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Negro stars. The companies didn't budge. So to prove that Black artists could draw I staged a Billy Eckstine day at the Paramount theatre with the help of Bob Weitman, the theatre progressive theatre manager. The only thing I forgot to do about the day was to tell the local police precinct of our plans. The morning we had the day for Billy the kids blocked traffic around 43rd and Broadway gave the cops a fit trying to have an orderly entrance to the theatre. The record companies took note of the promotion and MGM released all the Billy Eckstine recordings they had and the white kids bought them like hot cakes.

I kept up my attack by accusing the Red Seal department of RCA and the Columbia Masterworks people did not promote Marian Anderson, who was trying to get a 'gig' with the Metropolitan Opera at that time, or Dorothy Maynor, the great lyric soprano or Annie Wiggins Brown, or Todd Duncan, or Paul Robeson the best Baritone on their discs. 

The companies countered by telling me that it was our job to promote our artist and that when artists like Marian Anderson, Maynor or Brown scheduled concerts in New York, they never read any critique of their work in our papers. This was a glaring and true fault. During those days there was only one Negro music critic whose critiques was carried in a Black newspaper and it was a guy in Chicago named Charles Sterling White. I answered them by saying that I was a critic and to prove my boast I began to write a record revue column in the courier called the "Record Rack".

Columbia helped out by sending me to visit their plants in Hartford, Connecticut and RCA sent me to Camden, New Jersey. They recognized me as a reviewer of records by sending me all their classical and popular recordings from Victor and Columbia and race and Black records from Decca, MGM and Capitol. But we did not get any advertising, but I became a critic of recordings.

When I began this new venture I did not own a Machine to play the records on. And this is how all my neigbors [[neighbors]] on the fifth floor of the Riverton apartment got music records because Sinky Jones, Bert Belasco had radios with record players and I would come in their apartment to play the records the companies sent me until I bought a Magnavox radio and phonograph instrument.

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