Music: Baltimore Lynching

Another lynching was done in Maryland last week, this time not on the ragged Eastern Shore but in the proud old city of Baltimore. The Baltimore Civic Opera Company was responsible when it put on a one-act affair called Swing Low. In it Tenor A. Roy Williams, blacked up as a Negro, was making harmless love to Soprano Elsie Craft (also in blackface) when an operatic mob appeared to drag him offstage to a hanging.

Two Baltimoreans, Pianist Emmanuel Wad and Playwright Elmer Greensfelder, wrote Swing Low. The title refers not to the...

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