, like the spirit, bloweth where it listeth, recognizing no superficial barrier of race or caste.

Compared with the much acclaimed poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar, Mr. Johnson's work represents a much wider gamut of emotion and culture, as almost any page of his book bears witness, but notably the poems follow-

The Christian Register

(6) [APRIL 18 1918

ing, on "Mother Night" and "The Glory of the Dawn was in her Face."

### MOTHER NIGHT.

Eternities before the first-born day,
Or ere the first sun fledged his wings of flame,
Calm Night, the everlasting and the same,
A brooding mother over chaos lay.
And whirling suns shall blaze and then decay,
Shall run their fiery courses and then claim
The haven of the darkness whence they came;
Back to Nirvanic peace shall grope their way.

So when my feeble sun of life burns out,
And sounded is the hour for my long sleep,
I shall, full weary of the feverish light,
Welcome the darkness without fear or doubt,
And heavy-lidded, I shall softly creep
Into the quiet bosom of the Night.

The tropical splendor of the figure "fledge his wings of flame" from the pen of a proclaimed master would be hailed as magnificent and perhaps be embedded in some college rhetoric for the envy and emulation of students of coming generations, but I see no reason why it should not be hailed as magnificent though it comes from a poet who has been only a little proclaimed. Not less the entire sonnet, ignoring certain accents which fall on prepositions, moves forward with untrammelled dignity and strength to the finely modulated diminuendo of its ending.

Very winning, also, in its rich imagery and smooth cadences is

### THE GLORY OF THE DAWN WAS IN HER FACE.

The glory of the dawn was in her face,
The beauty of the night was in her eyes.
And over all her loveliness, the grace
Of Morning blushing in the early skies.

And in her voice, the calling of the dove;
Like music of a sweet, melodious part.
And in her smile, the breaking light of love;
And all the gentle virtues in her heart.

And now the glorious day, the beauteous night,
The birds that signal to their mates at dawn,
To my dull ears, to my tear-blinded sight,
Are one with all the dead, since she is gone.

The same light but felicitously sure touch marks the poem "Girl of Fifteen," from which four lines will give the flavor,—

"Girl of fifteen, as you pass
There passes, too, a lightning flash of time
In which you lift those forty summers off my head,
And take those forty winters out of my heart."

Here we catch some of the stately courtliness for which the best representatives of the colored race have been noted, as they have been for their quaintly delightful humor. Both these characteristics give a pleasingiri- descence to many of the poems in this volume. But in addition to the poet's mastery of the light and graceful manner, one finds evidence of unusual dramatic strength in poems like "The Suicide," "Brothers," and "The Greatest of These is War." That the first poem is pain- fully faithful to life doubtless many a suicide would testify:—

### THE SUICIDE.

For fifty years,
Cruel, insatiable Old World,
You have punched me over the heart
Till you made me cough blood.
The few paltry things I gathered
You snatched out of my hands.
You have knocked the cup from my thirsty lips.
You have laughed at my hunger of body and soul.

You look at me now and think,
"He is still strong,

There ought to be twenty more years of good punching there.

ELLEN BURNS SHERMAN.

II.

STUDYING further the poems * of Mr. James Weldon Johnson, we find one which handles a very live wire of the present moment:—

AND THE GREATEST OF THESE IS WAR.
But I arouse in man the demon and the brute,
I plant black hatred in his heart and red revenge.
From the summit of fifty thousand years of upward climb
I haul him down to the level of the start, back to the wolf.
I give him claws.
I set his teeth into his brother's throat.
I make him drunk with his brother's blood.
And I laugh, ho! ho! while he destroys himself.
O mighty Prince, not only do I slay,
But I draw man hell-ward.
And Satan smiled, stretched out his hand, and said,—
"O War, of all the scourges of humanity, I crown you chief."
And Hell rang with the acclamation of the Fiends.

From these poignantly realistic measures one is glad to turn to the swinging, lilting dialect jingles that are as admirably well done as the other poems, though one cannot endorse the ethics of the hero in "The Rivals." But

* Published by the Cornhill Co., Boston.

the philosophy of "Ma Lady's Lips am like de Honey" seems altogether sound and convincing:—

Oh, ma lady's lips am like de honey,
Ma lady's lips am like de rose;
An' I am jes' like de little bee a-buzzin'
'Round de flower wha' de nectah grows.

Honey in de rose, I s'pose, is
Put der fo' de bee;
Honey on her lips, I knows, is
Put der jes' fo' me.

The poet has further diversified his collection of verse by including his translations from German and Spanish poets, although one cannot unreservedly commend the choice of the Spanish sonnet, which, nevertheless, is so well rendered that it lacks the usual dry-jointed movement of translations.

Now and then the reader catches a metrical echo in these poems that calls up Kipling or Poe; yet that does not mean that Mr. Johnson is in the least a plagiarist, since he is far too original to feel the temptations of the poet who has few ideas of his own. Yet here one must even rigorously prune one's own ideas and numbers when they sound too reminiscent of those "accursed ones who say our good things before us." To illustrate, the poem "Down by the Carib Sea" has a poetical velocity and swing that are comforting, especially after reading verse that affects one like a trip over a corduroy road or a sleigh-ride in the "thank-you-ma'am" district of New England; yet Poe and Kipling will obtrude as we read, in spite of the fact that neither poet may have been on Mr. Johnson's intellectual premises at the time of the composition of "Los Cigarillos":—

This is the land of the dark-eyed gente,
Of the dolce far niente
Where we dream away
Both the night and the day,

Our dreams come by day through the redolent smoke,
As it lazily curls,
And slowly unfurls
From our lips,
And the tips
Of our fragrant *cigarillos*.
For life in the tropics is only a joke,
So we pass it in dreams and we pass it in smoke,
Smoke, smoke, smoke.

Leaving the South American land of smoke, where the poet was for a number of years in the consular service of the Government, the reader may pass to the more bracing atmosphere which emanates from

PRAYER AT SUNRISE.

O Greater Maker of this thy great sun,
Give me the strength this one day's race to run,
Fill me with light, fill me with sun-like strength,
Fill me with joy to rob the day of length.
Light from within, light that will outward shine,
Strength to make strong some weaker heart than mine,
Joy to make glad each soul that feels its touch;
Great Father of the sun, I ask this much.

If only fifty years of freedom for the colored race can show among its fair harvestings poetry like Mr. Dunbar's, Mr. William Stanley Braithwaite's, and Mr. James Weldon Johnson's, not to mention the rich fruitage in life and character from the sowings of industrial leaders like Booker Washington, what golden sheaves, in every art and industry, may we not expect from this race in the next fifty years? And with these fairer reapings may we not as fervently hope that we and the entire Caucasian race may gather a more mellow harvest of understanding, in which prejudice and arrogance will not superficially measure merit by the pigment that dyes the skin?

APRIL 25, 1918

THE NEW YORK AGE, SATURDAY, JUN 19, 1920

VIEWS and REVIESW

By James Weldon Johnson, Contributing Editor

THE REPUBLICAN CONVENTION.

The hectic week at Chicago is over. The candidate has been
nominated, the platform has been laid down, and all is up
nered big leaders and the pompous little leaders and the host
of pewee followers have broken camp and gone their various ways.

There were many things at Chicago to impress the observer
besides the main results of the convention. One could not help but
be impressed by the fact that victory belonged to the men with the
nerves that could stand the longest strain; the men who could attend
the convention all day and caucus all night, and do it day after day
and night after night. Other men would finally yield and agree under
such pressure. It was astonishing to see the stress to which the
human machine could be put, and still function.

Then there was the heart-breaking phase of the big political
game. Every observer could sense the varying emotions of the men
who had staked a life's work and a life's ambition on the turn of the
political wheel. He could sense the emotions of the men who felt
the great prize almost within their grasp and then saw it suddenly
or slowly pass beyond their reach. And the heart-breaking phase
was not limited to the men who had staked their all for the one, big
prize; there were hundreds of men whose ambitions and great ex-
pectations hung on the fate of the leader with whom they had
aligned themselves; and as his fortunes rose or fell, so did theirs.

