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238 The Crisis

is a proper, if somewhat tardy, recognition of the claims of our large colored population to representation in this branch of the city government. No Negro has been a member of the board since the creation of the greater city. In Brooklyn, a Negro served as an education commissioner from 1894 to 1898, retiring when the city was consolidated.

Dr. E. P. Roberts, Mayor Mitchel's appointee, was formerly a medical inspector of the Board of Education. He has been interested in educational work for many years, and his appointment had the indorsement of the most prominent Negro educators in the country. Of his fitness for the position there is no question.

The Chicago Herald says:

A Negro youth, the son of a barber, is Chicago's most honored football player of the season of 1916. Pollard of Brown, a student earning his own livelihood while seeking education, has been accorded the highest recognition open to the college athlete.

Chosen by most of the sporting writers as a member of their group of stars, the Negro player has finally been named by Walter Camp as a member of his All-American eleven. The veteran Yale coach, of course, did no more than sanction a success already registered. As the leading member of a team which triumphed over Yale and Harvard, Pollard had hitherto been acclaimed as one of the great players of the year. But this final selection assured the barber's son his place in the annals of amateur sport.

The Chicago Negro is not the first Negro to reach this reward. A generation ago William H. Lewis of Boston, later an Assistant Attorney General of the United States, was a Harvard contribution to the All-American football team. Lewis first and now Pollard are inspiring examples to their fellows. They have proved that color is not an insuperable handicap to honor on the field of sport.

Music and Dancing

Lada, the dancer, says in the San Francisco Chronicle:

America got its ragtime rhythm from the Southern Negro. He brought it from Africa and has nourished it and kept it alive during his residence in America. It began in the jungles of darkest Africa when the savages danced in their religious ceremonies. It was pounded forth on the drum, and the peculiar syncopation which makes it today provocative of muscular expression was worked out by the squatting drummers to keep time to the monotonous "step-step-stepping" of the dancers.

Beating in regular and ever-recurrent time and throwing on quick beats for half and quarter time, these tom-tom beaters learned how to inspire their fellows to greatest muscular action.

Ragtime it was then and nothing more. The white race got it from the levee and plantation house, where the slaves and later the free Negroes amused themselves happily with its performance.

It is the most powerful and naturally expressive dance music that the world has ever known.

The slow throbbing waltz music appeals to the dreamy, esthetic side of man; he wants to sing to it perhaps more than to dance to it; but when ragtime is played--what is there to do but dance? The thing that makes ragtime catchy is rhythm, not melody.

In my first serious study of dancing I observed Negroes and I analyzed their great proficiency in the art. They are, by far, the best natural dancers of this world, for their art is spontaneous, primitive and full of unction.

Gartenlaube, of Berlin, says, according to Musical America:

We have long known, that Negroes have a particular predilection for music. They sing all the time, everywhere, apropos of everything. It is, indeed, of very great interest to observe how the art of song aids a race which can neither read nor write to preserve the memory of certain events. Thus there was composed at Stanley Falls a few years ago a song called "O Lupembe," in honor of the major then resident. As surely and as rapidly as the most popular of our own refrains, this song spread over the whole extent of the great empire, and today the farthest echoes resound with its accents.

The New London, Conn., Telegraph writes:

We might as well admit that the only really native music we have that amounts to anything is "Negro music." The fact that Negroes have written little of it makes no difference. It is due none the less to the American Negro. This wonderfully musical race has furnished the one type of music which Americans all love, and which is thus far our only distinctive musical gift to the world. It is absurd to iron out the dialect, starch the grammar and rhetoric and make over our lovely old darkey songs into prim "literature" that will please nobody but bloodless pedagogues.

The Jim Crow Car

We received the following letter in the early fall inscribed, "A Word of Warning to Those Who Travel by Rail:"

We wish to warn you of the accommodations between Washington and Jacksonville, especially by way of the Seaboard Air Line Railroad.

I left Washington on train Number 1 in the usual way, the Jim Crow car (that is a coach divided into two compartments for the use of colored passengers; one part for [[...]]

The Looking Glass 239

use as a smoker, and the other part of the car for passengers). When we were leaving Savannah, all colored passengers were compelled by the conductor to file into the one-half coach, used as a smoker where men and women were obliged to use the same toilet. The news butcher occupied the best seats in that one-half part of the Jim Crow car, the same being packed with passengers who were very uncomfortable owing to the crowded condition--all for the purpose of affording accommodations to six white men, who could have been placed in other cars which were attached to the train for the use of white passengers.

We, as passengers, take this method of warning the traveling public (colored) just what to expect from some of the officials of the great transportation companies of the South, and we wish to let it be known that we do not mean to sit idle and take this kind of treatment after paying our fares just as others have to do, and keep our mouths shut.

Manufacturing Prejudice

1. The facts:

J. E. Teiper, his mother, brother and sister, were in an automobile. The mother and brother were killed, the sister had her skull fractured and Teiper had a "severe contusion on the forehead." He explained that the murderous attack was made "by a man, apparently a Negro."

2. The Headlines:

Murderous Negro Bent on Robbery Attacks Family Party on the Lonely Road.

Mother and Son Victims

Girl Dying and Brother is Wounded Before He Can Offer Resistance.
N.Y. Press, Feb. 1, 1916.

Survivor of Motor Tragedy Admits Ownership of Weapon Found Near Crime.

Attends Victims' Funerals

Sister Still Unconscious and at the Point of Death.
N. Y. Press, Feb. 3, 1916.

Teiper Is Indicted.

Son is Charged with the Murder of His Mother.

3. In December, 1916, Teiper was convicted and sentenced for the murder of his mother in the second degree.

Miscellaneous

Until we live up to Mr. Wilson's promise in his Mobile speech, that we are not going to take any more territory to the south of us, we shall woo in vain South American business and friendship. Until we agree to respect the rights of small Caribbean nationalities and treat differently the citizens of those we have annexed or purchased, our moral protests as to Serbia and Belgium must lack convincing force. The governmental problems in our island possessions alone afford vast opportunity for statesmanship. Are we, a republic, to continue to give overbearing governors to Porto Rico? Are we really to turn over our new Danish Islands to army or navy for administration? These are questions that need prompt and clear-cut answers.--New York Evening Post.

The time for the renewal of saloon licenses is at hand and we Negroes who live near the Attucks School are hoping the authorities will spare us the humiliation of seeing a saloon on the northeast corner of Eighteenth and Woodland half a block from the school. To continue this saloon at this place would be an injustice to the decent Negroes and a menace to the 600 children who attend the school.

All we can do is to "protest." This matter is in the hands of men who profess friendship for the Negro. Now is their time to prove it. Would the school board and the good white people of this city permit a saloon near one of the white schools?
--Kansas City, Kan., Star.

Julian Street has an article on "The Negro" in Collier's of January 27. It is what one would expect in Collier's--sensational, unfair, and crawling in its attitude to the white South. We shall refer to this article editorially next month.