AN AMERICAN MUSICIAN
Harry Herbert Pace was born in Georgia in 1884. Nineteen years later he was the valedictorian of his graduating class from Atlanta University, where he’d studied with W.E.B. Du Bois. Work as a printer's apprentice had enabled him to pay for school; so it seemed only natural for Harry to start a printing business with his former teacher in the thriving timber- and cotton-market town of Memphis.
A short time later he joined Du Bois to publish 'Moon's Illustrated Monthly,' a short-lived pulpit for the Niagara Movement which opposed the accomodation policies of Booker T. Washington; they insisted on full civil rights, due process of law, and increased political representation for African Americans. Pace was a founding member of the Atlanta branch of the NAACP in 1917, as well.
After the demise of Moon's, Pace busily looked for printing work. He learned that his neighbor - established songwriter and bandleader W.C. Handy - had sold the rights to “Memphis Blues” for just $100. Pace approached him about starting a sheet-music publishing firm. During the thirty-years from 1885 through 1915, Americans had purchased more than 200,000 pianos each year, and each one of those six million pianos needed a stock of the latest popular music for their owners. Pace and Handy Music Company licensed the rights to print and distribute popular songs in the mid-South, but the twin engines of their growth were the compositions of Handy and the business acumen of Pace.
In 1918, Pace moved their company offices to New York City. Pace and Handy soon became a nationally-successful sheet-music publisher, with offices in the Gaiety Theatre Building on Broadway at Times Square - often described as 'the black Tin Pan Alley'. They published the work of black artists including Fletcher Henderson, James P. Johnson, and James Berni Barbour, as well as white jazz composer W. Benton Overstreet - even the poetry of Langston Hughes.   Pace soon insisted they begin producing player-piano rolls, and hired several pianists (including James Lawrence Cook), and then looked at a new technology - phonograph recordings!
Pace sold his interest in the sheet-music business to Handy (the business continues to thrive today), because he considered records had the greatest potential for growth.    He started NYC-based company, Black Swan Records (named after singer Elizabeth T. Greenfield at the request of du Bois), employing Henderson as the recording manager and composer William Grant Still as music director. Investors included Harlem luminaries James Weldon Johnson and Bert Williams, while artists included pianist James P. Johnson and singers Alberta Hunter and Ethel Waters. Pace also insisted on equitable publishing deals and paid all the musicians a fair wage.
The label was modestly successful, but Pace contended that distribution was crippled by white-managed companies like Victor and Columbia, who encouraged store-policies of not marketing or selling records by black artists. At the end of 1923, Black Swan declared bankruptcy. Pace disbanded the production company and sold the label and its masters to Paramount Records, which soon moved the Black Swan recordings to its own "race-records" label.
After settling the affairs of his record company, Harry returned to school to study law. He received his law degree from Chicago-Kent Law School in 1933; while in school, he also founded the Northeastern Life Insurance Company in New Jersey - it soon became the biggest African-American owned company in the North.   
Late in his life, his racial heritage was not generally known among friends and other contacts in his Chicago business and social circles. Many of descendants only learned he was an African-American after his death in 1943.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T5u97CHSYIo