Page:Women of distinction.djvu/183

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WOMEN OF DISTINCTION.
153

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