So in
1871 the pilgrimage of the Fisk Jubilee Singers began. North
to Cincinnati they rode,--four half-clothed black boys and
five girl-women,--led by a man with a cause and a purpose.
They stopped at Wilberforce, the oldest of Negro schools,
where a black bishop blessed them. Then they went, fighting
cold and starvation, shut out of hotels, and cheerfully sneered
at, ever northward; and ever the magic of their song kept
thrilling hearts, until a burst of applause in the Congrega-
tional Council at Oberlin revealed them to the world. They
came to New York and Henry Ward Beecher dared to wel-
come them, even though the metropolitan dailies sneered at
his "Nigger Minstrels." So their songs conquered till they
sang across the land and across the sea, before Queen and
Kaiser, in Scotland and Ireland, Holland and Switzerland.
Seven years they sang, and brought back a hundred and fifty
thousand dollars to found Fisk University.
Since their day they have been imitated--sometimes well,
by the singers of Hampton and Atlanta, sometimes ill, by
straggling quartettes. Caricature has sought again to spoil the
quaint beauty of the music, and has filled the air with many
debased melodies which vulgar ears scarce know from the
real.
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