EARNING A LIVING--BUSINESS AND THE PROFESSIONS
If we walk west on Fifty-ninth Street, at Eighth Avenue, we come upon
one of the colored business sections of New York. Here, for a block's
length, are employment and real estate agents, restaurant keepers,
grocers, tailors, barbers, printers, expressmen, and undertakers, all
small establishments occupying the first floor or basement of some
tenement or lodging house, and with the exception of the employment
agency all patronized chiefly by the colored race. Another such section
and a more prosperous one is in Harlem, on West One Hundred and
Thirty-third, One Hundred and Thirty-fourth, and One Hundred and
Thirty-fifth Streets. From the point of view of the whole business of
the city such concerns are insignificant, but they are important from
the viewpoint of Negro progress, since they represent the accumulation
of capital, experience in business methods, and hard work. Very slowly
the New York Negro is meeting the demanding power of his people and is
securing neighborhood trade that has formerly gone to the Italian and
the Jew. Husband and wife, father and son, work in their little
establishments and make a beginning in the mercantile world.
The Negro, as we have seen, has conducted businesses in New York in the
past, businesses patronized chiefly by whites. Barbering and catering
were his successes, and in both of these he has lost, despite the fact
that one of the city's wealthiest colored men is a caterer. But if he
has lost here, he has gained along other lines. Among a number of
photographers he has one who is well-known for his excellent
architectural work. Two manufacturers have brought out popular goods,
the Haynes's razor strop, and the Howard shoe polish. These men, one a
barber and one a Pullman car porter, improved upon implements used in
their daily work and then turned to manufacture. The headquarters of
the Howard shoe polish is in Chicago, where the firm employs thirty
people, the New York branch giving employment to twelve.
A wise utilization of labor already trained and at hand is seen in the
Manhattan House Cleaning and Renovating Bureau. This firm contracts for
the cleaning of houses and places of business and has also been
successful in securing work on new buildings, entering as the builders
leave and arranging everything for occupancy. In one week the Bureau has
given employment to sixty men.
In those businesses in which he comes in contact with the white, the
most pronounced success of the colored man has been real estate
brokerage. The New York Negro business directory names twenty-two real
estate brokers, and though a dozen of them probably handle altogether no
more business than one white firm, a few put through important
operations. The ablest of these brokers, recently clearing twenty
thousand dollars at a single transaction, turned his operations to
Liberia, where he went for a few months to look into land concessions.
This broker has aided the Negroes materially in their efforts to rent
apartments on better streets. His energy, and that of many more like
him, is also needed to open up places for colored businesses, better
office and workroom facilities for the able professional and business
men and women. In New York as in the South the Negro needs to obtain a
hold upon the land. In this he is aided not only by his brokers, but by
realty companies. The largest of these, the Metropolitan Realty Company,
in operation since 1900, is capitalized at a million dollars, and had in
1910 $400,000 paid in stock, and $400,000 subscribed and being paid for
on instalment. This company operates in the suburban towns, and has
quite a colony in Plainfield, New Jersey, where it owns 150 lots. It has
built eighty cottages for its members, and has bought eighteen.
Among the businesses that cater directly to the colored, probably none
is more successful than undertaking. The Negroes of the city die in
great numbers, and the funeral is all too common a function. Formerly
this business went to white men, but increasingly it is coming into the
hands of the colored. The Negro business directory gives twenty-two
undertakers, one of them, by common report, the richest colored man in
New York. Profitable real estate investment, combined with one of the
largest undertaking establishments in the city, has given him a
comfortable fortune. Another large and increasingly important Negro
business is the hotel and boarding-house. As the colored men of the
South and West accumulate wealth, they will come in increasing numbers
to visit in New York, and the colored hotel, now little more than a
boarding-house, may become a spacious building, with private baths,
elevator service, and a well-equipped restaurant. In today's modestly
equipped buildings the catering is often excellent, and good,
well-cooked food is sold at reasonable prices. Occasionally the Hotel
Maceo advertises a southern dinner, and its guests sit down to Virginia
sugar-cured ham, sweet potato pie, and perhaps even opossum.
