Not to Newcastle

One way to get Negroes to visit white schools and vice versa is to tempt them. Novelist Carl Van Vechten (The Tattooed Countess, Nigger Heaven, Peter Whiffle) has done just that with a scheme involving Yale and Fisk Universities.

Last week Fisk was preparing to install a Van Vechten gift, the George Gershwin Memorial Collection of Music and Musical Literature, which may be the South's best musical library. It includes letters (by Gershwin, Puccini, Humperdinck, Gounod, Meyerbeer--but none by Negro musicians), operatic and other scores, U.S. first editions, a vast heap of recordings, bursting scrapbooks of U.S. musical history. All this can hardly fail to seduce white scholars from Vanderbilt, Tennessee, Chapel Hill and Duke Universities.

At Yale another Van Vechten gift, the James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection of material by and about Negroes, has already been in place two years. It attracts many Negro scholars, has trebled in size since it was installed. It includes the books, manuscripts and photographs which Van Vechten began accumulating while writing Nigger Heaven, the novel which put Harlem on the U.S. cultural map. It includes, too, unique Negro musical material.

White-haired, 63-year-old Carl Van Vechten is as incurable a collector as his own Peter Whiffle. But he usually gives everything away. The New-York Public Library has his boyhood hoard of cigaret pictures. Fastidious, unpredictable Van Vechten does not regret having abandoned musical criticism at 33 (because he thought he was getting too fond of Strauss waltzes to be ,really judicious) or novel writing at 52 (because he had had enough). He is busy with photography, a craft in which he has dabbled since 1895 and of which he is now a top-flight practitioner. His forthcoming one-man show in Harlem will include pictures of Cab Galloway, Marian Anderson, Bill Robinson, Ethel Waters, Claude McKay, Joe Louis.

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