Consider Lethierre, once president of the School of Fine Arts at Rome, within our present generation, and view his paintings that now adorn the walls of the Louvre in Paris.
We should not omit Edmonia Lewis, the sculptress, whose admirable works required a residence in Rome, nor Henry Owassa Tanner, the eminent artist, whose gems of art are represented in the fine art museums of the world. There are numerous others but these are given to emphasize the point of present Ethiopian intellectual ability.
Among writers were Alexander Poushkin, the celebrated Russian poet. He was a Negro with curly hair and a black complexion, but a man of extraordinary talent and versatility, in prose fiction, and history as well as poetry.
Jose Maria Heredia, the greatest of Spanish-American poets, was a Colored man, likewise the poet Placidio.
We can not forget Paul de Cassagnac, of France, editor, author and poet, who was also a Colored man.
Dumas, the noted dramatic author and novelist, was a colored man, and a most prolific popular author, poet, dramatist, novelist and essayist. That great production “Camille” is familiar to all theater-goers in the world, and when a man rises and says: “The world is mine,” he uses the language of Dumas’ Monte Christo, a world-wide novel that has been translated in all languages and performed on every stage.
We might go on for pages and refer to the Ethiopian intellect as something almost dominant in the world of letters in foreign countries, but must refer to our own Colored Americans as this work concerns them particularly.
We can claim as our own Williams, the historian, the first Colored American ever elected to the Ohio legislature, and at one time judge advocate of the G. A. R. of Ohio.
Phillis Wheatley, the girl who translated the Latin “Metamorphoses of Ovid” in Boston, which were republished in England as standard. Under the most distressing and adverse circumstances Phillis Wheatley became a scholar and a poetess of distinction and the associate of culture and refinement in Boston.
Paul Laurence Dunbar may be held up to all as an example worth following as a man, a poet, a novelist, and a journalist. At the age of twenty-one years he published his first book, “Oak and Ivy,” and followed it with others that commanded the attention and received the encomiums of the literary world in the United States. His poetry appeals to the heart and the hearth, and the intensity of thought displayed in his numerous writings is relieved by humor and quaint philosophy. Dunbar is a triumphant and unerring demonstration of Ethiopian intellect.