These and others that I could set forth were general observa-
tions; but there was one special thing to be observed which any
colored man or woman who watched with any degree of keenness
could plainly see. And that was that the Republican party in 1920
was not any more solicitous about the Negro as a political factor
than it was in 1916 or 1912. This was shown in the fate of colored
contesting delegates before the National Committee and the Com-
mittee of Credentials; even in the case of certain colored contesting
delegates from Virginia who proved that a force of police under
orders from "somebody" kept colored citizens and voters of Rich-
mond from entering the court house in that city, where the conven-
tion for the election of delegates to the state convention was being
held.

But the most astounding exhibition of what appears to be the
general attitude of the party on the Negro was given when Senator
Lodge, the chairman of the convention, was announcing the election
of members of the National Committee from the various states, and
placing their names before the whole body for approval. When he
reached Georgia he announced that the delegates from that state
had elected Henry Lincoln Johnson. When he put the vote there
was a moderately strong "Aye!" but a thundering "No!" It was a
tense and dramatic moment. The leaders on the platform appeared
dismayed at such an unlooked for crisis; for it might be all right to
turn down and unseat colored delegates on technical and other
grounds in committee meetings, but for the whole convention as-
sembled to refuse to approve the election of a member to the Na-
tional Committee, after being duly chosen by his state, to refuse
plainly on account of his color, would be an entirely different
matter.

During the hubbub which followed the vote Senator Lodge
retired upstage and conferred for several minutes with the leaders

2
J6335

on the platform; then he came back down gavel in hand, hammered
the big crowd into quiet and announced the election of Mr. Johnson.
On a point of order that was raised he ruled that the vote of the
convention was purely formal and could not affect the action of the
delegates of the state. Thus an awkward situation was saved, but
the fact remained that the majority in the convention was opposed
to a colored man being the representative of Georgia on the Repub-
lican National Committee.

What is it that has so changed and is still changing the Repub-
lican party in its attitude toward the Negro? It is due to the fact
that for the past two decades the party has been listening more and
more attentively to the voice of the lilywhite siren of the South.
That voice keeps saying and repeating, "If you will only throw out
the Negro we can build up a strong Republican party in the South-
ern states." This is the lure, "breaking the solid South." The party
dreams of sweeping Tennessee and North Carolina and, perhaps,
even Georgia, Alabama, Louisiana and Texas into the Republican
presidential column. This dream comes as a sweet relief from the
nightmare of 132 votes in the electoral college for which the Demo-
crats do not have to turn a finger; while the Republicans have to
fight desperately for every vote they get.

The writer makes no pretense at political sagacity, but if he
had the opportunity of offering the Republican party any advice it
would be that a solid North is worth more than a broken South.

Leave moral obligation, humanity, justice and all the other
mouth-filling terms aside and come down to common political wis-
dom and expediency; the Republican party would increase its
chances of national success more by standing by the Negro, and thus
making sure of the pivotal states in the North where the Negro
holds the balance of power, than by sacrificing the Negro in an at-
tempt to carry states like Georgia. And the balance of power which
the Negro holds in the pivotal states of the North to-day is, on ac-
count of the migration, far greater than it ever was before.

Perhaps, a little tradition and history might not be out of place.
In the final analysis, it was the Negro that caused the Republican
party to be brought into existence, and it was his cause that fur-
nished the party its chief inspiration. Those in charge of the G. O. P.
ship who believe in signs and omens may note that the ship has
been bumping hard upon the rocks ever since the adoption of the
policy to throw the Negro overboard.

THE PLATFORM.

The platform is good, as platforms go. The Democratic plat-
form will be the same kind of a document; it will generalize and
platudinize as far as it is able to do so, and be definite and specific
only on such subjects as are entirely "safe."

This is the art of platform writing for parties that have pros-
pects of winning. The candidate must have a platform on which he
can turn about a bit in order to meet the attacks from different
angles that will be launched against him through the campaign.

Therefore, anybody who expects something clear and definite
on a mooted question that is radical or vital must look in the plat-
forms of minority parties that have no immediate prospects of win-
ning.

Many will be disappointed in the Chicago platform. The labor
people will be disappointed, the people interested in independence
for Ireland will be disappointed, and the American Negro will be
disappointed.

Efforts were made before and during the convention to have
the party adopt a plank that would declare specifically for the right
of the Negro to vote in all states under the same qualifications as
other citizens; for a Federal law against lynching; for the abolish-
ment of "Jim Crow" cars; for the abolishment of segregation in the
Federal service, especially in the government departments and the
public buildings at Washington; and for Federal aid to education so
on the platform; then he came back down gavel in hand, hammered
the big crowd into quiet and announced the election of Mr. Johnson.
On a point of order that was raised he ruled that the vote of the
convention was purely formal and could not affect the action of the
delegates of the state. Thus an awkward situation was saved, but
the fact remained that the majority in the convention was opposed
to a colored man being the representative of Georgia on the Repub-
lican National Committee.

distributed that the colored children in no state could be discriminated against.

These efforts were continued through to the second day of the convention, the day on which the platform was adopted. On that morning a committee of colored men appeared before the Platform Committee and presented a plank containing the above points. The only definite result of all the efforts made is the three-line plank on lynching.

There is a sentence under "Law and Order" about the equality of all citizens. And under "Education and Health" there is a reference to Federal aid to education in the states. But the only clear cut statement on the Negro question is the statement regarding lynching.

There is this much to be said about this lynching plank in the platform: lynching as a crime has been condemned in former platforms, but this is the first time that the Republican party has urged that Congress take steps to end it.

As to the pledges that are not included in the platform, we must exact them from the presidential nominee and the other candidates for office.

## ACTION OF THE A. F. OF L.

Of greater importance than anything that has been done for the Negro in all the political conventions that have been held for the part forty years was the action of the American Federation of Labor at Montreal last week in abolishing the color line in its affiliated unions.

This victory came about as every real victory the Negro wins must come about, through pressure. The pressure of the Negro industrial has become so great that the labor unions find themselves compelled to take him in.

Heretofore, the Negro worker has been doubtful as to the wisdom of going into the unions, even when the locals would admit him. All such doubts should now be removed. With the color line thrown down in the unions, colored workers should enter and organize everywhere.

There is no source of more bitter hatred than fear on the part of one class that another class is willing and ready to take the bread out of its mouth by doing at a cheaper wage the work by which it earns that bread. The Negro has long been the object of this very hatred; he was in a position where he couldn't help but be so; however, now that he has the chance to escape it, he should lose no time in doing it.

After all, the Negro must come to recognize that his deepest interests, economic and political, belong with Labor. White labor is seeing clearly that it cannot realize its highest aims in this country without joining to itself Negro labor. On the other hand, Negro labor has for so long been affiliated with the very forces that labor must oppose that it has hardly yet begun to see where it really belongs in the opposite camp.

When white labor and Negro labor both realize that their interests are identical, and act upon that realization, there will come a better day for labor in America and an absolute revolution in the matter of color prejudice.

Quaint Negro Folk-Songs
Both Sacred and Secular

ON THE TRAIL OF NEGRO FOLK-SONGS. By
Dorothy Scarborough. Cambridge: Harvard University
Press. $3.50.
210-747-9051 - Out 10-25

THE BOOK OF AMERICAN NEGRO SPIRITUALS.
Edited, with an introduction, by James Weldon Johnson.
New York: The Viking Press. $3.50.

Reviewed by HERSCHEL BRICKELL

HERE are two noteworthy and invaluable additions to the growing literature of the American folk-song, Miss Scarborough's book offering more entertainment for the general reader, who is interested, as she is, in the songs themselves rather than in their racial or social connotations, than any other of recent publication. Mr. Johnson's volume contains the words and music of sixty-one of the choicest spirituals, the settings harmonized by J. Rosarmond Johnson and Lawrence Brown to a remarkably close approximation of the real choral singing of negroes.

For ten years Miss Scarborough, a Southerner, whose interest in negro folk-songs began when she was an infant, has gone up and down the earth in search of the riches she has packed into her book. Catching fire from her own fervid interest in the subject, dozens of others have helped her, both white and colored.

The result is a collection of rare fascination, not complete, of course. But she, like others in the field, has at least made a brave beginning. A lifetime might easily be spent in running down one folk-song, and a large volume written about its history and its multitudinous variations. That renowned and raffish ballad, "Frankie and Johnnie" of which Miss Scarborough gives several versions, would alone require long years of hard labor for the gathering and telling of its complete story.

