We hear so much about what the Negro hopes to receive
from America, that we are led to think of him always as a beggar,
a naked pauper at our gates. The Negro is rich, he is endowed.
He has already given much to America, and he has still more precious
gifts to give and in larger abundance.

I was over what the Negro has contributed towards the
material and political development of the country, what he has
given in sweat and toil and blood to help make this a great nation -
and not because that contribution has been negligible or unim-
portant, but because it has been the common contribution of all
the groups in America. What I wish to do is to call attention to
the Negro's unique contribution, the thing which he has given and
will give more freely, which no one of the other groups has to offer.

I speak of his esthetic contribution, of his power to
suck up the spirit of America from the very soil and transmute
it into something artistic. This, no other American group has
shown the ability to do. Others have produced American examples
of European art, but nothing distinctively and exclusively Ameri-
can which has appealed to the whole world as such.

Before we go any farther, let us consider for a moment
who and what the American Negro is. First of all, he is a part of
one of the great races of the world numerically. Not a minor race,
not a vanishing race, but a race numbering one hundred and fifty
millions. Secondly, he belongs to a great race physically. He
grows big and strong. He lives to reach old age (in spite of
statistics to the contrary). He can stand hard work hour for
hour with any other race in the world. The Negro race is the

only race in the world that, under all conditions and in every
clime, from the jungles of the tropics to the ice fields of the
polar regions, can stand firm and do a man's work. I am certain
that my statement about the jungles of the tropics will not be
questioned, and if anyone is inclined to question the statement
about the ice fields of the polar regions, I need only recall
that of the two civilized men accredited with having stood upon the
spot called the North Pole one of them was an almost full-blooded
Negro; and he was the first to stand there. Commodore Peary lost
several of his toes as a result of his expeditions, while Matt
Henson, who worked with him for twenty years as his most valuable
assistant, did not lose so much as a tooth. This superb physical
stamina is, of course, the most vital asset of the race. Without
it, the American Negro would not have been able at all to survive
his conditions in this country.

The Negro is the possessor of a remarkable degree of
adaptability. In this respect, no other race can approach him.
He can shape and mould himself absolutely to conditions. Wherever
he may be, he is able to make the language, the customs, the laws,
the religion, and the mode of thought of the people among whom he
lives his own. This adaptability is not mere outward conformity
or monkeyish imitation, but the power to assimilate. The proof
of this is the fact that the Negro is of a more divergent type
from the dominant race in this country than is any other distinct
race variety, yet he is able to come into closer touch than is any
of the less divergent types.

But above all, the Negro is the possessor of cheerfulness,
hope and faith; he is endowed with the gifts of laughter, music

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and song; he is imbued with boundless charity and love; there dwells
in him the oversoul. And it is in these that there lies the eternal
strength of the black man. It is because of these that he has not
gone the way of the American Indian, the Australian Bushman, and
the Sea Islanders of the Pacific. It is because of these gifts that
he cannot be crushed; for he cannot be crushed unless his soul is
conquered, and because of these gifts his soul is unconquerable.

This very brief catalog of the elements of strength
possessed by the Negro may suggest this truth: though the black race
may differ in many ways from the white race, its points of dif-
ference are not necessarily evidences of inferiority. There are
things which the white race can do better than the Negro, and there
are things which the Negro can do better than the white race. This
is no disparagement to either. It is not the fault of the Negro
that he has not that daring, restless spirit, that craving for power
over other races, which make the white race a pioneer, and overlord,
and often an oppressor; nor is it the fault of the white race that
it has not that buoyancy of spirit, that music in the soul, that
response to the sheer joy of living which sustain the Negro under
all conditions. A still deeper comparison might be drawn between
black and white civilizations, as to the absolute fulfilment of
human happiness, but for that there is neither time nor place.

In thus briefly cataloging the endowments of the Negro,
I have led up to those native elements which constitute the gift
that, I believe, will be the unique contribution of the race to
American democracy - I am here using the word "democracy" not in
the current sense. It is my opinion that the Negro has a distinct
artistic and spiritual contribution to make.