Printing establishments, tailors' shops,[1] express and van companies,
and many other small enterprises help to make up the Negro business
world. One colored printer brings out an important white magazine. There
are seven weekly colored newspapers, of which the New York _Age_ is the
most important, and two musical publishing companies. All these
enterprises are useful, not only to the proprietor and his patrons, but
especially to the clerks and assistants who thus are able to secure some
training in mercantile work. In the white man's office, white and
colored boys start out together, but as their trousers lengthen and
their ambitions quicken, the former secures promotion while the latter
is still given the letters to put into the mail box. If the Negro lad,
discouraged at lack of advancement, leaves the white man and ventures
with a tiny capital into some business of his own, his ignorance is
almost certain to lead to his disaster. He is indeed fortunate if he can
first work in the office of a successful colored man.[2]
We have one more census division to consider, Professional Service. The
table runs as follows:
PROFESSIONAL SERVICE
Key to column headers--
A: Total number of males in each occupation.
B: Number of Negroes in each occupation.
C: Number of Negroes to each 1000 workers in occupation.
========================================================
| A | B | C
------------------------------------+--------+-----+----
Actors, professional showmen, etc. | 4,733 | 254 | 54
Architects, designers, draftsmen | 3,966 | 2 | 0
Artists, teachers of art | 2,924 | 13 | 4
Clergymen | 2,833 | 90 | 32
Dentists | 1,509 | 25 | 16
Physicians and surgeons | 6,577 | 32 | 5
Veterinary surgeons | 320 | 2 | 6
Electricians | 8,131 | 18 | 2
Engineers (civil) and surveyors | 3,321 | 7 | 2
Journalists | 2,833 | 7 | 2
Lawyers | 7,811 | 26 | 3
Literary and scientific | 1,709 | 10 | 5
Musicians | 6,429 | 195 | 30
Officials (government) | 3,934 | 9 | 2
Teachers and professors in colleges | 3,409 | 32 | 9
| | |
Total including some occupations | | |
not specified | 60,853 | 729 | 12
========================================================
Examining these figures we find few colored architects[3] or engineers,
and a very small proportion of electricians, though among the latter
there is a highly skilled workman. The New York Negro has no position in
the mechanical arts. It may be that, as we so often hear, the African
does not possess mechanical ability.[4] You do not see Negro boys
pottering over machinery or making toy inventions of their own. But
another and powerful reason for the colored youth's failing to take up
engineering or kindred studies is the slight chance he would later have
in securing work. No group of men in America have opposed his progress
more persistently than skilled mechanics, and, should he graduate from
some school of technology, he would be refused in office or workshop. So
he turns to those professions in which he sees a likelihood of
advancement.
Colored physicians and dentists are increasing in number in New York and
throughout the country. The Negro is sympathetic, quick to understand
another's feelings, and when added to this he has received a thorough
medical training he makes an excellent physician. New York State
examinations prevent the practice of ignorant doctors from other states,
and the city can count many able colored practitioners. These doctors
practise among white people as well as among colored. As surgeons they
are handicapped in New York by lack of hospital facilities, having no
suitable place in which they may perform an operation. The colored
student who graduates from a New York medical college must go for
hospital training to Philadelphia or Chicago or Washington.[5]
Colored lawyers are obtaining a firm foothold in New York. From
twenty-six in the 1900 census they now, in 1911, number over fifty,
though not all of these by any means rely entirely upon their profession
for support. Some of our lawyers are descendants of old New York
families, others have come here recently from the South.
Turning to our census figures again we see that the three professions in
which the colored man is conspicuous are those of actor, musician, and
minister. Instead of the average eighteen, he here shows fifty-four in
every thousand actors, thirty in every thousand musicians, and
thirty-two in every thousand clergymen. And since the pulpit and the
stage are two places in which the black man has found conspicuous
success it may be well in this connection to consider, not only the
economic significance of these institutions, but their place in the life
of the colored world.