She means to go on, she tells us in her afterword, and has already assembled sufficient material for at least one more book. The publication of her first will undoubtedly deluge her with sufficient songs for a half-dozen, at least, as there are few Southerners nearing middle age who cannot add to her store, in addition to giving her variants for the songs she has already published.

Miss Scarborough's own keen interest in her subject, added to her intelligence and her zeal, make her book one of unusual importance and value. Her assistant, Ora Lee Gullidge, has arranged airs for many of the songs—this feature is one Miss Scarborough and the others who follow her may well emphasize, for, after all, a folk-song is a folk-song, and not merely a piece of verse or a sociological document. We understand and appreciate them better when they are sung.

Mr. Johnson's volume supplements, in a sense, Miss Scarborough's, which does not go into the splendor of contribution to American culture contained in the negro spirituals. His introduction needs to be read by all those who have heard the spirituals sung only as humorous songs by white vaudevillians. He speaks of the "miracle" of their birth, and none who has heard the Fisk singers or Paul Robeson sing them will ask that the word be qualified. They are miraculously moving and beautiful.

Among the sixty-one songs are "Deep River," "Go Down, Moses," "All God's Chillun Got Wings," "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot," "Steal Away to Jesus," "Keep A-Inchin' Along," to mention only a few of the better-known. The book is made for use on the piano—it is well-bound and opens flat. I do not know of another at the moment that can compare with it for those who are interested in the spirituals.

Four large and impressive books, with these two, have been printed within the year on Southern and negro folk-songs. We may expect many more, for there has been a widespread awakening to the alluring qualities of negro music, sacred and secular. There is room—the field is large enough for many workers of both races, and the harvest will be an outstanding contribution to the folk-treasure of the human race.

From the Collection Of
Carl
Van Vechten

ALL'S WELL

9

vividly picturesque and expressive, something new and original, something characteristically American, you should send for them. Guion, I hold, is the one real American composer who portrays the spirit of the age, who instinctively understands the negro, who is strong on local color, who has passion and depth and sensibility in everything he does, who is humorous without buffoonery, who is moved as no other composer for the pianoforte by national influences, whose musical utterance results from modern conditions.

And while on the subject of Guion let me utter a very definite and distinct word of disappointment. It is this. My friends of the Viking Press, who produce good books, brought out a Book of Negro Spirituals not so long ago, with a lengthy introduction by James Weldon Johnson. In it were many good songs, well arranged. But not a word of the work of Guion do I find in the book, although David Guion has labored with simplicity and singleness of heart to present the negro and his music. And, mind you, David Guion knows his negro. And because he knows him, knows the unspoiled negro mark you, not the negro who has been changed by contact with the white civilization, knows him at his play and at his work, in his ecstatic moments at church and in his moods of care-free jollity, all that he has done is happily illustrative of his subject. Nor is any of his work commonplace. Indeed, hearing a good singer at work on Guion's spirituals, I get a hint of something very much like austere grandeur.

I spoke of Guion's Alley Tunes just now. They consist of three jolly little descriptive pieces—one, a negro preacher very hortatory with his congregation breaking into 'A-mens'; the second, a darky amusing himself with a mouth harp; the third a fellow whistling to keep up his courage as he walks along a lonely lane, past a graveyard, I should say. Except Schumann, I know of no composer who has made his story as vivid by musical means. There is an extraordinary vitality about the little suite, quite without any technical feats of ornamentation. So, as you may see, I am enthusiastic about Guion and am anxious that you should be too.

Sometimes I have heard Negro

Spirituals sung by white men in camp, but the best of those have been given to the world by my friend David Guion, who came into glowing contact with the best singers and gave again to the world what he heard, as a man inspired.

One merry song with a merry tune must not be overlooked comes to mind, a whimsical piece of work expressly diverting when sung with proper dramatic expression. It is

Norah's Roll Call

Mr. Norah he built an ark,
He did, he did.
Built it out of hick'ry bark
He did, he did.
Animals came in one by one
The chillun they thought it mighty
fine fun
They all went into the ark
For to get out of the rain.

The animals came in two by two
They did, they did.
Old Norah he wondered what ever he
do
He did, he did.
The animals came in three by three
The bear a huggin' the bumble bee
They all went into the ark
For to get out of the rain.

The animals came in four by four
They did, they did.
The elephant's trunk got stuck in the
door
It did, it did.
The animals came in five by five,
Old Mrs. Norah says "Sakes alive"
They all went into the ark
For to get out of the rain.

The animals came in six by six,
They did, they did.
Hyena laughed at the monkey's tricks
He did, he did.
The animals came in seven by seven
Said the ant to the elephant "Who
are you shovin'?"
They all went into the ark
For to get out of the rain.

The animals came in eight by eight
They did, they did.
Old Norah he yelled "Go shut that
gate"
He did, he did.
The animals came in nine by nine
Old Norah he quit countin' and drank
down his wine
They all went into the ark
For to get out of the rain.

And mark this. The part of the negro in perpetuating the folk-song in the range countries is not to be overlooked. Out of eastern Texas came a coll'ud man, to take service as cook, handy man or what not. He brought with him songs, sung them while working or for the refreshment and entertainment of the white folk in the evenings, and they passed on and were accepted, for there is no color line in the musical world. So it was that Frankie, a song that has spread over the country, had its origin, though its negro origin is forgotten. There are many versions and two or three tunes. The version which I give I recently obtained from Mr. Harold Barber, of Dover, Mass., though I first heard the song in this version at a round-up sung by a negro called Dare Devil Dick who was advertised, by his white friend, Booger Red, to throw a steer with his teeth. Incidentally, the way he did the trick was to ride alongside the steer, then leap on to its back and work his way along the creature's neck. Holding to the horns he would bend over, his legs clutching fast to the neck, and catch the animal's upper lip between his teeth and hold fast with a bull dog grip. The steer would soon stop, raise his head with the pain then fall, the negro so managing he was in safety in the space bridged by the two horns.

Frankie

Frankie was a good woman,
Most everybody knows;
Stole a hundred dollars
To buy Albert Breton clothes.
For he was her man, but he done her
wrong.

Frankie went into a saloon
To buy a bucket of beer;
Said "Oh! Mr. Bartender,
Has my Albert been here?
For he was my man, but he done me
wrong."

Bartender says "I can't story."
Bartender says "I can't lie.
Albert was here an hour ago
With a girl named Alice Bly.
For he was your man, but he done
you wrong."

Frankie started down Third street,
Didn't mean no harm;
Looked up in a furnished room
Seen Alice in Albert's arms—

2

FICTION

THE TIME OF MAN

by ELIZABETH MADOX ROBERTS

WITH confidence and sincere conviction, the publishers present Miss Roberts as a novelist of unique and superlative powers, whose work is assured the highest recognition. *The Time of Man* is close to the heart of life. Its incidents have the commonplace reality of all simple existence; its characters, "poor whites" of the Kentucky hills, are akin to Hardy's Wessex folks in their nearness to the soil and their timeless simplicity. But its technique is highly original; its

prose has the fluid delicacy of verse; and there is a compelling force of beauty and a "life-enhancing" quality in the story that will be deeply felt and relished by every receptive reader. Its publication is an event for all adherents of the best in American literature.

B. W. Huebsch, the publisher who recognized in Sherwood Anderson and James Joyce the genius possessed by the few and accepted books by those authors when no other publisher would undertake them, is responsible for the selection of this novel—very different in manner, yet similar in the quality of its inspiration. “I can think of no other writer in America,” says Mr. Huebsch, “who is doing—or could do—anything comparable to this in sensitive insight, in poetic feeling, or in the beauty and grace of its expression.” Miss Roberts is already known for her poetry, published in a volume called *Under the Tree*. She has given years of painstaking effort to her first novel, which will admit her to the small company of true artists in America.

To be published in August [12mo, cloth, 400 pages. $2.50]

3

FICTION

POWER

by LION FEUCHTWANGER

Translated from the German by WILLA and EDWIN MUIR.