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It is admitted that he has the emotional endowment; that
he has originality and artistic conception, and, what is more im-
portant, the power of creating that which can influence and ap-
peal universally, he has already proven. He has proved it by being
the creator of the only things artistic that have yet sprung from
American soil and out of American life.

This power of the Negro to suck up, as I have said, the
national spirit from the soil and create something artistic and
original, which at the same time possesses the note of universal
appeal is due to a remarkable racial gift of adaptability, it is a
transfusive quality. And the Negro has exercised this transfusive
quality not only here in America, where the race lives in large
numbers, but in European countries, where the number has been
almost infinitesimal.

Is it not curious to think that the greatest poet of Russia
should be Alexander Pushkin, a man of African descent; that the
greatest romancer of France should be Alexander Dumas, a man of
African descent; and that one of the greatest musicians of England
should be Coleridge-Taylor, a man of African descent?

The fact is fairly well known that the grandfather of Dumas
was a Negro of the French West Indies; that the father of Coleridge-
Taylor was a native born African; but the facts concerning Pushkin's
African ancestry are not so familiar:

When Peter the Great was Czar of Russia, some potentate
presented him with a full-blooded Negro of gigantic size. Peter,
the most eccentric ruler of modern times, dressed this Negro in
soldier clothes, christened him "Hannibal" and made him a special
body-guard.

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But Hannibal had more than size, he had brain and ability. He not only looked picturesque and imposing in soldier clothes, he showed that he had in him the making of a real soldier. Peter eventually made him a general and afterwards enobled him. Hannibal, later, married one of the ladies of the Russian court. This same Hannibal was great-grandfather of Pushkin, the national poet of Russia, the man who bears the same relation to Russian literature that Shakespeare bears to English literature.

I know the question naturally arises: if out of the few Negroes who have lived in France there came a Dumas, and out of the few Negroes who have lived in England there came a Coleridge-Taylor, and if from the man who was at the time, probably, the only Negro in Russia there sprang that country's national poet, why have not the millions of Negroes in the United States with all the emotional and artistic endowment you claim for them produced a Dumas or a Coleridge-Taylor or a Pushkin?

The answer is not such a difficult one. The Negro in the United States is using up all of his mental energy in this terrible race struggle. I hope you will not think me immodest if I say that I, myself, am using up the greater part of whatever creative power I may have in this same struggle. I should much rather use it in making songs and stories.

And the same statement may be made in a general way about the white South. Why does not the white South produce great literature and art? The white South, too, is using up all of its mental energy in this lamentable conflict. Nearly all of the mental efforts of the white South run through one narrow channel; the life of every Southern white man and all of his activities are impassably limited

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by the ever present Negro problem. And that is why, as H. L. Mencken puts it, in all that vast region with its thirty or forty million people and its territory as large as half a dozen Frances or Germanys, there is not a poet, not a serious historian, not a creditable composer, not a critic good or bad, not a dramatist dead or alive.

But, even, so, I could go over a list of American Negroes who have achieved something in art which would be interesting. I have no doubt that you would be surprised by the length of the list and the excellence of the achievements.

Such a list begins with Phillis Wheatley. In 1761 a slave ship landed a cargo of slaves in Boston. Among them was a little girl seven or eight years of age. She attracted the attention of John Wheatley, a wealthy gentleman of Boston, who purchased her as a servant for his wife. Mrs. Wheatley was a benevolent woman, and noticing the girl's quick mind, determined to give her opportunity for its development. Twelve years later Phillis published a volume of poems. The volume was brought out in London, where Phillis was for several months an object of great curiosity and great attention on the part of English nobility.

Phillis Wheatley has never been given her rightful place in American literature. By some sort of conspiracy she is kept out of most of the books, especially the school books. Of course, she is not a great American poet, but she is an important American poet. Her importance, if for no other reason, rests on the fact that, save one, she is the first, in order of time, of all the women poets of America. And she is among the first of

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all American poets to issue a volume.

It seems strange that the books would give space to a
mention of Urian Oakes, President of Harvard College, and to quote
from the crude and lengthy elegy which he published in 1667; to
give examples from the execrable versified version of the Psalms
made by the New England divines, and yet deny a place to Phillis
Wheatley.