The Negro minister was born with the Negro Christian, and the colored
church, in which he might tell of salvation, is over a century old in
New York. Today the Boroughs of Manhattan and Brooklyn have twenty-eight
colored churches besides a number of missions. Some of the societies own
valuable property, usually, however, encumbered with heavy mortgages,
and yearly budgets mount up to ten, twelve, and sixteen thousand
dollars. The Methodist churches lead in number, next come the Baptist,
and next the Episcopalian. There are Methodist Episcopal, African
Methodist Episcopal, and African Methodist Episcopal Zion. Bethel
African Methodist Episcopal Church, as we have seen, is one of the
oldest and is still one of the largest and most useful Negro churches in
New York. Mount Olivet, a Baptist church on West Fifty-third Street, has
a seating capacity of 1600, taxed to its full on Sunday evenings. St.
Philip's gives the Episcopal service with dignity and devoutness, and
its choir has many sweet colored boy singers. At St. Benedict, the Moor,
the black faces of the boy acolytes contrast with the benignant
white-haired Irish priest, and without need of words preach good-will
to men. Only in this Catholic church does one find white and black in
almost equal numbers worshipping side by side.
The great majority of the colored churches are supported by their
congregations, and the minister or elder, or both, twice a Sunday, must
call for the pennies and nickels, dimes and quarters, that are dropped
into the plate at the pulpit's base. Contributors file past the table on
which they place their offering, emulation becoming a spur to
generosity. These collections are supplemented by sums raised at
entertainments and fairs, and it is in this way, by the constant
securing of small gifts, that the thousands are raised.
The church is a busy place and retains its members, not only by its
preaching, but by midweek meetings. There are the class meetings of the
Methodists, the young people's societies, the prayer meetings, and the
sermons preached to the secret benefit organizations. Visiting sisters
and brothers attend to relief work, and standing at a side table,
sometimes picturesque with lighted lantern, ask for dole for the poor.
The Sunday-schools, while not so large as the church attendance would
lead one to expect, involve much time and labor in their conduct. A
colored church member finds all his or her leisure occupied in church
work. I know a young woman engaged in an exacting, skilled profession
who spends her day of rest attending morning service, teaching in
Sunday-school, taking part in the young people's lyceum in the late
afternoon, and listening to a second sermon in the evening. Occasionally
she omits her dinner to hear an address at the colored Young Men's
Christian Association. On hot summer afternoons you may see colored boys
and girls and men and women crowded in an ill-ventilated hall, giving
ear to a fervid exhortation that leads the speaker, at the sentence's
end, to mop his swarthy face. The woods, the salt-smelling sea, the
tamer prettiness of the lawns of the city's park, have not the impelling
call of sermon or hymn. If the whole of the Negro's summer Sunday is to
be given to direct religious teaching, one wishes that it might take
place at the old time camp meeting, where there is fresh air and space
in which to breathe it. The first of Edward Everett Hale's three rules
of life as he gave them to the Hampton students was, "Live all you can
out in the open air." The religious-minded New York Negro succumbs
easily to disease, and yet elects to spend his day of leisure within
doors.
With the exception of the Episcopalians, the churches undertake little
institutional work. Money is lacking, and there is only a feeble
conviction of the value of the gymnasium, pool table, and girls' and
boys' clubs. The colored branches of the Young Men's Christian
Association, however, are places for recreation and instruction. The
lines that Evangelical Americans draw regarding amusements, prohibiting
cards and welcoming dominos, allowing bagatelle and frowning upon
billiards, must be interpreted by some folk-lore historian to show their
reasonableness. Doubtless the extent to which a game is used for
gambling purposes has much to do with its good or bad savor, and pool
and cards for this reason are tabooed. Dancing is also frowned upon by
many of the churches, while temperance societies make active campaign
for prohibition. To New York's black folk, the church-goers and they who
stand without are the sheep and the goats, and the gulf between them is
digged deep.
Of the five colored Episcopal churches, St. Philip's and St. Cyprian's
have parish houses. St. Philip's has moved into a new parish house on
West One Hundred and Thirty-Fourth Street, where with its large,
well-arranged rooms, its gymnasium, and its corps of enthusiastic
workers it will soon become a powerful force in the Harlem Negro's life.