WITH the publication of *Power* (Jud Süsz) in Germany Lion Feuchtwanger was hailed as the greatest romantic writer of his day. Under the capable translation of Willa and Edwin Muir it comes to American readers to judge for themselves the enthusiastic praise which has been heaped on this book. Süsz the Jew, the hero of the novel, was an actual character in the early Eighteenth Century in Germany. So strange was his life in his dizzying ascent to power and sudden plunge to the depths, that it has come down through history, a blend of legend and fact. At a time when the Jews were being herded into ghettos and generally contemned, there rose to the position of a potential kingmaker a young money lender, brilliant, attractive, with an insatiable lust for power. Through pandering to the reigning Duke until even his daughter was sacrificed to the dissolute nobleman, Süsz succeeded in swaying the Duke, in ruling over lives, in bringing the court to the depths of moral depravity.

The psychology that made a generation respond to the novels of Dumas is fundamental to all readers of romance, and the allure of such tales of passion as Rigoletto is perennial. *Power* gathers to itself the factors inherent in such tried and seasoned stories, but stands out as a dignified work of art, substantial and three dimensional, that will withstand the years.

To be published in October. [8vo, cloth, 400 pages. $2.50]

4

FICTION

LISTEN, MOON!

by LEONARD CLINE

"THERE is a pirate in the heart of each one of us," claims Leonard Cline, and he proceeds to build a vastly amusing tale around this theme. Higbie Chaf finch, widower, pillar of the church, Latin professor at the University of Johns Hopkins, and social nonentity needed something to bring his pirate out; and Ruth, the ultra modern daughter of an ultra conservative min ister, turned the trick. From then on Higbie cast inhibition to the winds. Aided and abetted by Ruth, by Hilton shurley Moggs, head of the Moggs Foundation for the purvey ing of useless things to worthy people, by Kendrick, star re porter, and by Mrs. Potter, Southern lady of undeniable charms, he starts off on a career of romantic adventures that reach newspaper headlines. Defying the Klan, aiding an elope ment, falling in love, searching for buried treasure, pirating along the peaceful waters of Chesapeake Bay become the every day occupation of the renegade professor.

Leonard Cline, with his originality of imagination and beauty of style, has turned from the powerful tragedy of his first novel, *God Head*, to the humor and adventure of *Listen, Moon!* And all who read will find that what the moon heard was well worth listening to!

*To be published in August*

[12mo, cloth, 320 pages. $2.00]

5

FICTION

THE TWO SISTERS

by H. E. BATES

*With a Foreword by EDWARD GARNETT*

EDWARD GARNETT, dean of English critics, writes of this novel: "Critics of insight will agree that this is a signal example of a rare species. The element of beauty that our utilitarian civi lization pushes out more and more is insistent in *The Two Sisters*." In the characters of Jenny and Tess, Mr. Bates has created a study of temperaments—the one sister pleasure loving, taking life from its surface values, the other casting away child hood and assuming the responsibilities of a woman with the deep introspection and insight of a dreamer. Their life in the brooding malignant household and their love for the man Michael are told with a quiet beauty and art which presages much for a new novelist, twenty years of age, who even now is being recognized in England as an important arrival in the literary field.

It is significant that Mr. Bates is the discovery of Edward Garnett, who was one of the first to recognize and sponsor Joseph Conrad, W. H. Hudson and John Galsworthy. *The Two Sisters* will find for itself an audience of discriminating readers who look within a novel for those literary qualities that make for greatness.

*To be published in September*

6

FICTION

FROM NINE TO NINE

by LEO PERUTZ

*Translated from the German by LILY LORE*

FROM NINE TO NINE
LEO PERUTZ

HERE is a mystery story as baffling as it is fascinating by one of the most original of modern German writers. To describe it is to reveal the strange surprises existing in every chapter of this book, for Mr. Perutz has succeeded in giving each portion of his narrative an O. Henry twist, leaving the reader bewildered yet believing. *From Nine to Nine* is far more than a mystery story. It has in it the added attractions of keen characterization, a power of story telling and a remarkable manner of approach.

Demba, the Viennese student, moves through a series of incidents leaving astonishment in his wake. From the moment that he steps into the story his life seems a paradox. He is starving yet will not eat; he craves money yet refuses to take it by honorable means; he loves yet cannot act; he commits the most irrational deeds with the most perfect rationality. There is a brooding mystery about him that defies analysis until the middle of the book and then upsets all previous clues and theories by the very last paragraph. There is something new under the sun and every lover of the bizarre and novel will find it in *From Nine to Nine*.

To be published in August

[12mo, cloth, 256 pages. $2.00]

7

BIOGRAPHY

MOHAMMED

by R. F. DIBBLE

R. F. Dibble has found, in the character of Mohammed, a perfect opportunity for an informal biography. Piercing the mists of legend which envelop the great religious leader, he has attempted to show what manner of man Mohammed actually was. Mr. Dibble's freshness of manner and biographical talent which were so admirably revealed in his former volumes and in his articles in The American Mercury and other magazines, have now been applied with even greater success to a larger subject.

The story begins with a vivid description of Arabia in about the year 570. The customs, the politics, the religions, the wars, the manners of these people are set forth in a lucid and absorbing style. With the birth of Mohammed in the fortunate city of Mecca the author launches into a swiftly moving narrative of the prophet's struggle against tremendous odds, of his ruses of statesmanship, of his wives and loves, of his brilliance and power, and finally of his death and the far-reaching influence of his teachings. The volume is filled with the colorful legends which surround the name of Mohammed, but he is treated as a flesh and blood character, not as a legendary hero. Mr. Dibble does not go into creeds or doctrines. His interest is in the man and his deeds, in Mohammed rather than in Mohammedanism.

Few men have lived so fully and so absorbingly as did Mohammed and few have had as entertaining a biographer as R. F. Dibble.

[8vo, cloth, 250 pages. Decorative end papers. $3.00]

8

MUSIC

THE SECOND BOOK OF
NEGRO SPIRITUALS

Edited with an introduction by JAMES WELDON JOHNSON,
With musical arrangements by J. ROSAMOND JOHNSON.

ENDORSED by distinguished people from every walk of life *The Book of American Negro Spirituals* was one of the outstanding successes of the past year in the book and music worlds. Sinclair Lewis, Carl Van Vechten, Carl Sandburg, Walter Damrosch, John Haynes Holmes were among the many who felt the spiritual was America's greatest and most individual contribution to art and that the faithful arrangements contained in this book set them down for all time as a landmark in music.

The first volume was a selection of the best known songs. The present volume goes on to many of the lesser known, but equally fine spirituals, most of which have never been set down before.

James Weldon Johnson has contributed another illuminating introduction carrying on the work which he began so admirably in introducing these songs to the American public. Among the songs contained in the new volume are: Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child; Walk Together Children; I Want God's Heab'n To Be Mine; Zekiel Saw De Wheel; A Little Talk Wid Jesus Makes it Right; Daniel Saw De Stone; Same Train; I Want To Die Easy When I Die; Walk Down De Lane; Members, Don't Get Weary.

To be published in September

[Uniform with first volume. 4to, cloth, 192 pages. $3.50]

9

BELLES-LETTRES

GAUTIER and the Romantics

by JOHN GARBER PALACHE

A ROSE-COLOURED waistcoat, at the opening of "Hernani," was the battle flag of the Romantic Movement in France—and Théophile Gautier was its triumphant wearer. In this genial book Mr. Palache surveys the life of Gautier in its two-fold significance: his advocacy of Art for Art's Sake, and his share in the literary life of the period between the two French Empires. Into his circle of acquaintances moved the celebrities and eccentrics of a brilliant era: Hugo, Balzac, Baudelaire—who dyed his hair green and said that his favorite dish was the brain of a baby; the pathetic Gérard de Nerval, parading in front of the Opera with a pet lobster on a string; George Sand, with her constancy to the inconstant god of love; Musset, the enfant du siècle; Turgenev, the gentlest and best-loved of writers; Mérimée, Flaubert, the brothers Goncourt, the women of the salons, and the gallant company at the Magny dinners. Mr. Palache has embodied all this in anecdotal fashion, not neglecting to include pertinent criticism and original comment on the meaning and trend of these diverse literary currents. His book fills another gap in the English estimate of French letters: it carries on the spirit of his earlier work, *Four Novelists of the Old Régime*, with which he was introduced as an American critic of fresh and original talents. Gautier is printed in the same attractive format as *Four Novelists*.

