Music is always back of this gay Negro spirit and the folk song which the Negro brought to America was developed not simply by white men but by the Negro himself. Musicians and artists sprung from the Louisiana group. There was Eugene Warburg who distinguished himself as a sculptor in Italy. There was Victor Sejour who became a poet and composer in France, Dubuclet became a musician in Bordeaux and the seven Lamberts taught and composed in America, France and Brazil. One of the brothers Sydney was decorated for his work by the King of Portugal. Edmund Dèdè became a director of a leading orchestra in France.[199]
Among other early colored composers of music are J. Hemmenway who lived in Philadelphia in the twenties; A. J. Conner of Philadelphia between 1846-57 published numbers of compositions; in the seventies Justin Holland was well known as a composer in Cleveland, Ohio; Samuel Milady, known by his stage name as Sam Lucas, was born in 1846 and died in 1916. He wrote many popular ballads, among them “Grandfather’s Clock Was Too Tall For The Shelf.” George Melbourne, a Negro street minstrel, composed “Listen to the Mocking-Bird,” although a white man got the credit. James Bland wrote “Carry me Back to Ole Virginny”; Gussie L. Davis composed popular music at Cincinnati.[200]
Coming to our day we remember that the Anglo-African Samuel Coleridge-Taylor received much of his inspiration from his visits to the American Negro group; then comes Harry T. Burleigh, perhaps the greatest living song writer in America. Among his works are “Five Songs” by Laurence Hope; “The Young Warrior,” which became one of the greatest of the war songs; “The Grey Wolf” and “Ethiopia Saluting the Colors.” His adaptations of Negro folk-songs are widely known and he assisted Dvorak in his “New World Symphony.” R. Nathaniel Dett has written “Listen to the Lambs,” a carol widely known, and “The Magnolia Suite.” Rosamond Johnson wrote “Under the Bamboo Tree” and a dozen popular favorites beside choruses and marches. Clarence Cameron White has composed and adapted and Maud Cuney Hare has revived and explained Creole music. Edmund T. Jenkins has won medals at the Royal Academy in London. Among the colored performers on the piano are R. Augustus Lawson, who has often been soloist at the concerts of the Hartford Philharmonic Orchestra; Hazel Harrison, a pupil of Busoni; and Helen Hagen who took the Sanford scholarship at Yale. Carl Diton is a pianist who has transcribed many Negro melodies. Melville Charlton has done excellent work on the organ.
Then we must remember the Negro singers, the “Black Swan” of the early 19th century whose voice compared with Jenny Lind’s; the Hyer sisters, Flora Batson, Florence Cole Talbert, and Roland W. Hayes, the tenor whose fine voice has charmed London, Paris and Vienna and who is now one of the leading soloists of the Boston Symphony Orchestra.
The Negro has been one of the greatest originators of dancing in the United States and in the world. He created the “cake walk” and most of the steps in the “clog” dance which has so enthralled theatre audiences. The modern dances which have swept over the world like the “Tango” and “Turkey Trot” originated among the Negroes of the West Indies. The Vernon Castles always told their audiences that their dances were of Negro origin.[201]
We turn now to other forms of art and more particularly literature. Here the subject naturally divides itself into three parts: first, the influence which the Negro has had on American literature,—and secondly, the development of a literature for and by Negroes. And lastly the number of Negroes who have gained a place in National American literature.
From the earliest times the presence of the black man in America has inspired American writers. Among the early Colonial writers the Negro was a subject as, for instance, in Samuel Sewall’s “Selling of Joseph,” the first American anti-slavery tract published in 1700. But we especially see in the influence of the Negro’s condition in the work of the masters of the 19th century, like Ralph Waldo Emerson, John Greenleaf Whittier, James Russell Lowell, Walt Whitman, Julia Ward Howe, Harriet Beecher Stowe and Lydia Maria Child. With these must be named the orators Wendell Phillips, Charles Sumner, John C. Calhoun, Henry Ward Beecher. In our own day, we have had the writers of fiction, George U. Cable, Thomas Nelson Page, Thomas Dixson, Ruth McEnery Stewart, William Dean Howells, Thomas Wentworth Higginson.
It may be said that the influence of the Negro here is a passive influence and yet one must remember that it would be inconceivable to have an American literature, even that written by white men, and not have the Negro as a subject. He has been the lay figure, but after all, the figure has been alive, it has moved, it has talked, felt and influenced.
In the minds of these and other writers how has the Negro been portrayed? It is a fascinating subject which I can but barely touch: in the days of Shakespeare and Southerne the black man of fiction was a man, a brave, fine, if withal over-trustful and impulsive, hero. In science he was different but equal, cunning in unusual but mighty possibilities. Then with the slave trade he suddenly became a clown and dropped from sight. He emerged slowly beginning about 1830 as a dull stupid but contented slave, capable of doglike devotion, superstitious and incapable of education. Then, in the abolition controversy he became a victim, a man of sorrows, a fugitive chased by blood-hounds, a beautiful raped octoroon, a crucified Uncle Tom, but a lay figure, objectively pitiable but seldom subjectively conceived. Suddenly a change came after Reconstruction. The black man was either a faithful old “Befoh de wah” darky worshipping lordly white folk, or a frolicking ape, or a villain, a sullen scoundrel, a violator of womanhood, a low thief and misbirthed monster. He was sub-normal and congenitally incapable. He was represented as an unfit survival of Darwinian natural selection. Philanthropy and religion stood powerless before his pigmy brain and undeveloped morals. In a “thousands years”? Perhaps. But at present, an upper beast. Out of this today he is slowly but tentatively, almost apologetically rising—a somewhat deserving, often poignant, but hopeless figure; a man whose only proper end is dramatic suicide physically or morally. His trouble is natural and inborn inferiority, slight by scientific measurement but sufficient to make absolute limits to his possibilities, save in exceptional cases.
And here we stand today. As a normal human being reacting humanly to human problems the Negro has never appeared in the fiction or the science of white writers, with a bare half dozen exceptions; while to the white southerner who “knows him best” he is always an idiot or a monster, and he sees him as such, no matter what is before his very eyes. And yet, with all this, the Negro has held the stage. In the South he is everything. You cannot discuss religion, morals, politics, social life, science, earth or sky, God or devil without touching the Negro. It is a perennial and continuous and continual subject of books, editorials, sermons, lectures and smoking car confabs. In the north and west while seldom in the center, the Negro is always in the wings waiting to appear or screaming shrill lines off stage. What would intellectual America do if she woke some fine morning to find no “Negro” Problem?