St. Cyprian's is under the City Episcopal Mission, and has unusual
opportunity for helpfulness since it is separated only by Amsterdam
Avenue from the San Juan Hill district and yet stands amid the whites.
Its clubs and classes, its employment agency, its gymnasium, its
luncheons for school children, its beautiful church, are all primarily
for the Negroes; but the colored rector has a friendly word for his
white neighbors, tow-headed Irish and German boys and girls sit upon his
steps, and his ministry has lessened the belligerent feeling between
the east and the west sides of Amsterdam Avenue. St. David's Episcopal
Church in the Bronx has a fresh air home at White Plains, cared for
personally by the rector and his wife, who spend their vacation with
tenement mothers and their children, the tired but grateful recipients
of their good-will.
If there were ninety colored clergymen in New York in 1900, as the
census says, a number must have been without churches, itinerant
preachers or directors of small missions, supporting themselves by
other labor during the day. Those men who now fill the pulpits of
well-established churches have been trained in theological schools of
good standing, for the ignorant "darky" of the story who leaves the hot
work of the cotton field because he feels a "call" to preach does not
receive another from New York. The colored minister in this city works
hard and long, and finds a wearying number of demands upon his time. The
wedding and the funeral, the word of counsel to the young, and of
comfort to the aged, a multiplicity of meetings, two sermons every
Sunday, the continual strain of raising money, these are some of his
duties. With a day from fourteen to seventeen hours long he earns as few
men earn the meagre salary put into his hand. But his position among
his people is a commanding one, and carries with it respect and
responsibility.
Strangers who visit colored churches to be amused by the vociferations
of the preacher and the responses of the congregation will be
disappointed in New York. Others, however, who attend, desiring to
understand the religious teaching of the thoughtful Negro, find much of
interest. They hear sermons marked by great eloquence. In the
Evangelical church the preacher is not afraid to give his imagination
play, and in finely chosen, vivid language, pictures his thought to his
people. Especially does he love to tell the story of a future life, of
Paradise with its rapturous beauty of color and sound, its golden
streets, its gates of precious stones, effulgent, radiant. He dwells not
upon the harshness, but rather upon the mercy of God.
A theological library connected with a Calvinistic church, when recently
catalogued, disclosed two long shelves of books upon Hell and two slim
volumes upon Heaven. No such unloving Puritanism dominates the Negro's
thought. Hell's horrors may be portrayed at a revival to bring the
sinner to repentance, but only as an aid to a clearer vision of the
glories of Heaven.
The Negro churches lay greater stress than formerly upon practical
religion; they try to turn a fine frenzy into a determination for
righteousness. This was strikingly exemplified lately in one of New
York's colored Baptist churches. During the solemn rite of immersion the
congregation began to grow hysterical, or "happy," as they would have
phrased it; there were cries of "Yes, Jesus," "We're comin', Lord," and
swayings of the body backward and forward. The minister with loud and
stirring appeal for a time encouraged these emotions. Then in a moment
he brought quiet to his congregation and called them to the consecration
of labor. Faith without works was vain. Baptism was not the end, but
only the beginning of their salvation. "You-all bleege ter work," he
said, "if yer gwine foller der Lord. Ain't Jesus work in der carpenter
shop till he nigh on thirty year old? Den one day he stood up (he ain't
none er yer two-by-fo' men) an' he tak off his blue apun (I reckon he
wore er apun like we-alls) an' he goes on down ter der wilderness, an'
John der Baptist baptize him."
From oratory one turns naturally to music. The feeling for rhythm, for
melodious sound, that leads the Negro to use majestic words of which he
has not always mastered the meaning, leads him also to musical
expression. He has an instinct for harmony, and, when within hearing
distance of any instrument, will whistle, not the melody, however
assertive, but will add a part.[6] Those who have visited colored
schools, and especially the colored schools of the far South where the
pupils are unfamiliar with other music than their own, can never forget
the exquisite, haunting singing. When a foreman wants to get energetic
work from his black laborers he sets them to singing stirring tunes. The
Negro has his labor songs as the sailor has his chanties, and it would
be impossible to measure the joy coming to both through musical
expression.
