advance of his master, and they gave him a room at once, thanks to the reflected refulgence of this supposed ownership by a white man! He could not have got one at any price had they known that he was a free man and paid his own bills.
There was one college in Ohio, that at Oberlin, which admitted coloured students to the same privileges as white ones, and his parents would have gladly aided him in obtaining a college education. But the obstacles in the way of using it, either as a means of usefulness or of earning a livelihood, were so great, that it seemed to them not worth the while. In those days the most a coloured man could look forward to was a position as waiter or hostler in a white man's hotel; or possibly, if he was exceptionally thrifty and subservient, to the ownership of a small barber's shop. After he had learned the printer's trade, in fact, he found it of no use to him. White printers would not tolerate the presence of a black compositor, and he was obliged to seek other means of getting a livelihood.
Going to Tennessee after the war, he became interested in the work of the Jubilee Singers, and joined them previous to their second visit to Great Britain in 1875.
Benjamin W. Thomas was the son of an exhorter in the Baptist Church at Bennettsville, South Carolina, and the eldest of his family of four children. When he was quite young, the whole family were sold to a man living in another part of the State. When the war broke out, in 1861, his master went
