To The Moon

The following editorial appeared, last week, in the Pittsburgh Courier, most famed Negro newspaper in the U. S.:

WE GET IN EVERYWHERE

"Whatever goes on in the world there always seems to be a Negro there. When Columbus discovered America a Negro piloted one of his ships. Almost every early history of the western hemisphere tells of some part taken by Negroes. As early as 1645 there were free Negroes in New York, and it is common knowledge that the first Negroes in Virginia arrived in 1619, but a few years after the white colonists at Jamestown. In the French and Indian Wars, black men did their bit, and a Negro was first to fall in the War for Independence. They were with Perry at the battle of Lake Erie and they helped Jackson repulse the British at the Battle of New Orleans. The first chief of police of St. Petersburg (now Petrograd) under the Bolshevist regime was a Negro, and it was a black man, Matt Henson, who drug Peary to the North Pole, thus enabling that gentleman to discover it.

"When the flagship of the Byrd Antarctic Expedition, the City of New York, left Manhattan on August 26, it looked as if this would be one trip on which there would be no Negro. But Robert White Lanier, a 20-year-old Negro youth from Brunswick, Ga., via Jersey City, thought differently. He is evidently one of those youths filled with the spirit of adventure, since he had hiked across the continent some time before. At any rate, he concealed himself aboard the City of New York, and was not discovered until the bark was well out to sea. He had stayed in his hiding place for several days without food and had withstood the danger of asphyxiation during the fumigation of the ship prior to its departure. Certainly here was a young man eager to embark on this great and dangerous expedition to the southern ice continent. Happily for him, Commander Byrd was so impressed by his courage and excellent stamina that he has given him permission to stay with the expedition. Two white boys who stowed away were put off ere the ship got out of the harbor because sailors heard them arguing. The black boy goes. The promoters of the first trip to the moon had better examine their rocket carefully if they would make sure that no adventurous Negro is aboard."