d. William Dean Howells at length
gave him a helping hand, and Dodd, Mead & Co. published _Lyrics of Lowly
Life_. Dunbar wrote both in classic English and in the dialect that
voiced the humor and the pathos of the life of those for whom he spoke.
What was not at the time especially observed was that in numerous poems
he suggested the discontent with the age in which he lived and thus
struck what later years were to prove an important keynote. After he had
waited and struggled so long, his success was so great that it became a
vogue, and imitators sprang up everywhere. He touched the heart of his
people and the race loved him.

By 1896 also word began to come of a Negro American painter, Henry O.
Tanner, who was winning laurels in Paris. At the same time a beautiful
singer, Mme. Sissieretta Jones, on the concert stage was giving new
proof of the possibilities of the Negro as an artist in song. In the
previous decade Mme. Marie Selika, a cultured vocalist of the first
rank, had delighted audiences in both America and Europe, and in 1887
had appeared Flora Batson, a ballad singer whose work at its best was of
the sort that sends an audience into the wildest enthusiasm. In 1894,
moreover, Harry T. Burleigh, competing against sixty candidates, became
baritone soloist at St. Georges's Episcopal Church, New York, and just a
few years later he was to be employed also at Temple Emanu-El, the Fifth
Avenue Jewish synagogue. From abroad also came word of a brilliant
musician, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, who by his "Hiawatha's Wedding-Feast"
in 1898 leaped into the rank of the foremost living English composers.
On the more popular stage appeared light musical comedy, intermediate
between the old Negro minstrelsy and a genuine Negro drama, the
representative companies becoming within the next few years those of
Cole and Johnson, and Williams and Walker.

Especially outstanding in the course of the decade, however, was the
work of the Negro soldier in the Spanish-American War. There were at
the time four regiments of colored regulars in the Army of the United
States, the Twenty-fourth Infantry, the Twenty-fifth Infantry, the
Ninth Cavalry, and the Tenth Cavalry. When the war broke out President
McKinley sent to Congress a message recommending the enlistment of more
regiments of Negroes. Congress failed to act; nevertheless colored
troops enlisted in the volunteer service in Massachusetts, Indiana,
Illinois, Kansas, Ohio, North Carolina,