To be published in October

[8vo, cloth, 250 pages, Illustrated, $3.00]

By the same author:
FOUR NOVELISTS OF THE OLD RÉGIME ($3.00)

10

BELLES-LETTRES

TRANSITION:
Essays on Contemporary Literature

by EDWIN MUIR

THE most puzzling and interesting figures of contemporary English letters, writers who really count in the forward march of literature, are interpreted in these essays: James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, Lytton Strachey and a half-dozen others equally important. Edwin Muir belongs to no school; he brings to his criticism an independent mind, a rich knowledge of the past, and a spirit intensely modern. Since the publication of *Latitudes*, his earlier volume, he has been recognized as the most acute and most stimulating of the younger English men of letters; his criticism is a joy to all lovers of fine writing and original thinking.

The essays include:

Introductory: The Zeit Geist

James Joyce

D. H. Lawrence

Virginia Woolf

Stephen Hudson

Aldous Huxley

Lytton Strachey

T. S. Eliot

Edith Sitwell

Robert Graves

Contemporary Poetry

Contemporary Fiction

To be published in September [12mo, cloth, 200 pages. $2.00]

11

REPRINTS

THE CONTINENTAL LIBRARY

THIS library, consisting of classics of modern Continental literature, is under the general editorship of Ernest Boyd, who contributes a preface to each volume. The volumes are handsomely bound and well printed. 8vo., cloth stamped in gold, stained tops. $2.50 each.

THE FOOL IN CHRIST:
Emanuel Quint

by GERHART HAUPTMANN

THE supreme embodiment of Christ in modern literature—a powerful reply, in fictional form, to the questions: “What would Christ do if He were to come into the world today?” and “What would the world do to a Christ today?” “That it contains the greatest and most fruitful suggestions will be denied only by one who no longer knows how to feel the pulsation of his time and who is not even accustomed to look into his better self.”—*Boston Transcript*. Already published.

OTHER TITLES ARE:

SANINE by MICHAEL ARTZIBASHEV

THE CONFESSION OF A FOOL by AUGUST STRINDBERG

FIVE ORIENTAL TALES by COMTE DE GOBINEAU

12

JUVENILE

MAIDA'S LITTLE SCHOOL

by INEZ HAYNES IRWIN

THE many young readers of Maida's Little Shop and Maida's Little House, books which have become household classics for children, have been eagerly awaiting this latest volume of the adventures of Maida and her friends. This new book tells of a Winter in the country where the Big Eight, the name by which Maida and her seven little friends go, attend a new kind of school where everything they learn is an adventure of the most thrilling sort. A lovable Frenchman, a charming young authoress, and an attractive young explorer bring new and happy experiences into their lives. Legends of pirates, arrows carved on rocks, treasures buried in old boxes lead them on to new adventures. And with it all come the country Winter sports of all descriptions, a country Autumn Hallow-een, a country Winter Thanksgiving and Christmas, ending with a huge joke on April Fools' Day.

At the end Maida and her friends are mighty sorry that the wonderful Winter is all over, but no sorrier than her young readers will be. However, Mrs. Irwin has promised a new Maida book to follow this one and to be called "Maida's Little Island."

*To be published in August*

[12mo, cloth, illustrated with a Frontispiece, 250 pages. $1.50]

Uniform with this Volume: "MAIDA'S LITTLE SHOP"
AND "MAIDA'S LITTLE HOUSE." $1.50 EACH.

13

JUVENILE

MEDDLESOME MATTY
and Other Poems for Infant Minds

by JANE and ANNE TAYLOR

With an introduction by EDITH SITWELL

Illustrated in four colors by WYNDHAM PAYNE

OVER a hundred years ago the Misses Taylor, scions of a literary and highly moral family, wrote a slim volume of verse of an extremely moral nature. They pointed out in delicate, crinoline manner the awful fates awaiting the youthful trans-gressor and the lofty ideals which the best of children should strive for. Where Hilaire Belloc in his "Cautionary Tales for Children" turned to gentle burlesque, these ladylike authoresses follow out their verses with all the seriousness and highminded-ness of two charming uplifters. The result is a volume of sheer delight—to be chuckled at, to be memorized and in some odd ingratiating way to be cherished as a memento of a bygone day.

The book itself is superbly illustrated with fifty sketches in four colors and bound in decorative boards. In an intro-duction Edith Sitwell tells all she knows about these truly Christian souls whose gentle philosophy may be summed up in their own words:

"Tis better to have a sweet smile on one's face,
Than to wear a fine frock with an elegant lace;
For the good-natured girl is loved best in the main,
If her dress is but decent, though ever so plain."

[8vo, decorated boards, 64 pages, illustrated. $1.75]

14

POETRY

## SATIRICAL POEMS

by SIEGFRIED SASSOON

THE striking word, the phrase that illuminates a whole situation with ironic meaning, are the peculiar gift of Siegfried Sassoon, who holds a high and incontestable place in modern poetry. This volume is his first since 1919. It contains his best work in the satirical vein—the mockery of human inconsistencies—done with characteristic independence of spirit, an acute insight, and the knack of clothing the pungent thought in finely-fashioned dress. His ideas and his suave manner of expression touch the deep-seated sense of irony in every reader; they titillate the intelligence and make it chuckle inwardly.

To be published in October.
[12mo, boards, 64 pages. $1.50]

## TWO LIVES

by WILLIAM ELLERY LEONARD

"AN authentic work of genius." "One of the most extraordinary compositions in American literature." "A masterpiece." "Tremendously important." "The best poem that has ever come out of America." "The most remarkable poem produced in America in this generation." "Deserves a place among the poetic tragedies of all time." These are just a few of the hundreds of tributes paid by discriminating critics in America and Europe to a poem which belongs to every cultured America. Fifth printing.
Already published.

[12mo, cloth, 110 pages, $2.00]

15

## RECENT AND OUTSTANDING BOOKS

LOLLY WILLOWES

OR THE LOVING HUNTSMAN

by SYLVIA TOWNSEND WARNER [$2.00]

THE ORIGIN OF THE NEXT WAR

by JOHN BAKELESS [$2.50]

THE NEW AGE OF FAITH

by JOHN LANGDON-DAVIES [$2.50]

THE SONG OF SONGS

by HERMANN SUDEMRANN [$2.50]

A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN

by JAMES JOYCE [$2.00]

A STORY TELLER'S STORY

by SHERWOOD ANDERSON [$3.00]

DOLLAR DIPLOMACY

by SCOTT NEARING and JOSEPH FREEMAN [$2.50]

THE ISLAND OF THE GREAT MOTHER

by GERHART HAUPTMANN [$2.50]

THE MASTERS OF MODERN ART

by WALTER PACH [$3.50]

AMERICAN FOREIGN INVESTMENTS

by ROBERT W. DUNN [$5.00]

[$3.50]

ord, he established the second best ever made for the ascent of the mountain and broke the descending record of one hour and twenty-nine minutes by forty-one minutes. Last June he captured first place in the five thousand meter race at the Rocky Mountain Olympic tryouts held in Denver. For this feat he received a gold medal. Then, after being forced to hitch-hike his way across the continent to Boston, he participated in the final Olympic trials there, though failing to place. In spite of working from six to eight hours every day on the side he is making a splendid record in college.

Effie, the fourth child, graduated from the Colorado Springs High School with honors at the age of seventeen, winning the Henry Sachs Scholarship to Colorado College. During her high school career she won first honors in a chemistry essay contest. In the all-state contest she won second honors, for which she received a set of valuable books. She too is a sophomore at Colorado College and is the only colored girl in that institution.

Tandy, the fifth child, graduated from high school at seventeen with the highest honors of any of the Stroud children. He too won a scholarship to Colorado College; but, since he preferred to attend a race institution, he is now a freshman at Howard University, Washington, D. C. While in high school, he won every cross-country race in which he participated, establishing a new record for the course. For this feat he received a gold medal. He won the championship of the South Central League in the mile-run and was placed third in that event at the Boulder relays and State Meet. He is the proud possessor of three beautiful medals and a sweater, as the result of his athletic work. He was also a member of the football squad during his high school days, even though he was the youngest and one of the smallest boys in his class.

