It was only eight years after the close of the Civil War had brought freedom to the slaves. Eleven young colored people stood in the court of Queen Victoria to sing the haunting melodies of Negro spirituals. From them the world outside our shores was learning a new and beautiful kind of music. It was the gift of the African Negro to America.

These boys in richly tailored broadcloth and girls in silks and velvet—how had they come there?

Not many months before, they were stranded in a strange American city in borrowed clothes, penniless and rejected. They who had been sent out to earn money to save their struggling little college, had promptly required saving themselves.

The exciting story of the Jubilee Singers—and their young new college—is part of Chariot in the Sky. But the book begins when Caleb Willows, one of those singers, was a sixteen-year-old slave, making a break for freedom!

Today new freshman at Fisk University in Tennessee gather in the Chapel on a certain day each fall to hear the story behind the life-size painting which hangs there. It is a portrait by Queen Victoria's own court painter—of eleven boys and girls who saved the life of their school.

From the dust jacket