Famous Negro Singer gives Views on American Colour Bar

Mr. Duncan considered that although strenuous efforts are being made by the Negro people and indeed by all progressive organisations to abolish legislation such as the Poll Tax, which prevents the majority of Negroes in the South from voting, the Southern landlords will stop at nothing to secure the dis-enfranchisement of Negroes, and also that large mass of "poor whites," In all struggles for equal rights, the common man takes the initiative and is in the forefront. Progressive legislation is never Just granted, but won, sometimes in very bitter struggles. Mr. Duncan outlined the terrible conditions which exist in the South, the disgraceful poverty as illustrated in the film "The River," the illiteracy, the ignorance, the "Jim Crow" universities, the fact that white children in the State of Mississippi, for example, receive on the average an education grant of $46 compared with only $6 for the Negro. Negro-white unity is the key to progress in the South as it has been in the North. In the cities on the lower Mississippi, this has been achieved by the stevedores with splendid results, and the white workers will not accept any concessions without the Negroes getting their share, and vice versa. The Southern politicians in Congress, backed by the Southern landlords, hold back the progress of America and they are there only because they have succeeded in dividing the whites and Negroes.

Mr. Duncan is Professor of Music at Howard University, the most famous Negro college in the country. However. Howard, like most colleges in the North, is not a "Jim Crow" university, but is the traditional Negro seat of learning and culture and endowed with Negro money and receives a Federal grant of 1,000,000 dollars a year. Howard University has a small proportion of white students and staff. Many other famous colleges in the North, such as Yale and Harvard, have a number of coloured professors, lecturers and students. In the South it is a completely different story. No coloured people are admitted into the universities, and those which the Southern authorities in their magnanimity condescend to set aside for Negroes, are on the whole inferior institutions. Mr. Duncan refuses to give public concerts in the South simply because very few of his people manage to gain admittance and also because no hotels will admit him. On occasions he has visited Negro universities and then they are frequently gate-crashed by whites who will accept his voice but nothing else.

Mr. Duncan related an incident which happened to a friend of his, the son of van Loon, the author. Mr. van Loon. Jun., was during the war an officer in the U.S. Army in charge of a Negro unit stationed in the South. He trained these men to be a real crack outfit in gunnery, drill, etc., far better than all the neighbouring ones which were mostly white. He also treated his men as normal human beings and showed no little kindness and sympathy towards them. For these terrible crimes, the local members of the master-race, their vanity wounded, actually beat him up. Mr. van Loon was, however, shortly promoted, against his wish, and moved to a safe place.

In reference to the recent controversy in the "Southern Cross," he said that while his own abilities were of small import, it was an insult to his people to say that a Negro should necessarily be at his best only in spirituals. Many famous artists such as Kipnis, Lottie Lehman, recognise Roland Hayes as the greatest exponent of the German lieder and still go to his concerts expressly to learn from him.