RACES: Florence Mills Warned

It was one of the most brilliant affairs of the season. The guests did not begin to arrive, at the Foot-Lights Club in West 131st Street, until well after midnight. When they did come, they were the elite— Pope B. Billups, candidate for Judge; Dr. Alain Locke, professor of philosophy at Howard University; Actress Gertrude Saunders, Composer Ford Dabney and many another Harlem notable—fashionable Dr. H. Binga Dismond, for example, and ¶ Franklin Carr, the mortician. The ten-course dinner had been cooked by Irvin ¶ Miller himself, president of the Foot-Lights Club and of Miller Productions, Inc., brother of Flournoy D. Miller, the musical comedian. Flournoy Miller’s stage partner, Aubrey Lyles, was there, as one of the principal speakers. And of course there was the guest of honor, Actress Florence Mills, just back from

European triumphs. Loosely speaking it was a gala “Saturday night” party, but no one expected to get home until well along in a merry Sunday morning.

The speechmaking began along about the fifth or sixth course, as might have been expected; but not until nine or ten others had spoken did Aubrey Lyles arise to deliver the speech for which the evening was long to be remembered.

Mr. Lyles is a short, vanilla-colored gentleman whose serious cast of countenance belies his reputation as one of the most irresistible Negro stage comedians who ever slapped a softshoe. In fact it was quite by accident that he went on the stage. People who were convulsed by the Messrs. Miller & Lyles in Shuffle Along, Runnin Wild, George White’s Scandals, Rang Tang, and other reviews, would be surprised to know that diminutive Aubrey Lyles and tall Flournoy D. Miller (nephew of Bishop Evans Tyree of the African Methodist Church) were undergraduates at Fisk University when they got their first laugh. They had to box together in a gymnasium class, and the discrepancy in their sizes was so ludicrous that each instinctively “clowned it.” After that they worked up skits on purpose and still later, caught stage fever. But Aubrey Lyles still has the serious face of the young medical student he once was, and the speech he made in the Foot-Lights Club to Florence Mills and his other friends was as serious as could be.

Mr. Lyles spoke so quietly, so politely, so circumspectly, that none present quite realized what bitter things he was saying until he was nearly done. None thought to take his words down verbatim, yet as he finished they realized that he had pronounced a judgment as scornful as it was scathing upon a white man who is popularly supposed to be loved by Negroes— Author Carl Van Vechten of Nigger Heaven, long a cat-fancier but lately a collector as well of Negro art, a patron of Negro poets, a frequenter of Harlem cabarets and apartments.

Mr. Lyles came right out and warned Miss Mills that Mr. Van Vechten’s interest in Negroes would do her no good; warned her to steer clear of him and turn a deaf ear to his flattery. Mr. Van Vechten, said Mr. Lyles, had only brought shame upon Negroes by taking an “esthetic” interest in their art. Mr. Van Vechten’s real purpose, said Mr. Lyles, was to encourage and exaggerate Negro vulgarity and thus, subtly, pander to the “white supremacy” notion of Nordics. Let Florence Mills beware of Carl Van Vechten lest she, pride of “Race People,” lose race caste.