Katherine D. Tillman

"The type of Negro oftenest depicted by modern fiction writers, is a genuine Southern production, a race of ante-bellum days-the simple-hearted, affectionate negro, who has no higher ambition than to serve faithfully the children of his former master. Isabel A. Mallon's story entitled, "The Colonel and Me," in the recent issue of the Ladies' Home Journal, is an example of this class of literature of which thinking Negroes are becoming heartily tired. While these stories occasionally interest, they never inspire the Negro reader, and besides, give the Anglo-Saxon reader false ideas concerning the race. It is praiseworthy to be a good servant, but all Negroes are not content to be merely hewers of wood and drawers of water. Out of the Negro race must come soldiers, statesmen, poets, authors, financiers and reformers, and fiction that is written with Negro men and women as heroes and heroines must keep these facts in mind...Another poem that appeals to all bold, courageous souls in "The Warning," by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, who, some critics aver, won more English hearts over to the anti-slavery cause than did the "Quaker Poet.""