For example, Urian Oakes begins his elegy with these lines:

"Reader, I am no poet, but I grieves.
Behold here what that passion can do,
That forced a verse without Appolo's leave,
And whether the learned sisters would or no."

And this from the Bay Psalm Book:

"The earth Jehova's is
and the fullness of it;
The habitable world and they
that thereupon do sit."

Or worse still:

"The Lord's song sing can we? being
in stranger's land, then let
lose her skill my right hand if I
Jerusalem forget."

Anne Bradstreet preceded Phillis Wheatley by a little
over twenty years. She published her volume of poems, "The Tenth
Muse" in 1750. Let us strike a comparison between the two; Anne
Bradstreet was a wealthy, cultivated Puritan girl, the daughter
of Thomas Dudley, Governor of Bay Colony; Phillis Wheatley, as
we know, was a Negro slave girl born in Africa. The following is
a stanza from Anne's poem entitled "Contemplation":

"While musing thus with contemplation fed,
And thousand fancies buzzing in my brain,
The sweet touged Philomel percot ore my head,
And chanted forth a most melodious strain,
Which rapt me so with wonder and delight,
I judged my hearing better than my sight,
And wishtme wings with her a while to take my flight."

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And the following from Phillis' poem entitled "Imagination":

"Imagination: who can sing thy force?
Or who describe the swiftness of thy course?
Soaring through air to find the bright abode,
The empyreal palace of the thundering God,
We on thy pinions can surpass the wind,
And leave the rolling universe behind;
From star to star the mental optics rove,
Measure the skies, and range the realms above,
There in one view we grasp the mighty whole,
Or with new worlds amaze the unbounded soul."

We do not think that the black woman suffers much by com-
parison with the white. Thomas Jefferson said of Phillis, "Religion
has produced a Phillis Wheatley, but it could not produce a poet;
her poems are below the dignity of contempt". It is likely that
Jefferson's criticism was directed more against religion than a-
gainst Phillis' poems. On the other hand, General George Washington
wrote her with his own hand a letter in which he said, (Letter) He
afterwards received her with marked courtesy at Cambridge.

Phillis Wheatley's poetry is the poetry of the Eighteenth
Century. She wrote when Pope and Gray were supreme, and they were
her models. Had she come under the influence of Wordsworth or Byron
or Keats or Shelley she would have done greater work. As it is, her
work must not be judged by the work and standard of a later day, but
by the work and standards of her own day and her own contemporaries.
By this method of criticism she stands out as one of the important
characters in the making of American literature, without any allow-
ance being made for her sex or her antecedents.

Braithwaite

Meta Werrick

Burleigh, Johnson and Cook

E. M. Sanister, the painter, awarded a medal at the
Philadelphia Centennial Exposition.

- 13 -

These lines no doubt are one of the many versions of
the famous "Blues". They are also crude, but they go straight to
the mark. The last two lines move with the swiftness of all
great tragedy.

We are all familiar with the great influence that ragtime
has had on music in America. Most people will recognize that in-
fluence on the theatrical stage, but no many would know that rag-
time has even influenced our religious music. I do not know how
many of us here are familiar with gospel hymns, but if you are,
you can at once see the great difference between the songs of
thirty years ago such as "In the Sweet Bye and Bye", "Ninety and
Nine", etc., and the up-to-date, syncopated tunes that are sung
in Sunday Schools and like meetings today.

Ragtime has not only influenced American music, it has
influenced American life; indeed, it has saturated American life.
It has become the popular medium for our national expression musi-
cally. And who can say that it does not express the blare and
jangle and surge, too, of our national life?

Now the dances which I have referred to in passing and
ragtime music may be lower forms of art, but they give evidence
of a power that will some day be applied to the higher forms.
And even now we need not stop at the Negro's accomplishment through
these lower forms. In the spirituals or slave songs, the Negro has
given America not only its only folksongs, but a mass of noble music.
I never think of this music but what I am struck by the wonder, the
miracle of its production. How did the men who originated them
manage to do it? The sentiments are easily accounted for; they
are mostly taken from the Bible,

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As examples of this primitive poetry let me repeat the
following:

"You may bury me in de East
You may bury me in de West,
But I'll hear de trumpet sound in dat mornin'."