Jack, the fifth child, a lad of fifteen, is now a sophomore in high school. He graduated from grade school with the highest scholastic average of his class. James, a boy of thirteen, and Lulu, a

girl of twelve, are both in the junior high school. Number Nine, a girl of nine years, is in the fifth grade. In the last report she secured the highest scholastic average in the entire school of two hundred and fifty pupils, making a perfect record of eleven A's in eleven subjects.

Rosa Mae, a girl of seven, is in the second grade. She and Number Nine in their kindergarten days made the highest scores of all the children in the town in a city-wide intelligence test. Bobbie, a girl of four, is the baby and has not yet entered school.

This is the record that Lulu Magee and Dolphus Stroud have established. In their twenty-five years of married life they have never been separated from each other for as much as seven continuous days.

Please give me space in your paper for this account, as it might prove helpful to some young couple who are now struggling through some of the difficulties which my husband and I have conquered.

Lulu, Tandy and Kimbal and her husband.

# Negro Authors and White Publishers

By JAMES WELDON JOHNSON

NEGRO writers, like all writing folks, have many things to complain about. Writers have always felt and many of them have plainly said that the world did not fully appreciate their work. This attitude has seldom been justified. The great or good writers who have not been acknowl-

edged as such by the generation in which they lived are rare. And where such acknowledgement has not been accorded by the generations which touched an author's life, posterity has hardly ever revoked the unfavorable judgment.

Nevertheless, writers have many

good reasons for complaining; for their lot is a hard one. And it may be that Negro writers have some special good reasons for complaining; I am not sure that at the present time this is so. However that may be, there is one complaint that some younger Negro writers are uttering with greater and greater in-

228

THE CRISIS

# The Strouds Celebrate Their Silver Wedding

By MRS. LULU STROUD

What do we mean when we say that American Negroes are advancing? What becomes of the families who leave the South for the freer North? Here is one concrete answer written for THE CRISIS by a black mother.

The couple are the parents of eleven children, all living, six of whom are girls and five boys. Kimbal Stroud, the eldest, who is now Mrs. Goffman and the mother of two boys, graduated from the Colorado Springs High School at the age of seventeen. She has a good husband, a modern two-story home and a motor car. Albert, the second child, who graduated from high school at the age of nineteen, is now operating a trucking business in Maywood, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago.

Dolphus, the third child, graduated from high school with honors at the age of seventeen, winning a scholarship to Colorado College. In addition to being the only Negro man student attending that institution at the present time, he has the highest scholastic average of all the men of the sophomore class. He has also won some distinction in athletics. Some time ago he participated in the Cheyenne Mountain Marathon, sponsored by Spencer Penrose, Colorado multi-millionaire, and owner of the Broadmoor Hotel. Dolphus captured eighth place in that event, the first seven places going to Zuni and Hopi Indians from Arizona and New Mexico. Later, while training for the Rocky Mountain Olympic tryouts, he established a new record for the round trip to the summit of Pike's Peak. While making this rec-

MR. AND MRS. D. K. STROUD of Colorado Springs, Colorado, recently celebrated their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary quietly at their home. On March the thirtieth, nineteen hundred four, in Chandler, Oklahoma, Lulu Magee, 22 years of age, of Alton, Illinois and Dolphus Stroud, thirty-two, of Navarro County, Texas, were united in matrimony by the Reveterd J. B. F. Westbrooks, pastor of the Sweet Home Baptist Church. For four years prior to his marriage, Mr. Stroud had been a teacher in the public schools of Lincoln County, Oklahoma. For six additional years he continued in this capacity, during which time four children were born to him and Mrs. Stroud. Later, they migrated to Colorado Springs, Colorado, where they have remained for the past nineteen years, and where Mr. Stroud conducts a trucking business.

The Stroud Family
Standing: Jack, Number Nine, Dolphus, Effie.
Sitting: James, Bobbie, the Father, Rosa Mae, the Mother.

July, 1929

227

["sistance which I do not think is based on the facts and which reacts to the injury of the writers uttering it. This complaint is: that the leading white publishers have set a standard which Negro writers must conform to or go unpublished; that this standard calls only for books depicting the Negro in a manner which tends to degrade him in the eyes of the world; that only books about the so-called lower types of Negroes and lower phases of Negro life find consideration and acceptance.", "Now, in the first place, there is a certain snobbishness in terming the less literate and less sophisticated, the more simple and more primitive classes of Negroes as \"lower\". At least as literary material, they are higher. They have greater dramatic and artistic potentialities for the writer than the so-called higher classes, who so closely resemble the bourgeois white classes. The vicious and criminal elements—and we must admit that even in our own race there are such elements—are rightly termed \"lower\", but even they have more accessible dramatic values than the ordinary, respectable middle-class element. It takes nothing less than supreme genius to make middle-class society, black or white, interesting—to say nothing of making it dramatic.", "But I am jotting down this brief es-\nsay with the prime purpose of pointing\nout the dangers, especially to young\nwriters, in complaining that publish-\ners refuse to consider their work be-\ncause it portrays Negro life on too high\na level. When a writer begins to say\nand then believe that the reason why\nhe cannot get published is because his\nwork is *too good* he is in a bad way.\nThis is the way that leads to making\na fetish of failure. It is a too easy\nexplanation of the lack of accomplish-\nment. It is this \"superior work—sor-", "did publishers—low brow public” com-\nplex that gives rise to the numerous\nsmall coteries of unsuccessful writers,\nwhite as well as colored; the chief\nfunction of the members of these co-\nteries being the mutual admiration of\neach other’s unpublished manuscripts.\nThis attitude brings its adherents to a\nposition of pathetic futility or ludicrous\nsuperiority.", "Within these seven or eight years of\nliterary florescence I doubt that any\nfirst class publisher has turned down\nfirst rate work by any Negro writer on\nthe ground that it was *not on a low\nenough level*. Now, suppose we look\nat the actual facts as shown by the\nbooks published in these recent years\nby leading publishers. Let us first\ntake fiction and list the books depicting\nNegro life on the \"upper\" levels or\nshedding a favorable light on the race\nthat have been published:", "There Is Confusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Captain Floyd and Cuba Libre

THE writing of history is curious business. It is not simply "lies agreed upon" that makes the part of the American Negro in history unknown or forgotten; it is more often a little matter of emphasis. One does not talk of Estevanico simply because most historians fail to mention that this black man was the discoverer of the Southwest United States. They do not deny it; they merely forget it. One does not say that the 5th of March, commemorating the death of Crispus Attucks, was the first national American holiday. It is true, but, says the average historian, what of it? And so the part which Negroes, and American Negroes, played in the freeing of Cuba from the domination of Spain was a matter quite well-known at the time, but today almost forgotten.

It was not only Maceo and his dark fellows in the field that freed Cuba. There were Negroes in America that helped with arms and men, and foremost among them was Captain James W. Floyd of Jacksonville, Florida.

There were during the Cuban revolt Cuban clubs with colored members in New York, Chicago, in all Southern cities, and particularly in the cities of Florida, like Tampa, Jacksonville and Key West. They contributed 10% of their wages for years to the Revolutionary Fund. Their leader for a long time was José Martí, who, at the end of the 10-years' war, took refuge in New York. He was killed in 1895. Palma, then teaching a school in New York State, succeeded Martí as the American representative and became active in smuggling arms from America to the Revolutionists. There was much treason, bribery and double-crossing in this work, and many persons and boats took part, but the success of the whole smuggling campaign depended largely on Captain James W. Floyd.

An ocean-going tug, called the "Dauntless", was purchased by the Cuban Junta from the Brunswick Navigation Company for $30,000 in 1896. It was a new and fine boat, measuring 125 feet, and capable of making 13 knots an hour.

James W. Floyd, a colored Jacksonville pilot, with a Master's license, was made mate of the "Dauntless" with the understanding that the white Captain, who was in the tug when she was purchased, should be in command until he found the place too dangerous. In that case, Floyd was to become Captain. As a matter of fact, the white Captain made only two voyages. After that, Floyd became Captain, and from

> This is a story of the Cuban Revolution, showing that Cuba gained her freedom, not simply by the leadership and help of her Negro citizens, but also by the cooperation of an American Negro sea Captain.