In New York, despite their poverty, few Negroes fail to possess some
musical instrument--a banjo perhaps, or a guitar, a mandolin or zither,
or it may be the highly prized piano. Visiting of an evening in the
Phipps model tenement, one hears a variety of gay tinkling sounds. And
besides the mechanical instruments there is always the great natural
instrument, the human voice. Singing, though not as common in the city
as in the country, is still often heard, especially in the summer, and
remains musical, though New York's noise and cheap and vulgar
entertainments have an unhappy fashion of roughening her children's
voices.
Music furnishes a means of livelihood to many Negroes and supplements
the income of many others. Boys contribute to the family support by
singing cheap songs in saloons or even in houses of prostitution. A boy
"nightingale" will earn the needed money for rent while learning, all
too quickly, the ways of viciousness. Others, more carefully reared,
sing at church or secret society concert, perhaps receiving a little
pay. Men form male quartettes that for five or ten dollars furnish a
part of an evening's entertainment. There are many Negro musicians and
elocutionists who largely support themselves by their share in the
receipts from concerts and social gatherings.
We speak of men crossing the line when they intermarry with the whites,
but there is another crossing of the line when some Negro by his genius
makes the world forget his race. Such a man is the artist, Henry Tanner;
and New York has such Negro musicians. Mr. Harry Burleigh, the baritone
at St. George's, has won high recognition, not only as an interpreter,
but as a composer of music; and one of the richest synagogues of the
city has a Negro for its assistant organist. There are five colored
orchestras in New York, the one conducted by Mr. Walter A. Craig having
toured successfully in New England and many other northern states.
But the colored musician has usually found his opportunity for
expression and for a living wage upon the stage. Probably many of the
actors noted on the census list are musicians, and many of the
musicians, actors; the writer of the topical song having himself sung it
in vaudeville or musical comedy. Few New Yorkers appreciate how many of
the tunes hummed in the street or ground out on the hand-organ, have
originated in Negro brains. "The Right Church but the Wrong Pew,"
"Teasing," "Nobody," "Under the Bamboo Tree," which Cole and Johnson,
the composers, heard the last thing as they left the dock in New York,
and the first thing when they arrived in Paris, these are a few of the
popular favorites. Handsome incomes have been netted by the shrewder
among these composers, and the demand for their songs is continuous.
With a bright song and a jolly dance comes success. Picking up the copy
of the New York _Age_, that lies on my desk, I find jottings of
twenty-four colored troupes in vaudeville in the larger cities of the
North and West. Three are at Proctor's and three at Keith's. Their
economic outlook is not so hilarious as their songs, for transportation
is expensive and bookings are uncertain; yet pecuniarily these actors
are far better off than their more sober brothers who stick to their
elevators or their porters' jobs.
Twenty years ago the Negro performer probably had little anticipation of
advancing beyond minstrel work, in which he sang loud, danced hard, and
told a funny story. S. H. Dudley, the leading comedian in the "Smart
Set" colored company, said in 1909: "When I started in business I had no
idea of getting as high as I am now. A minstrel company came to the
little town in Texas where I was raised, and at once my ambition fired
me to become a musician. So I bought a battered horn and began to toot,
to the great annoyance of my neighbors. Then I secured an engagement
with a minstrel company whose cornet player had fallen into the hands of
the law; and now here I am with one of the best colored shows ever
gotten together and a starring tour arranged for next season." The
movement from the minstrel show to the musical comedy, from the cheapest
form of buffoonery to attractive farce, and even to good comedy, has
been accomplished by a number of colored comedians. Williams and Walker
may be considered the pioneers in this movement, and the story of their
success, as Walker has told it, is a fine example of what the Negro can
do along the line of decided natural aptitude. And it is important to
notice this, for today, in the education of the race, aesthetic instincts
are often suppressed with Puritan vigor, and labor is made ugly and
unwelcome.
