Music: Colored Christians

Sixty-one years ago in Cincinnati eleven Negroes who called themselves the "Colored Christian Singers" shambled onto the platform of the old Vine Street Congregational Church. All eleven had been slaves, eaten hominy and bacon breakfasts in rude, smoky cabins, worked all day in cottonfields, sung spirituals in the light of the moon around their cabin doors. But they sang no spirituals that night in Cincinnati. Spirituals were slave songs. Accordingly they sang orthodox hymns and temperance pieces which made less impression on the audience than the rusty, ill-fitting suits the men wore and the women's dresses so ludicrously assorted that Jennie Jackson, 19, was taken to be the mother of Eliza Walker, 15.

In Cincinnati one afternoon last week 60 Negro singers supplied a sequel to that long-ago concert. Wearing neat-looking vestments which Mrs. John Davison Rockefeller had given them, they appeared in Emery Auditorium, stirred a fashionable audience with their singing of difficult church music and of spirituals. Like the eleven Christians of long ago, they had come from Fisk University in Nashville, Tenn.* The first Fisk Singers made $50 from their concert in the Vine Street Church. They turned it over to refugees from the Chicago fire which broke out next day, and set out on a tour which paved a glory-road for all Fisk Singers to come. Known as the Fisk Jubilee Singers they arrived in New York, reluctantly put spirituals on their programs and went to sing in Henry Ward Beecher's Church in Brooklyn. The first time he heard them Preacher Beecher, as ardent an abolitionist as his sister Harriet Beecher Stowe, sat down and addressed a letter to his parishioners: "Avail yourselves of a rare opportunity to hear a style of music rapidly passing away, music . . . sung as only they can sing it who know how to keep time to a master's whip."

Dr. Beecher started Northerners talking about spirituals and about Fisk—the School for freedmen which a Union General, Clinton Bowen Fisk, a Union Chaplain, Erastus Milo Cravath, and a Union schoolteacher, one John Ogden, established after the War in the Union Barracks at Nashville. Erastus Cravath, its first president and father of famed Lawyer Paul Drennan Cravath, the Metropolitan Opera's Board Chairman, took the Jubilee Singers abroad after their New York success, to Stockholm where they gave 52 concerts in a single season, to England where Queen Victoria was a disappointment to them because she received them in a plain black dress and widow's cap, to Germany where the Crown Prince, father of the Kaiser of Doom, gave a glittering court reception more to their liking.

On their early tours the Jubilee Singers earned $150,000 with which Jubilee Hall was built to replace the Union barracks. As the singers went on advertising the University, Fisk equipment grew until the first stack of spelling books and New Testaments, bought by selling for old iron the rusty handcuffs from Nashville's slavepens, became a legend. Now there are 25 well-equipped campus buildings at Fisk (not counting the nearby grocery store where students go to eat fried fish). Academically it has Class A rating.