Academic literature on the topic 'St. Henry Church (Dayton, Ohio)'

Abstract Though quite busy, E. M. Martin, secretary of the Atlanta Life Insurance Company, affably gave me much time, and proved to be a good talker. He is a sturdily built, sharp-featured man with shrewd eyes; his color is that of sunburned white Southerners; his thin, graying hair is straight. He is energetic and forceful, and from all quarters I heard that he was a resourceful business man. One of his immediate concerns was an eight millimeter technicolor motion picture called “The Parade of Negro Progress” that the Atlanta Life Company had been exhibiting throughout the South. The picture took two years and a lot of money to make, he told me. The machinery belonged to the company and a photographer was employed for the filming and showing. Martin candidly admitted that the primary object of the film was to make money, but in a clean honest way, he said, “to build friendships, and to show others what we’re doing. Many Negro schoolboys in their history classes learned only one thing pertaining to the Negro and that is that Lincoln freed the slaves.” The picture stresses the “highlights of Negro life,” with such items as the Negro hospital in St. Louis, a commencement at Atlanta University, the new plant at the Tennessee A & I State College at Nashville, the celebration at Daytona Cookman Institute when Mrs. Roosevelt went down there on Mrs. Bethune’s anniversary; Negro farmers in southwest Georgia with large mechanized farms, warehouses, fine mule and horse teams, well-fed cattle, and tractors at work in the fields; hair-dressing establishments; the bank in Atlanta; girls at the intricate statistical machines in the Atlanta Life offices; gas stations owned and manned by Negroes; Paul Laurence Dunbar’s home in Dayton, Ohio; green troops marching in the camps; Negro pilots taking off at Tuskegee; Dean William Pickens selling bonds. And so the list went. “It would be an all-day proposition if we showed all the stuff,” Martin said. So it was edited to meet local interest, with the school and church stuff varying according to the section. When shown in Texas, for instance, a few Texas churches and schools would be spliced in.