Bert Williams and George Walker, one a British West Indian, the other a
Westerner, met in California where each was hanging around a box
manager's office, looking for a job. Hardly more than boys, they secured
employment at seven dollars a week. That was in 1889. In 1908 they made
each $250 a week, and in later times they have doubled and quadrupled
this. Their first stage manager expected them to perform as the
blacked-up white minstrels were performing, but the two boys soon saw
that the Negro himself was far more entertaining than the buffoon
portrayed by the white man. They wanted to show the true Negro, and
billing themselves as the "real coons" (their white rivals called
themselves "coons") they played in San Francisco with some success.
Later they came to New York, and at Koster and Bial's made their first
hit.
"Long before our run terminated," Walker said in telling of those early
days, "we discovered an important fact: that the hope of the colored
performer must be in making a radical departure from the old time
'darky' style of singing and dancing. So we set ourselves the task of
thinking along new lines.
"The first move was to hire a flat in Fifty-third Street, furnish it,
and throw our doors open to all colored men who possessed theatrical and
musical ability and ambition. The Williams and Walker flat soon became
the headquarters of all the artistic young men of our race who were
stage-struck. We entertained the late Paul Lawrence Dunbar, who wrote
lyrics for us. By having these men about us we had the opportunity to
study the musical and theatrical ability of the most talented members of
our race."
In 1893 the World's Fair was held at Chicago, and on the "Midway" the
visitor saw races from all over the world. Here was a Dahomey village,
with strange little huts, representative of the African home life. The
Dahomeyans themselves were late in arriving, and American Negroes,
sometimes with an added coat of black, were employed to represent them.
Among them were Williams and Walker, who played their parts until the
real Dahomeyans arriving, they became in turn spectators and studied the
true African. This contact with the dancing and singing of the primitive
people of their own race had an important effect upon their art. Their
lyrics recalled African songs, their dancing took on African movements,
especially Walker's. Any one who saw Walker in "Abyssinia," the most
African and the most artistic of their plays, must have recognized the
savage beauty of his dancing when he was masquerading as an African
king.
After the Dahomey episode the success of the two men was continuous. "In
1902 and 1903," Walker said, "we had all New York and London doing the
cake walk." In February, 1908, they appeared in "Bandanna Land," at the
Majestic Theatre, and remained there for six months. Only those colored
men who have made a steady, uphill struggle for the chance to play good
comedy, know how important such recognition was for the Negro. "Bandanna
Land" was probably the most popular light opera in New York that winter
next to "The Merry Widow." The singing, especially that of the male
chorus, was often beautiful. Mrs. Walker's dancing and charming acting
were delightful, the chorus girls were above the average in beauty
and musical expression, and the two men who made the piece were
spontaneously, irresistibly funny; added to this, unlike its successful
rival, "Bandanna Land" was without a vulgar scene or word.
This was the last time the two men played together. Walker became
seriously ill, and died in January, 1911. After their company disbanded,
Williams went back to the one-piece act of vaudeville, but as a star in
a white troupe. His position as a permanent actor in the "Follies of
1910" marks a new departure for the colored comedian, a departure won by
great talent combined with character and tact.
Since 1908 the Majestic has seen another colored company, Cole and
Johnson's, presenting a half-Negro, half-Indian, musical comedy, the
"Red Moon." These two men, for years in vaudeville, have written songs
for Lillian Russell, Marie Cahill, Anna Held, and other popular musical
comedy and vaudeville singers. They have played for six months
continuously at the Palace Theatre, London. Accustomed to writing for
white actors, their own plays are not so distinctively African as
Williams and Walker's. Both Johnson and Cole are of the mulatto type,
and neither blackens his face. Cole is one of the most amusing men in
comedy in New York. He is tall and very thin, with a genius for finding
lank and grotesque costumes that are delightfully incongruous with his
grave face. The words of the musical comedies are his, the music,
Johnson's. He, too, has become seriously ill, and his company has
disbanded. In three years the colored stage has suffered serious loss,
but we see forming new and successful companies whose reputation will
soon be assured.
Comedy has always furnished a medium for criticism of the foibles of the
times, and there are many sly digs at the white man in the colored play.
