Frederick Bruce Thomas was born in Mississippi in 1872 to former slaves, who found success as independent farmers. Driven away by a vengeful white plantation owner, the family left for Memphis.
But the murder of Thomas’s father prompted young Frederick to set out for Chicago and, later, Brooklyn, where he worked as a waiter. Nothing unique so far.
In 1894, Thomas’s German music professor recommended that he attend a conservatory in London, where he had been accepted as its first nonwhite student; Thomas was a great lover of music and hoped to become a singer. England at that time was welcoming to blacks in ways that the United States could not have been. “No American Negro who reaches London goes away again, if he can help it,” American reporter William Drysdale said during a grand tour of Europe.
“Here his color does not militate against him in the least, but rather the contrary, because it is something of a novelty … He is more of a man here than he can well be at home, because there is no prejudice against him.”
He used his savings for the voyage across the Atlantic, but was left with no tuition money to attend the conservatory. So he went on his own grand tour, working at hotels or restaurants for a few weeks at a time, just long enough to get a sense of the place and earn the cash for the next leg. From London he went to Milan, Venice, Trieste, Vienna, Budapest, St. Petersburg, and Odessa.
The article about THE BLACK COUNT OF RUSSIA, based on Alexandrov's book, is from the internet remains of what was once known as NEWSWEEK magazine.
The second-most important American weekly news magazine remains quite relevant.