08 
THE NEGRO IN POEM, SONG, AND STORY. 
(Wirn Musicat Iniusrrations). 
By Mr. H. A. CHAMPION. 22nd March, 1904. 

The President, Mr. W. L. Grant, in introducing the Lecturer, 
mentioned that Mr. A. Strange, J.P., one of the Vice-Presidents 
of the Club, was that week leaving Burnley for a trip to the 
Kast. They all wished a pleasant journey and safe return for 
himself and his good wife, and hoped they would derive much 
benefit from their pilgrimage to those scenes of sacred history in 
the Holy Land, in which few travellers had during their life taken 
more interest. (Hear, hear.) 
The Lecturer treated the audience to a unique discourse on the 
various phases of the negro’s history—written with the lash 
more than the pen, recorded not in ink but in tears, blood and 
the sweat of ignominious servitude. His peculiar disposition 
had a charm all its own, made up of strangely assorted incon- 
sistent elements. He was simple as a child, yet cunning as a 
fox, industrious but lazy, a disregard of the value of time, honest 
yet gipsy-like and cunning, slow to resent an injury to himself, 
yet quick in defence of others. Of him good old Thomas Fuller 
said he was ‘‘ God’s image cut in ebony.’’ Mankind was made 
up of seventy-two distinct races, which had descended from three 
fundamental types—the white, the yellow, and the black. Shem, 
Ham, and Japheth founded the three great races which peopled 
the world, and at the time of the great dispersion, estimated at 
2500 z.c., the black, the descendants of Ham, were forced to go 
south into Africa, and east into the islands of the Indian 
Archipelago. 
After an historical review of the traffic in slavery and the part 
taken in it from the reign of Queen Elizabeth to 1833, when 
slavery was abolished throughout British Dominions, the Lecturer 
referred to the songs of the negroes, the nature of which showed 
that in spite of the inhumanity practiced towards them, they 
remained patient, cheerful, and apparently a contented people. 
They had no written literature of any kind, and their songs 
were passed down from generation to generation. It was to the 
Jubilee Singers who visited England that they owed one of the 
earliest collections of negro songs published. They soon 
made the negro melodies popular throughout the country, their 