Captain Floyd and his Cuban medals.

that time until war was declared by the United States against Spain, the "Dauntless" and Captain Floyd were the chief means of furnishing the Cuban revolutionists with arms and ammunition. The "Dauntless" made in all eleven landings of arms and men in Cuba without the loss of a man or rifle.

In the official histories of the Americans on the Spanish War, the name of Captain Floyd is not mentioned, but Cuba never forgot him, and whenever you hear about what the "Dauntless" did for Cuban freedom, remember that Floyd was its Captain.

The first voyage of the "Dauntless" was to take Fred Funston and a load of arms from Florida to Cuba. On this voyage Floyd was mate. The "Dauntless" was lying at the landing below the railroad bridge at Woodbine on the Satilla River under a full head of steam. A tug gave her an extra supply of coal and at sunrise they were off for Cuba. The Spanish Government, suspecting an expedition, had protested at Washington, but while Government agents were watching at Charleston and Jacksonville, the "Dauntless" left from Woodbine, August 14th, and three days later they dodged a Spanish gunboat and landed

a Cuban General and his men, together with Funston and a load of arms ashore 12 miles east of Nuevitas, Cuba. Within a week the "Dauntless" landed three such cargoes and then headed for Key West and Brunswick, Ga., with Floyd as captain.

She was promptly seized by the Custom House authorities at Brunswick, but freed because no evidence was submitted to the court. In fact, the local officials were in sympathy with the Cuban revolution.

On October 26th, the "Dauntless" again landed a cargo of men and arms, which had been brought down by special train, east of Cienfuegos. The Government at Washington was much incensed at this breaking of the Neutrality Laws and the revenue cutters began to get busy. The "Dauntless" was ostensibly sold and used for a while as a tow-boat between Jacksonville and the mouth of the St. John's river; but, of course, the Cubans had reserved the right to buy her back.

Early in 1897, the "Dauntless" took over a cargo which another boat had failed to land. In spite of many misaps, the cargo was landed on the morning of January 3rd near Cape Corrientes, where the mulatto Maceo was leading the Revolutionists. Another cargo with General Nunez and twenty men and arms were landed May 21st, ten miles east of Nuevitas. In all these cases the "Dauntless" innocently left Florida without cargo and returned without cargo, so that it was difficult to prove that she had been to Cuba.

Later, two carloads of arms and ammunition were secretly shipped down to Fort Lauderdale near Miami, put on a coaster and transferred to the "Dauntless" at sea. They were chased by a third-class cruiser named the Marblehead. The confidential navigator on board the coaster disagreed with Floyd as to what vessel it was. Floyd advised running for the Bahama banks, but the officials on the tug waited until it was too late. Nevertheless, the "Dauntless" gave her a chase and the Commander informed Washington that he had to put on full steam in order to overhaul it. Afterward, the government took measurements of the "Dauntless" in order to discover the secret of her speed.

When the "Dauntless" was captured, a Lieutenant boarded her and called for the Captain. Floyd stepped forward and asserted that he was in search of a wreck, and that he had no idea the cruiser was pursuing until she began to drop shells.

230

THE CRISIS

HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY, INC.
PUBLISHERS

383 MADISON AVENUE, NEW YORK

Telephone: ELdorado 5-7920
Cable Address: Harbrace, New York

May 26, 1931

If you have already read at least part of James Weldon Johnson's THE BOOK OF AMERICAN NEGRO POETRY which we sent you a short time ago along with a copy of Sterling Brown's OUTLINE FOR THE STUDY OF THE POETRY OF AMERICAN NEGROES, you will be especially interested in what the reviewers have been saying about this anthology. The first quotation is from Ben Ray Redman's column in the "New York Herald Tribune" and the second is from the "Saturday Review of Literature" (William Rose Benét).

"It is one of the most satisfactory and richest anthologies that I have encountered in a long time."

"Mr. Johnson has made his selections with the taste of a true poet and a thorough knowledge of the extant poetry of his race. It is good to have so characteristically American a volume as this."

It would interest us very much indeed to know your own opinion of this revision of a standard anthology. Won't you use the enclosed card to write us about it?

In addition to that we hope that you will find it possible to use this book with the outline pamphlet as a basic text in one or more of your classes. In order that it might be possible for each of your students to be required to have a copy, we have set a price of $1.60 upon the text edition of THE BOOK OF AMERICAN NEGRO POETRY. The pamphlet sells for $.50. If you can at this time tell us about how many copies of this book will be required for your classes next year, we should appreciate very much indeed having this information as soon as possible.

Very truly yours,

Harcourt, Brace and Company

FWR:MP

KDKA BOOKWORM - JULY 3 1931

Good afternoon radio friends -- Perhaps most of our Pittsburgh know that during this week, the Twenty-second Annual Conference of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People has been in session in Pittsburgh. In view of this fact, it seems fitting that we should devote a few minutes of this afternoon to the consideration of the literary work which has been accomplished by our colored brethren.

With the exception of one book all those to be mentioned during this period today are from the pens of colored writers, and we believe that our radio audience, regardless of color, will enjoy reading these books, and will not only enjoy them, but be greatly profited by such reading.

The exception is a book by Mary White Ovington, called PORTRAITS IN COLOR, a book in which is found sketches of the outstanding persons of the colored race who have achieved success in business, in the professions, and in art. We do not have time to mention the names of these outstanding members of the colored race, but the stories are interesting, and they will be very enlightening to many who have not studied the problems of the negro.

Miss Ovington is chairman of the board of directors of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and naturally is in a position to speak with authority regarding those persons whose lives have been sketched in this book. The title is PORTRAITS IN COLOR, by Mary White Ovington, and it is published by The Viking Press.

Incidentally we learn that Miss Ovington will have a new book in August called ZEKE. This is the story of a boy who overcame

- 2 -

great difficulties. It is written especially for boys between
the ages of ten and fourteen years.

When we speak of the negro and his accomplishments in literature,
our minds at once turn to Paul Laurence Dunbar, whose beautiful
songs have charmed English speaking people everywhere. If you
have not in your library a volume of Dunbar's poems, we suggest
that you add THE COMPLETE POEMS OF PAUL LAURENCE DUNBAR, a volume
of some three hundred pages, published by Dodd, Mead and Company.
In this volume you will find some of the most beautiful verse in
the negro dialect.

The colored writers have not confined themselves to the homey
type of poetry which marks the work of Paul Laurence Dunbar. We
find a more modern trend in a volume by Langston Hughes called
THE WEARY BLUES. Hughes is one of the younger poets who is ra-
pidly making an name for himself. This little volume of poems
has gone into a number of printings, which indicates its popu-
larity with the reading public.

Another prominent negro writer, James Weldon Johnson, has com-
piled an anthology of negro poetry which is intensely interesting.
This book was originally published in 1922, but has just been
revised and brought up-to-date. There is an essay on "Negro Cre-
ative Genius" by James Weldon Johnson, and selected poems from
the works of Paul Laurence Dunbar, James Edwin Campbell, James
David Corrothers, Daniel Webster Davis, William H. A. Moore, W.E.
Burghardt DuBois, who spoke to you from this station yesterday,
George Marion McClellan, and a great many others. In fact there
are forty poets represented in this anthology including the editor

- 3 -

Mr. Johnson.

Among the new poets added since the first edition are: Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, Sterling A. Brown, Helen Johnson, Arna Bontemps, Frank Horne, Waring Cuney, Lucy Ariel Williams, and Gwendolyn Bennett.

In the Appendix is a suggested list of books for (collateral) reading. This is another book which should grace the library table of every reader who wishes to be well informed. The student of poetry can hardly count his list of books complete without including this anthology of poetry. The title is THE BOOK OF AMERICAN NEGRO POETRY, edited by James Weldon Johnson and published by Harcourt, Brace, and Company.

The work of the negro writers has not been confined to poetry, and a shining example of fiction is found in the book called, PLUM BUN by Jessie Redmond Fauset. This is a story based on the subject of color. The heroine was so fair that she passed easily for a girl of white blood. The situations and complications which she was forced to meet furnish material for a word picture of life which you will enjoy reading. The name of this book is PLUM BUN by Jessie Redmond Fauset, published by the Frederick A. Stokes Company. You may have heard Miss Fauset speak yesterday. She was here in the station, and we found her to be a very charming woman.

