Music: Highest Achievement

Every year a committee, consisting of a churchman (Bishop John Hurst), a writer (Dorothy Canfield Fisher), a politician (Theodore Roosevelt), a financier (James H. Dillard), an educator (John Hope, President of Morehouse College), and an editor (W. E. DuBois of The Crisis’), awards a prize to “an American of African descent who has performed the highest achievement in some form of human endeavor.” This prize is known as the Spingarn medal.

There is no musician on the committee of award. Nevertheless this year’s recipient of the decoration is a musician. He is Roland Hayes, Negro singer (TIME, Oct. 8), who has already garnered an amazing harvest of similar trinkets from foreign royal and notable personages and societies. His passionate rendition of his people’s deeply felt “spirituals” has endeared him to Boston and Philadelphia symphony subscribers as well as to titled connoisseurs. He is now on concert tour in Europe.