Activities Among Negroes
There is being held this week in Kansas City, Kansas, the annual convention of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. It will be addressed by Attorney Scipeo Jones of Little Rock, Ark., the negro attorney who with the assistance of Morefield Storey fought the cases of the Arkansas peonage victims to a successful conclusion before the Supreme Court of Arkansas, and later the United States Supreme Court. In his address he will tell of these cases of Arkansas riots of 1919 to the court victories of 1923.
The great event of the convention will be the presentation of the Spingarn medal, which will take place this afternoon in the Kansas City, Kansas, (white) auditorium. This medal is valued at $100, and is given every year by Major Spingarn through the N. A, A. C. P. for the most distinguished achievement during the year by an American of African descent. This year it will be presented to Prof. George W. Carver of Tuskegee Institute, Alabama.
Carver was born of slave parentage in a one-room cabin on the plantation of Moses Carver at Diamond Grove, Mo., sixty years ago. He was ten years old before he had an opportunity to enter a school. He then entered a night school at Fort Scott. After nine years he finally reached the high school, where he was graduated, and later entered and was graduated from the Iowa State College, earning the money for his education as a house servant specializing in laundry work..
After winning his bachelor's and master's degree from the Iowa State College he was given charge of a greenhouse, the bacterological laboratory and the department of systematic botany. It was then that he was discovered by the late Booker T. Washington and offered a position which he has retained for the past thirty years. Today he is the head of agricultural science and husbandry at Tuskegee and holds a fellowship in the Royal Society of Great Britain. He was invited to address the ways and means committee of the House of Representatives in Washington, D. C., on the advisability of a tariff on peanuts. He has discovered 145 different foods or useful articles which may be made from the peanut and 107 which may be made from the sweet potato.
The World's Work, in speaking of Professor Carver, said: "Not all these discoveries may prove commercially feasible, yet they indicate a racial genius devoted to practical ends and which men of all races must admire. Professor Carver is a good example as could be found of the economic value to the South of the liberated and enlightened negro."
The committee, in addition to recognizing his scientific achievements, declared that "his clear thought and straightforward attitude have greatly increased interracial knowledge and respect."
The local California branch will have three delegates to this convention - San Jose one and Los Angeles several negro representatives and delegates.
Jean Adams, as a representative of the Universal Negro Improvement Association, sailed last week from New York for Switzerland. He left San Francisco as a delegate from the branch in that city to represent it at the annual convention which recently met in Liberty hall, New York City.
The National Universal Negro Improvement Association at this meeting elected him to serve as its delegate to the League of Nations, which will shortly convene in Geneva, Switzerland. He will present that body a petition from the U. N. I. in which they will ask for the late German West African colonies.
Adams was elected for this diplomatic position because of his education. He is a graduate of the University of France, majoring in history and as a linguist. During the Panama-Pacific International Exposition he served in the French building as interpreter and librarian.
The annual convention of the National Negro Doctors, Dentists and Pharmists was held last week in Kansas City, Kan. They will send to the national government a memorial in which they will voice the justice of having negro doctors and negro nurses to serve in the recently erected hospital at Tuskegee for negro ex-servicemen.
Rev. Pryor, pastor of the First A. M. E. church, Oakland, is busy in bringing to a close his first year's work as pastor of this church. The annual California conference of the A. M. E. church will meet in Los Angeles. beginning September 25, Bishop B. F. Lee. senior bishop of the African Methodist Church, presiding. He will, en route, visit Oakland and San Francisco Sunday, September 23, and will speak in Fifteenth street church in the morning, at Parks chapel in the afternoon, and in Bethel church, San Francisco, In the evening.
Rev. G. C. Coleman of the North Oakland Baptist church left the city Thursday morning for the East. He will attend the fourteenth annual conference of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in Kansas City. He will later attend a Baptist annual convention in Fort Worth, Texas. This meeting will represent the Boyd faction. Rev. Henry Allen Boyd. who, since the death of his father, has been elected secretary of the National Baptist Publishing Board of Nashville, Tenn., will take an active part in the convention,
The state funeral procession of the late President Harding, which was held in Washington, D. C., in addition to the army and navy escort, was made up of every representative organization in Washington. Among those designated by the commissioners of the District of Columbia to take part in the procession as members of the committee of one hundred were the following colored citizens: Rev. E. D. W. Jones, R. H. Rutherford, Dr. A. M. Curtis, Dr. W. A., Warfield, Rev. W. J. Jernagin, James A. Cobb, Kelly Miller, Thomas Jones, John R. Hawkins, Dr. Emmett J. Scott. Perry W. Howard, special assistant to the attorney general, and Mrs. Booker T. Washington.
