Lament for the Stolen (1938), a poem about kidnapping written not long after the Lindbergh kidnapping and apparently with the Lindbergh tragedy in mind, became the libretto for a composition by Harl McDonald. McDonald wrote his score in July and August 1938. The composition, a fantasia, was about 20 minutes long. The Philadelphia Orchestra premiered Lament for the Stolen on December 30, 1938, under the direction of Eugene Ormandy. The New York Times, in a notice for And They Lynched Him on a Tree, called Lament "a dirge for the mother of a child who has been stolen and killed". Philosopher Alain Locke praised Chapin's writing in Lament, in letters to Chapin and to Charlotte Mason, but disparaged McDonald's score. And They Lynched Him on a Tree Chapin wrote And They Lynched Him on a Tree (1940) while a federal anti-lynching bill sponsored by Representative Joseph A. Gavagan was being debated in the United States Congress; scholar Catherine Reef argues that Chapin wrote And They Lynched Him "to persuade Congress to pass" the legislation. The bill failed to pass the Senate three months after And They Lynched Him premiered. The work, set to music by William Grant Still, was Still's first "large-scale choral-orchestral work". The composition features two choruses, one Black and one white. Chapin's aunt Charlotte Osgood Mason, a white patron of artists of the Harlem Renaissance, conceived the work in collaboration with Alain Locke, likely in spring 1939. According to scholar Wayne D. Shirley, the "first clear reference" to And They Lynched Him appears in a letter from Locke to Chapin dated April 20, 1939, in which Locke mentions Still as a possible collaborator. Locke introduced the poem to Still in a letter of August 9, 1939:Mrs. Biddle, who writes as Katherine Garrison Chapin, has done a powerful poem on lynching, really an epic indictment but by way of pure poetry not propaganda. … [And They Lynched Him on a Tree] is more powerful than the Lament for the Stolen, but has the same skill at transforming a melodramatic situation into one of tragic depth and beauty.Still wrote to Chapin just over a week later, on August 18, 1939, to express his enthusiasm for the project: "I've long wished to add my voice to the general feeling against lynching, and have been waiting for the proper vehicle to present itself". Chapin had prepared initial drafts of the text