Another work of fiction by a colored writer of note is a book called GOD SENDS SUNDAY, by Arna Bontemps. This is a story of that portion of our history when the negro supplied most of our jockies. The chief character is one of these jockies, and the story por-

- 4 -

trays the popularity he enjoyed with the members of the opposite sex. This is a story of thenineties, the period which gave us the St. Louis Blues.

To explain the title is somewhat difficult as it is not mentioned throughout the story. We are told however that if the reader is able to get into the spirit of the story, he will understand how the title was suggested. The title of this book is GOD SENDS SUNDAY. It is written by Arna Bontemps, published by Harcourt, Brace and Company.

Among the examples of more serious writing is, WHAT THE NEGRO THINKS by Robert Russa Moton. Dr. Moton will be recognized by most of our listeners as the Principal of Tuskegee Institute and the successor to Booker T. Washington as the recognized leader of his people.

Dr. Moton has attempted to tell in his candid, straight-forward way, just what are the mental processes of the negro. He tries to indicate what the negro thinks when he contemplates the attitude of the average white man in America toward his race. This is a very frank discussion of the negro's capabilities and shortcomings. We know of no one better qualified to make such an appraisement, and we recommend that everyone who has any idea of the importance of the negro problem should study this book. That the welfare of the negro is one of our outstanding national questions cannot be denied when it is realized that of every ten persons in the United States, one is a member of the colored race.

Dr. Moton writes forcibly and with understanding, and his statements show deep thought and deliberate judgment.

- 5 -

We have been speaking of a book called WHAT THE NEGRO THINKS, by Robert Russa Moton. This book is published by Doubleday Doran and Company.

We have already mentioned one of the books of James Weldon Johnson, but we are forced to recognize another of his books as an outstanding contribution to the historical literature of our country. This book is called BLACK MANHATTAN. It is the story of the negro in New York. Beginning with the founding of New Amsterdam when the negro population was eleven persons, the author takes us through the early history of our country -- the days of slavery -- the war between the states -- the migration to Harlem, and the development of this great negro center in New York City. A very interesting chapter is the one which refers to the negro as the maker of the nation's songs.

We also find considerable space devoted to the success of the negro on the dramatic stage. Mr. Johnson has combined his thirty years of experience in New York with the results of his painstaking research, and his intimate knowledge of negro traditions. The result is a remarkably interesting and valuable book. This book is called BLACK MANHATTAN, and is published by Alfred A. Knopf.

We can hardly pass by the works of James Weldon Johnson without mention of his new book under the title GOD'S TROMBONES. This title covers a series of seven negro sermons in verse with illustrations of the most modern type of Aaron Douglas. This book which has had a number of printings will make a very handsome gift book. It is published by The Viking Press. The title is GOD'S TROMBONES, by James Weldon Johnson.

- 6 -

One of the most brilliant of the young negroes of today is Walter White, and a particularly interesting book from his pen has been published under the title, ROPE AND FAGGOT, a Biography of Judge Lynch. Undoubtedly the subject of Lynch Law has been uppermost in the thoughts of most persons who have given any serious attention to the problems concerning the negro race.

Mr. White's book should be of great assistance in clarifying the issues which surround this problem. We suggest that this book be given a careful reading. The subject is ROPE AND FAGGOT by Walter White. It is published by Alfred A. Knopf.

Just one more mention this afternoon and we conclude our list of books. THE NEW NEGRO by Alain Locke is a collection of stories by the foremost negro writers of today. This is a book of considerable size and is divided into two parts called, "THE Negro Renaissance", and "The New Negro in a New World". It is opened with an article by Alain Locke on "The New Negro" followed by "Negro Art and America" by Albert C. Barnes, followed by "The Negro in American Literature", by William Stanley Braithwaite. Under the title, "Negro Youth S peaks", we find examples of fiction, poetry, drama, music and history, these making up the first part of the book.

The second part which is called "The New Negro in a New World", contains five subheads as follows: "The Negro Pioneers, The New Frontage of American Life, The New Scene, The Negro and the American Tradition, and Worlds of Color." This book is handsomely printed with many unusual illustrations. The production of such a book as this should be abundant proof that the negro race has

- 7 -

made great progress in the realms of literature and art. This
book is called, THE NEW NEGRO, edited by Alain Locke, published
by Albert and Charles Boni.

We have tried to crowd as many outstanding books into our period
today as it would hold. All of these books with the exception
of Miss Ovington's PORTRAITS IN COLOR have been written by col-
ored writers, and they are only a few of the most important con-
tributions to literature by the colored race.

PUBLISHERS

383 MADISON AVENUE, NEW YORK

Telephone: ELdorado 5-3610

Concerning . . . .

Dunbar

Campbell

Corrothers

Davis

Moore

Du Bois

McClellan

Braithwaite

Margetson

Johnson (J.W.)

Holloway

Johnson (F.)

Jones (E.S.)

Brawley

Hill

Rogers

Carmichael

Nelson

McKay

Johnson (G.D.)

Cotter

Dandridge

Jamison

Dett

Johnson (C.B.)

Jones (J.H.)

Bohanan

Fauset

Shackelford

Watkins

Spencer

Cullen

Hughes

Bennett

Brown

Bontemps

Horne

Johnson (H.)

Cuney

Williams

James Weldon Johnson's

Who are the outstanding Negro poets? What part
has each played in the development of American
literature?

These are questions any Negro student should be
able to discuss. Surely the subject of Negro
poets and the significance of their work has
reached the degree of importance entitling it
to special study.

THE BOOK OF AMERICAN NEGRO POETRY, edited by James Weldon Johnson, is the one book which encompasses the subject. In it the 40 poets listed at the left are represented by 185 poems. The price of the book is only $1.60.

Mr. Johnson's essay, *The Negro's Creative Genius*, provides historical background and a general survey of the Negro's artistic contribution to America. Mr. Johnson has also furnished critical as well as biographical notes to introduce each poet.

Another teaching aid is Professor Sterling Brown's
*Study Outline* - 52 pages of questions, critical
suggestions, topics, and assignments. The net
price of the outline is 50¢.

THE BOOK OF AMERICAN NEGRO POETRY offers an opportunity to give your freshmen and sophomores an understanding of a vital, increasingly important phase of American literature - the phase that they should know and enjoy best.

Do you know this book? Do you wish to consider it
for text use in your classes? A reply card is en-
closed.

Very truly yours

Harcourt, Brace and Company

56335

PUBLISHERS

130 NATIONWIDE AVENUE, NEW YORK

Stephen B. Johnson
Clerk-Hall/Post Office Box

### Jean Babin Johnson's THE BOOK OF AMERICAN HERO POETRY

(200 pages. Text Bittles, $1.40)

affords a sense of appreciating the boys and girls in your school with the finest literature produced by members of their own ranks, poetry that must be looked upon not only as part of a distinctive racial heritage but as a powerful contribution to the common American cultural store. It is a volume which each of them should become increasingly proud to own. We suggest that you require it as an adopted text in one of your classes.

THE BOOK OF AMERICAN HERO POETRY has received high praise from both reviewers and teachers. We quote:

> "I find it not only the most complete and comprehensive work of the kind but also a scholarly, highly selective and authoritative text worthy of consideration by teachers of Negro literature, and so interesting in its selections that students could not but be highly interested by the pages."

> —Charles B. Bunting, Lincoln University (Pa.)

> "In other single volumes so deeply discloses the soul of the Negro race." —The Christian Century

> "It is one of the most satisfactory and richly thoughtful books that I have encountered in a long time."

> —Ben Bajaj, New York City

For textbook use of the book it will help to have the pamphlet, all OUTLINE FOR THE STUDY OF THE POETRY OF AMERICAN HEROES, prepared by Charles B. Bunting of Howard University. The Quarterly Critical Support, Chapters and Assignments will make classroom teaching of the poetry profitable and practical. This pamphlet of 82 pages, paper-covered, sells for fifty cents.

If you do not have a copy of THE BOOK OF AMERICAN HERO POETRY but think that there is a fair chance of the subject being a bestseller in your classes, we should like to send you a selection copy. We are the judges of the fair chance. If you do not believe it will be ordered for use in your classes, but would like a copy of your own, please send us your check or money order for $1.44 and we will send you one complimentary prepaying. We enclose a business card.

Very truly yours,

Harcourt, Brace and Company

J-1335