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20 THE CRISIS

it was the composer's intention to come here early in the season and personally conduct the first European performance of this new violin concerto in G minor. * * * He was a man of sterling character, he was a good husband and father and a staunch and loyal friend."
The London Daily Telegraph says:
"The work of Coleridge-Taylor must be regarded as adding lustre to the history of musical composition in England. That his career, already so fruitful, should have been cut off while he was at the height of his artistic power, is a tragedy whose pathos will be universally recognized." The Philadelphia Public Ledger says that he exemplifies the genius of the African race in music, and continues: "Coleridge-Taylor was to modern music what our American Negro poet, Paul Laurence Dunbar, was to literature. His genius was not of the very highest order, but it was of elevated rank. He never set his pen to an ignoble or unworthy score. The world of melody is impoverished by the premature termination of the labors of one who represented by far the best achievement of his race in his chosen field of endeavor."
A writer in the New York Tribune speaks of Mr. Taylor's visit to the Litchfield County Choral Union in 1910, and says: "Coleridge-Taylor, who endeared himself to all by his charming personality, repeatedly by word of mouth and in letters assured me and others that the whole-hearted welcome accorded him by his host and hostess at Norfolk and the cordiality with which he was received by those he met there had filled him with new energy, enthusiasm and love for work."
The Syracuse Post-Standard, remembering the artist's descent, says that Providence did not visit upon the offspring of this union the penalty which racial amalgamation is commonly supposed to incur. "He was," it continues, "one of the greatest artists in England."
Miss Natalie Curtis calls attention to the talent of the colored people for music—a talent which in Coleridge-Taylor's case received in England encouragement and honor, whereas in our own country the barrier of race has kept colored musicians, with one or two exceptions, in the music hall, and has made them ashamed of their best heritage—the folk music of the old plantation.
THE NEGRO AND THE UNIONS
There are several indications that the white and black workingmen are beginning to get together. Now and then one hears the old attitude of the Negro echoed as in the Western Outlook, a colored paper, which says:
"We have always contended that unions are no benefit to the Negro and will not tolerate him in them only when they are to be benefited. Take the barbers' union—they are glad to have Negroes as members. Why? Because they control most of he good trade among the whites, and it helps white barbers to keep up prices. In this case they are a benefit to the union. But how is it in other branches of trade? It was only last week Messrs. Siebe & Sons, proprietors of Shell Mound Park, came to us and told us that union musicians want them to sign a contract on January 1, 1913, not to rent the park to any one, club or society, that does not employ union music. He said he had refused to sign, as he could see at a glance it would only affect colored organizations who gave picnics out there."
On the other hand, down in Louisiana white men have begun to get a taste of the way in which colored laborers are treated. The white timber workers tried to organize the workingmen into a union. Their committee of dense in an appeal says:
"When the forest slaves of Louisiana and Texas revolted against peonage, and began, about two years ago, the organization of the Brotherhood of Timber Workers, an industrial union, taking in all the workers in the sawmills and camps, the lumber kings at once recognized the power inherent in such a movement and immediately began a campaign of lying and violence against the union and all persons connected with it or suspected of sympathizing with us.
"First among the cries they raised against us was, of course, the old bunco cries of 'white supremacy' and 'social equality,' coupled with that other cry, 'they are organizing the Negroes against the whites,' which the capitalists and landlords of the South and their political buzzard and social carrion crows always raise in order to justify the slugging and assassination of white and colored workingmen who seek to organize and better the condition of their class. From the day you, the Negro workers, were 'freed,' down to the present hour, these cries have been used to cloak the vilest crimes against
OPINION 21
the workers, white and colored, and to hide the wholesale rape of the commonwealth of the South by as soulless and cold-blooded a set of industrial scalawags and carpetbaggers as ever drew the breath of life.
"For a generation, under the influence of these specious cries, they have kept us fighting each other—us to secure the 'white supremacy' of a tramp and you the 'social equality' of a vagrant. Our fathers 'fell for it,' but we, their children, have come to the conclusion that porterhouse steaks and champagne will look as well on our tables as on those of the industrial scalawags and carpetbaggers; that the 'white supremacy' that means starvation wages and child slavery for us and the 'social equality' that means the same for you, though they may mean the 'high life' and 'Christian civilization' to the lumber kings and landlords, will have to go. As far as we, the workers of the South, are concerned, the only 'supremacy' and 'equality' they have ever granted us is the supremacy of misery and the equality of rags. This supremacy and this equality we, the Brotherhood of Timber Workers, mean to stand no longer than we have an organization big and strong enough to enforce our demands, chief among which is 'A man's life for all the workers in the mills and forests of the South.' Because the Negro workers comprise one-half or more of the labor employed in the Southern lumber industry, this battle cry of ours, 'A man's life for all the workers,' has been considered a menace, and therefore a crime in the eyes of the Southern oligarchy, for they, as well as we, are fully alive to the fact that we can never raise our standard of living and better our conditions so long as they can keep us split, whether on race, craft, religious or national lines, and they have tried and are trying all these methods of division in addition to their campaign of terror, wherein deeds have been and are being committed that would make Diaz blush with shame; they are so atrocious in their white-livered cruelty. For this reason, that they sought to organize all the workers, A. L. Emerson, president of the brotherhood, and sixty-three other union men are now in prison at Lake Charles, La., under indictment, as a result of the massacre of Grabow, where three union men and one association gunman were killed, charged with murder in the first degree, indicted for killing their own brothers, and they will be sent to the gallows or, worse, to the frightful penal farms and levees of Louisiana, unless a united working class comes to their rescue with the funds necessary to defend them and the action that will bring them all free of the grave and the levees.
"Further words are idle. It is a useless waste of paper to tell you, the Negro workers, of the merciless injustice of the Southern Lumber Operators' Association, for your race has learned through tears and blood the hyenaism we are fighting. Enough. Emerson and his associates are in prison because they fought for the unity of all the workers.
"Will you remain silent, turn no hand to help them in this, their hour of great danger?
"Our fight is your fight, and we appeal to you to do your duty by these men, the bravest of the brave! Help us free them all. Join the brotherhood and help us blaze freedom's pathway through the jungles of the South."
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THE JUBILEE
The fiftieth anniversary of the issuing of President Lincoln's preliminary Emancipation Proclamation has brought much comment together with one frightful cartoon in the New York Sun. On the whole, the comments are encouraging.
The Philadelphia Ledger says:
"The problem is still a far cry from the final solution. But if in half a century such gratifying progress—'up from slavery'—has been made, who shall venture to impose a limit to the Negro's developing possibilities of usefulness to himself and to his white neighbor?"
The Boston Post, reviewing some of the main facts concerning the Negro's rights, adds:
"Such is the development of half a century of acknowledged equal manhood. It marks an anniversary that may well be celebrated with pride and with confidence in the future."
The Indianapolis Star calls attention to the double meaning of emancipation:
"Emancipation of the slaves brought freedom to the black race, but its blessings were hardly less to the whites. It lifted a cloud that had always darkened the nation's fame and whose shame was felt by a multitude of citizens; it opened the way for a prosperity and an advance of civilization never before equaled in one-half century in the history of the world. Even yet the effect upon the nation of a genuine and universal sense of liberty has not been fully realized. The debt