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Elmer A. Carter on Christian's 

"Men on Horseback"

 

 

 Letter 4

OPPORTUNITY-Journal of Negro Life

Published by the National Urban League 

1133 Broadway, Room 826

New York City

August Fifth 1936

 

My dear Mr. Christian: 

Thank you very much for your letter. I am going to send your poem ['Men on Horseback'] over to W.C. Handy and see what he can do with it. I will have Handy get in touch with you directly. If he does not compose the music himself he is acquainted with a great number of composers who, I am sure, could do justice to it. 

Very sincerely yours, 

Elmer Anderson Carter, Editor

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Elmer A. Carter (1890-1973), editor and a prominent Republican, was the first chairman of the New York State Commission Against discrimination (the predecessor of the State Division of Human rights) and first director of the State Human rights Division until his resignation in 1961. He then served for two years as special assistant to Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller on issues of race relations. In 1937, while editor of Opportunity, a journal published by the Urban League, Carter was appointed by Governor Herbert Lehman to the Unemployment Insurance Appeal Board.

 He thus began a career in public service devoted to eliminating racial bias in housing, employment, and public accommodation. Carter's wife, the former Thelma Johnson, died just a few weeks before her husband. the carters lived at 409 Edgecombe Avenue from the 1940s until their deaths.

OPPORTUNITY -- Journal of Negro Life, the official organ of the National Urban League, completing in December thirteen brilliant years under the able editorship of distinctive contribution to the literature dealing with the problems of interracial contacts in America. Dispassionate, factual data and illuminating articles from the pens of some of America's most distinguished students and writers graced the columns of the magazine -- establishing it in the minds of discriminating readers as one of the indispensable sources of light on "America's most baffling problem." Opportunity Journal, thanks to its perceptive, broad-minded editors, first, Charles S. Johnson, and then Elmer A. Carter, was a leading venue for the work of African-American artists.

 

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