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MEN OF THE MONTH

CHARLES L. MITCHELL

THE colored race lost a famous fighter in the month of May, when Charles L. Mitchell died at his home in Toxbury, Mass. Born in Hartford, Conn., in 1829, of a well-known colored family, he went to work as a

[[portrait of a man with caption: "THE LATE CHARLES L. MITCHELL]]

printer in Boston, in 1853, and found congenial employment on William Lloyd Garrison's Liberator. He worked with the great abolitionist until the Civil War broke out, but he enlisted with the Fifty-fifth Massachusetts Regiment as soon as the colored men were called on.
He had a remarkable record for bravery in the war. He was camp printer for a time; he begged, however, to be sent to the firing one and took part in the battle of Honey Hill, in which one-third of the force engaged was killed. His foot was taken off by a cannon shot, but they told the story of how, when he was being carried bleeding from the field, he sat upright on the stretcher to cheer a regiment that went by to make another charge. The incident was widely commented on at the time and shortly afterward he received a second lieutenancy, one of the few colored men to be thus honored.
Returning to Boston with what Wendell Phillips called "that added grace, the halting which is the stateliest step of the soldier," he was elected to the legislature by a handsome majority, and he was also given a post in the customs house, which he held for forty-three years. He took a prominent part in the life of the city and was in close touch with all movements for the betterment of his race. He was one of the pallbearers at the funeral of Mr. Garrison, and served as one of the five members of General N. P. Hallowell's staff when the Robert Gould Shaw monument was unveiled. When the Cuban War broke

[[portrait of a man with the caption: CHARLES BURROUGHS]]

[[portrait of a man with the caption: GEORGE E. HAYNES]]

out he was so active in organizing the colored Company L of the Sixth Massachusetts that his injured leg sent him again to the hospital and he suffered another amputation, so that he was as truly wounded in Cuba's cause as he had been when he fought for the freedom of the slave. Mr. Mitchell married Miss Nellie Brown of Dover, N. H., who is well known as a musician and who survives him.

CHARLES BURROUGHS

MR. CHARLES BURROUGHS, who was born in Galveston, Tex., in 1875, has a unique record. For three years he has lectured on Shakespeare under the New York Board of Education, speaking to audiences in every borough of the greater city and achieving a remarkable success.
Mr. Burroughs had to leave school at the age of fourteen, but that did not incline him to give up thoughts of further education, and he managed to enter Wilberforce University and graduate from it in 1897. By that time, however, he had become convinced that his future lay in the field of vocal expression, and he entered the Boston School of Expression where he studied for a year. At the beginning of his career as a public reader he followed the lines of familiar dramatic type, but in 1906 he determined to emphasize the interpretative and educational phases of his work, and in recent years his appearances have been largely before college and academic audiences. Mr. Lewis F. Mott, of the department of English in the College of the City of New York, has lectured together with Mr. Burroughs, and he wrote to the department of education that he found the audience, which had listened to him with patience, got what it wanted when Mr. Burroughs rose. "His readings of many passages I cannot easily forget<" he said, in the speaking of Mr. Burroughs' interpretation of "Macbeth." "They were, in my humble judgment, superb."

TWO DOCTORS OF PHILOSOPHY

THE commencements of 1912 have seen two colored men receive the degree of doctor of philosophy, Columbia University conferring it on Mr. George Edmund Haynes and Harvard on Mr. C. G. Woodson.
Mr. Haynes was born in Pine Bluff, Ark., in 1880. He attended the Richard Allen Institute in his native town, the Agricultural and Mechanical College at Normal, Ala., and then entered the preparatory school at Fisk University. He received his A. B. degree from Fisk in 1903. He had worked nearly every step of his educational way, but he determined to go on and won a tuition 

[[portrait of a man with caption: C. G. WOODSON