Women of distinction/Chapter 31
CHAPTER XXXI.
LADIES OF THE FISK JUBILEE SINGERS.
As this volume is exclusively devoted to the Distinguished Women of the race it is hardly necessary, in the beginning of this chapter, to offer any apology for our exclusion of the male members of the Fisk Jubilee Singers. Therefore, let it be understood that we have no intention whatever to detract in any way a single one of the many honors due these gentlemen for the valuable and indispensable part which they played in the accomplishment of that great work. As we must necessarily be brief, suffice it to say, "Honor to whom honor is due."
The following are the names of the ladies who are said to have been members of that famous club of singers: Misses Ella Shepherd, Maggie Porter, Jennie Jackson, Georgia Gordon, Maggie Carnes, Julia Jackson, Eliza Walker, Minnie Tate, Josephine Moore, Mabel Lewis, A. W. Robinson, Pattie J. Malone.
We quote the following from the valuable little book, "The Story of the Jubilee Singers," by Mr. J. B. T. Marsh: At different times twenty-four persons in all have belonged to the company. Twenty of these have been slaves and three of the other four were of slave parentage.
Whether the company was equally composed of twelve males and twelve females does not appear from the above quotation.
Mr. J. B. T. Marsh also makes the following statement with reference to their first three years' work, which furnishes another link to the chain of evidence that an humble beginning is by no means an assurance of failure in large and difficult undertakings of the Afro-American:
They were at times without money to buy needed clothing; yet in less than three years they returned, bringing back with them nearly one hundred thousand dollars. They had been turned away from hotels and driven out of railway waiting-rooms, because of their color; but they had been received with honor by the President of the United States; they had sung their slave songs before the Queen of Great Britain, and they had gathered as invited guests about the breakfast table of her Prime Minister. Their success was as remarkable as their mission was unique.
It is but just to state here that the ostricism which they received at "hotels" and "railway waiting-rooms" all, possibly, took place in our liberty-loving America, as we have never known of the denial of rights to colored ladies of America when traveling in foreign counties.
A letter just received from Rev. E. M. Cravath, D. D., President of Fisk University, contains the following, in answer to questions by the author:
The University raised through the Jubilee Singers in the seven years' work one hundred and fifty thousand dollars net in money, and secured books, paintings and apparatus to the value of seven or eight thousand dollars more. The Jubilee Singers sang in England, Scotland, Ireland, Holland, Switzerland and Germany. Mr. Lowden, who was a member of the company while under charge of the University, took a company, on his own responsibility, to Australia, India, Japan and around the world.
Some idea of what these young women willingly and bravely encountered, that their less favored brothers and sisters might in after years enjoy the advantages of an education, may be gathered from the following words of Mr. Marsh:
At Zanesville, also, their concert did not meet expenses; but a friend paid their hotel bill, which amounted to twenty-seven dollars. What figure it would have reached had not the six girls been put into a single room over a shed, where the bed-clothing was so offensive that they were constrained to roll the most of it in a bundle and lay it on the porch while they slept wrapped in their water-proofs, is not known.
The gross receipts of the last seven days of their tour through Connecticut amounted to more than $3,900.
The total receipts of one month's work in England amounted to nearly $20,000. These two items alone are arguments, strong and forcible, in favor of what great things the race may accomplish by concert of effort.
On their return from New York to Nashville, having secured a first-class passage, they were ejected from the waiting-room for ladies in Louisville by some local prejudice which it seems the superintendent of the railroad could not overcome. Thereupon he placed at their disposal and for their own special comfort an extra coach. This he has willingly done every time since when they have traveled that road. However many and severe the difficulties they had to meet, one thing is certain—that the results of their work have been far more elevating and inspiring; far more beneficial to themselves as matters of actual experience and travel; far more beneficial .to their race as adjuncts to their education and helpers in the destruction of prejudice, than the indignities heaped upon them and the thrusts made at them can ever tear down or destroy. While we have spoken mostly of their financial success, we have been none the less mindful of their rounded and fully well-developed success in every direction. Had we the available space many newspaper clippings would here appear which would do great honor to any company.
It will also be seen that we have said nothing of the personal history of these twelve young women, simply for want of space. The Supplement to the Jubilee Singers contains much valuable information as to their success under the new (colored) manager (F. J. Lowdin, its author, also), who deserves unmeasured credit for his bold and arduous undertaking, which was most wonderfully successful. Now, when it is remembered that the songs they sang originated, not in some musical conservatory of the North, or of the West, but are the promptings of religious zeal in the untrained minds of the slave in the cotton fields, or in midnight secret prayer-meeting on the sugar farms of the South; or they were the productions of untrained minds of the ex-slave in the heat of camp-meetings or in their lonely and loathsome huts in the "Sunny South." And then when it is remembered that they who sang them were not graduates of our best musical conservatories, but were the humble ex-slaves and the children of former slaves, whose gifts were the real and mysterious endowments of the all-wise and ever good God, then the glory of their accomplishments heightens and expands as it could not otherwise do.
In speaking of them, after they had spent some time in Germany, the Berliner Musik-Zeitung, a very critical journal, in passing its final sentence upon them, said:
Not only have we had a rare musical treat, but our musical ideas have also received enlargement, and we feel that something may be learned of these negro singers, if only we will consent to break through the fetters of custom and long use.
Long after this great building, "Jubilee Hall," which is dedicated to their memory, shall have crumbled to dust and shall no longer mark the spot upon which it now rests; long after its present occupants and the Jubilee Singers, who gave it birth, along with this humble author, shall all have returned to their mother, dust, and be no more among the living creatures of earth, still the deeds of this most wonderful company of self-sacrificing singers and ex-slaves will ever live as imperishable monuments to their memory. And then may they, with all the just made perfect, sing jubilee songs, even more gloriously triumphant than the songs of earth.
FISK UNIVERSITY—JUBILEE HALL.