p. 18

[NEW YORK POST Tuesday, April 24th, 1945]

Youthbuilders Win an Anti-Bias Victory
by Fern Marja

The mystery of the disappeance of the villain Steamboat has been solved.

Thick-lipped, kinky-haired, with ape-like stance and moronic drawl, Steamboat roamed the pages of the Captain Marvel comic books. "Roamed"--past tens--because a group of youngsters representing one of the 157 chapters of Youthbuilders, Inc., persuaded Fawcett Publications to drop the character.

The crusade originated at Junior High School 120, Manhattan, where the club members were discussing discrimination and what they could do about it. Individual action and responsibility were stressed. Comic book fans, they launched an attack on that front.

Acting upon the advice of Alex H. Lazes, leader of the Junior High School Division of Youthbuilder, a committee called upon William Lieberson, Fawcett Publications' executive editor of comic books. "They were born diplomats," Lazes said today in the organization's headquarters at 120 E. 16th St.

"After announcing they liked Captain Marvel, they went on to explain that Steamboat was a Negro stereotype tending to magnify race prejudice. Lieberson countered that White characters were distorted for the sake of humor. But the kids had a snappy comeback--white characters were both hero and villains; Steamboat was a buffoon, was the only Negro in the strip.

"One boy drew and enlarged portrait of Steamboat and added, 'This is not the Negro race, but your one-and-a-half million readers will think it is.' That clinched it. Lieberson felt the same way."

Tenth Anniversary Concert
Marian Anderson

For ten years the art of Marian Anderson has enriched
the lives of Americans with a deep and abiding musical
experience, and has created for this great lady a unique
place in the hearts of her countrymen.

In a celebration of her tenth anniversary, I have the honor to
announce that Marian Anderson will appear at Carnegie
Hall on December 30th, 1945, to sing the same program
which, a decade ago on that very day, raised the curtain
on one of the most significant careers in concert history.
S. HUROK

One Delightful Evening
Sursum Corda
by REV. JAMES M. GILLIS C.S.P.

It was the end of a long evening of music at Carnegie Hall in New York. In that historiec auditorium the best music in the world is to be heard. At the Metropolitan Opera House one can scarcely tell whether it is the music, or the style, or what I believe the French call le chic, that attracts the audience. Perhaps we may say that in the $7.70 parquet seats and in the boxes, especially in the lower tier--the famous Diamond Horseshe--are to be found the fashionable folk who go "for to see and for to be seen" rather than to hear, while in the upper reaches of the lofty house those who love music for its own sake have their habitat.

But at Carnegie there is no folderol. Style? Yes, but not as a primary consideration. Carnegie habitues go for the music and they are perhaps the most exacting music critics amateur and professional, in all the world.

Well, there were some 4,000 of them present on the night which I speak. They had listened to a long program of 17 songs, with five or six encores. Not what is called "popular songs." Decidedly not. Nothing shoddy, nothing meretricious, or even theatrical. It was all sober, substantial, pure music. Nor did the artiste indulge in any exhibitionism. She had no mannerisms. She turned on no flashy pyrotechnics. She sang as one consecrated to her art, too sincere, too honest to sacrifice the meaning of a song to the vanity of the singer.

There were selections in French, Spanish and English. That evening, as it happened, there were non in Italian or in German, the singers best medium, or in Russian or Finnish in which, they say, she is also at ease.

Obviously nothing showy, theatrical: no claptrap. But the audience was, as it were, entranced for two hours. Then came what was, for me at least, the climax of the joy of the evening. We were favored with a little group of Negro spirituals delivered with genuine religious emotion. Ordinarily one expects these folk songs of the black people to be a bit uncouth if not barbaric. This time they were sung with infinite delicacy and the most exquisite artistry.

When they were finished came a demonstration of how deeply the sould souls of those thousands of people had been stirred. The program had been completed. But no one went home. Instead some hundereds left their seats and rushed to the front of the hall, crowding close to the platform, standing packed in three aisles half way from front to rear. There they stood applauding and crying loudly for more, and more and more.

The singer responded once and again, I think in all six or eight times. Still the crowd would not depart. So once more the artiste condescended graciously, and this time, to the ecstatic delight of the hushed throng sang the Bach-Gounod "Ave Maria."

Hushed! It was as though their very hearts stood still. I have never felt a more holy silence even in church at Mass at the Consecration. If ever a people worer worshipping, it was there and then. I confess that I was deeply moved, not only by the beauty of the hymn, sung as I think I had never heard it before, but with the sens of religious awe manifest among those thousands of people who had a moment previously been clapping their hands and uttering loud cries.

Whether their silence was a tribute to the singer, ro the music, or to religion, who could say? Probably all three. But when the Angelic Salutation "Ave Maria" floated through that vast concert hall as if it came from some unearthly source those of us who as Catholics had been brought up on reverence and love for the Mother of God, could have wept.

Now the name of the singer? Marian Anderson. Other members of her race have achieved high distinction in the art of music, especially vocal music. Paul Robeson and Roland Hayes are still names to conjure with.

Years ago there was, I believe, a famous singer who used to be billed as "The Black Patti." Whether she was that or not I cannot say. But Marian Anderson needs no adventitious association with Patti, or Melba, or Jenny Lind, or Madame Homer or Schumann-Heink. In her own right she is a kind of miracle of nature and art. If only in recognition of what God has gibven her and what she has done with His gift, every civilized and cultured person will respect and reverence the race to which she belongs.

But that, after all, is the least of the things one must say after sitting spell-bound for two or three hours under the magic of that voice, and that personality.