Word: spingarn
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Down to dinner in Manhattan last week sat sharp-eyed. Scholar and Libertarian Joel Elias Spingarn & friends. They did not celebrate "J. E." Spingarn's birth, his scholastic achievements or his work as president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People but the 25th anniversary of a famed old U. S. academic scandal in which "J. E." Spingarn lost...
When, in March 1911, Columbia University's President Nicholas Murray Butler dismissed "J. E." as chairman of Columbia's Division of Modern Languages and Literatures, he claimed that fiery young Professor Spingarn was unable to work smoothly with his colleagues. Professor Spingarn always believed that his real offense was his valiant and tactless championship of a Columbia scholar who had been cashiered six months before...
...summer of 1910, he wrote a bundle of impetuous letters to an obscure stenographer named Esther Quinn. Esther Quinn sued him sensationally for breach of promise. He was deserted by his wife and friends, espelled from his clubs, finally dismissed from his Columbia professorship. At a faculty meeting Professor Spingarn got himself in scholastic hot water by defending his friend Peck. Independently rich, Spingarn refused to resign when President Butler suggested it, sharpened the issue by making Columbia fire...
Already a notable literary scholar, "J. E." Spingarn went on to further triumphs as a critic (Creative Criticism). Longtime president of the N. A. A. C. P., he annually awards the Spingarn Medal, highest honor a U.S. black man can receive. Major of infantry in the War, onetime Republican candidate for Congress, Spingarn now lives quietly "as a retired capitalist," grows clematis on his 1,000-acre estate in Dutchess County...
Honors had already been heaped on Actor Harrison. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People gave him its Spingarn Medal as the outstanding Negro of 1930. Howard University made him a Master of Arts. From North Carolina State College of Agriculture & Engineering and Lincoln University he received Doctorates of Dramatic Literature. Boston University presented him its Sigma Key. He was asked to speak at Rotary Clubs, to colleges and congregations wherever the show went, and his most prized possession is the Bible from the Clergy Club of New York, with the names of all its members inscribed. Governors...