Ernest Hogan, now deceased, better than any one else played the rural
southern darky. In the "Oysterman" we saw him in contact with a white
scamp who was intent upon getting his recently acquired money. He was
urged to take stock in a land company, to buy where watermelons grew as
thick as potatoes, and chickens were as common as sparrows. The audience
hated the white man heartily and sided with the simple, kindly, black
youth, sitting with his dog at his side, on his cabin steps. Behind
boisterous laughter and raillery the writers of these comedies often
gain the sympathy of their hearers for the black race.
In this attempt to show the occupational life of the Negro, we have
found that race prejudice often proves a bar to complete success, to
full manhood. Something of this is true with the actor as well as with
the laborer and the business man. In securing entrance in vaudeville,
color is at first an advantage. The "darky" to the white man is
grotesquely amusing, and by rolling his eyes, showing a glistening
smile, and wearing shoes that make a monstrosity of his feet, the Negro
may create a laugh where the man with a white skin would be hooted off
the stage. And since the laugh is so easily won, many colored actors
become indolent and content themselves, year after year, with playing
the part of buffoon. But with the ambition to rise in his profession
comes the difficult struggle to induce the audience to see a new Negro
in the black man of today. The public gives the colored man no
opportunity as a tragedian, demanding that his comedy shall border
always on the farcical. And what is demanded of the actor is also
demanded of the musician. Writers of the scores of some of our musical
comedies are musicians of superior training and ability, but rarely are
they permitted full expression. Mr. Will Marion Cook, the composer of
much of the music of "Bandanna Land," for a few moments gives a piece of
exquisite orchestration. When the colored minister rises and exhorts his
quarrelling friends to be at peace with one another, one hears a
beautiful harmony. I am told that Mr. Cook declares that the next score
he writes shall begin with ten minutes of serious music. If the audience
doesn't like it, they can come in late, but for ten minutes he will do
something worthy of his genius.
However light-hearted a people, and however worthy of praise the
entertainment that brings a jolly, wholesome laugh, let us hope that in
the near future the Negro will find a more complete expression for his
musical and histrionic gifts. Some actor of commanding talent, whose
claims cannot be ignored, may reveal the larger life of the race. The
nineteenth century knew a great Negro actor, Ira Aldridge, a _protege_
and disciple of Edmund Kean. He played Othello to Kean's Iago, and in
the forties toured Europe with his own company, receiving high honors in
Berlin and St. Petersburg.[7] A dark-skinned African, of immense power,
physically and emotionally, he made Desdemona cry out in real fear, and
caused Bassanio instinctively to shrink as he demanded his pound of
flesh. Today's actor must be more subtle in his attack, but it may be
given to him to reveal the thoughts at the back of the black man's mind.
The genius of Zangwill gave us the picture of the children of the
Ghetto; perhaps from the theatre's seat the American will first
understand the despised black race.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] On West 133d Street two former Hampton students have a prosperous
little tailor and upholstering shop.
[2] Those interested in the Negro in business should look for an
intensive study, shortly to be published, on the wage-earners and
business enterprises among Negroes in New York. It is entitled "The
Negro at Work in New York City," and has been made by George E. Haynes,
under the direction of the Bureau of Social Research of the New York
School of Philanthropy.
[3] Since going to press the new and very beautiful building of St.
Philips' Episcopal Church, on W. 134th Street, has been opened. This is
a fine example of English Gothic and its architects are two young
colored men, one of whom was for years in the office of a white firm.
[4] Mary Kingsley has some interesting generalizations on this point.
She speaks of the African mind approaching all things from a spiritual
point of view while the English mind approaches them from a material
point of view, and of "the high perception of justice you will find in
the African, combined with the inability to think out a pulley or a
lever except under white tuition."--_West African Studies_, p. 330.
[5] Lincoln Hospital in New York, while receiving white and colored
patients, was especially designed to help the colored race. It has a
training school for colored nurses, but neither accepts colored medical
graduates as interns, nor allows colored doctors upon its staff. This is
one of many cases in which the good white people of the city are glad to
assist the poor and ailing Negro, but are unwilling to help the strong
and ambitious colored man to full opportunity.
[6] See H. J. Wilson, "The Negro and Music," _Outlook_, Dec. 1, 1906.
[7] William J. Simmons's "Men of Mark."