"Sometimes I feel like an eagle in de air."

"I see King Jesus walkin' wid a rainbow on his shoulder".

"I know de moonlight, I know de starlight;
I lay dis body down.
I walk in de moonlight, I walk in de starlight;
I lay dis body down.
I know de graveyard, I know de graveyard,
When I lay dis body down.
I walk in de graveyard, I walk troo de graveyard
To lay dis body down.
I lay in de grave an' stretch out my arms;
I lay dis body down.
I go to de judgment in de evenin' of de day
When I lay dis body down.
An' my soul an' yo' soul will meet in de day
When we lay dis body down."

Words of Negro spirituals from Bible rather commonplace
repetitions. Leader of singing must commit to memory lines of all
songs. No easy task, they run up into the hundreds. But accom-
plished leader must know them all. Congregation sings only refrains.
Every ear in church fixed upon him; if he forgets or becomes mixed
responsibility falls directly on his shoulders. Accomplished leader
must have not only clear, strong, high-pitched voice, must be a
maker and an improviser of lines. Must be a judge of just the
right hymn to sing and when to sing it. Sometimes it devolves on
the leader to "sing down" a long-winded or uninteresting speaker -
a device which I think many of our more intellectual would be glad at time

- 15 -

to take advantage of. Sometimes he breaks in on some sentiment expressed by the preacher with an appropriate song. Sometimes he does so when he feels that the preacher is stalling for time - splendid team work, wouldn't you say?

Manner of singing by leader and congregation:

"Swing Low, Sweet Chariot"

The solitary and plaintive voice of the leader is answered by a sound like the roll of the sea, producing a most curious effect. In only a few of these songs do the leader and the congregation start off together. Such a song is the well known "Steal Away to Jesus".

But the melodies, where did they come from? Some of them so weirdly sweet, and others so wonderfully strong. Take for instance, "Go Down, Moses." I doubt that there is a stronger theme in the whole musical literature of the world. Perhaps, I cannot better express what I feel about these slave songs than in the following lines:

"Black and Unknown Bards."

And here is a vast mine of material that has been almost absolutely neglected. We have our native composers denying the worth and importance of this slave music and try to manufacture grand opera out of so-called Indian themes.

A couple of winters ago an Indian princess who is a singer made this statement in an interview, "If there is an American music, surely it is we, the Indians who are its originators". The princess went on to speak of the musical gifts of the Indians and of the custom of singing while at work.

Maybe the Indians are a musical race, but they have pretty well succeeded in hiding it from the rest of the world. Indeed, a real singing Indian would be regarded as a curiosity. And, by way

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of striking an odious comparison just here, I may say that the Negro must still in many things yield the palm to the white man, but as for the Indian, despite his superior opportunities, the Negro has him beat down to a whisper in music or anything else that is considered civilized.

But there is a great hope for the development of his music, and that in the Negro himself. There will come the trained Negro musician who will voice through this music the soul of America.

And does it not seem strange that this greatest gift of the Negro has been the most neglected of all that he possesses? Money and effort have been expended upon his development in every other direction, except this. This gift has been regarded as a sort of side show, something for occasional exhibition, wherein it is the magic thing; it is the touchstone; it is that by which the Negro can bridge all chasms. No class of persons, however hostile, can listen to Negroes sing this wonderful music without having all their hostility melted down. Anyone who can hear Negroes sing from their hearts "Nobody knows de Trouble I see" without shedding tears must indeed have a heart of stone. This very music can be used as bond.

I believe the Negro possesses a valuable and much needed gift that he will contribute to the future American democracy. I have tried to point out that the Negro is here not merely to be a beneficiary of American democracy, not merely to receive. He is here to give something to American democracy. Out of his wealth of artistic and emotional endowment he is going to give something that is wanting, something that is needed, something that no other element in all the nation has to give.