Page:The Story of the Jubilee Singers (7th).djvu/54

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page needs to be proofread.

could draw an audience away from the greatest preacher and lecturer in the land.

The admission receipts at this concert were over $1,200. The collection taken for them the next Sunday evening, in the Second Congregational Church in Norwich, was the largest contribution they had ever received at a Sunday service, and the gross income of the last seven days of this Connecticut campaign exceeded $3,900.

At the Sterling House, in Bridgeport, the party were assigned to some of the best rooms in that first-class hotel, and admitted to the same privileges in the dining-room as the most aristocratic guests. The answer of the proprietor, when asked if his boarders complained of such attentions to coloured people, was pithy and to the point, "I keep this hotel, sir!"

At Norwich they were the guests of Connecticut's distinguished War Governor and Senator, the late Hon. William A. Buckingham. But the very next day they were turned out of an hotel in Newark, New Jersey, by a publican who would have felt honoured by even a bow from Governor Buckingham on the street. This tavern-keeper had inferred, it seems, when accommodations were engaged for them in advance, that they were a company of "nigger minstrels." Although they had already retired to the rooms assigned to them before he discovered that their faces were coloured by their Creator, and not with burnt cork, he promptly drove them into the street.

The outrage was the harder to bear because they