Cardon-The South's New Negroes' and African American

The South's "New Negroes" and African American Visions of Progress at the Atlanta
and Nashville International Expositions, 1895–1897

Author(s): Nathan Cardon
Source: The Journal of Southern History , MAY 2014, Vol. 80, No. 2 (MAY 2014), pp.
287-326
Published by: Southern Historical Association
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/23799160
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The South's "New Negroes" and
African American Visions of Progress at
the Atlanta and Nashville International
Expositions, 1895-1897
By Nathan Cardon
On a late September day in 1895, the prominent A

American spokesman and emigrationist booster Bishop Henry
Turner of the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church tour
grounds of Atlanta's Cotton States and International Expositio
side a reporter from the Chicago Inter Ocean. Looking at the
of industry, education, and agriculture in the fair's Negro Bu
Turner commented that he had '"no patience with the talk abo
new negro as a workman."' Blacks had always done the bulk
labor in the South, and to display them as workers was '"nothin
Instead, Turner placed the "New Negro" in a different categor
Negroes were not laborers but African Americans participatin
nascent world of commercial amusements, and, far from
positive force, they were bringing blacks down in the eyes of
Upon leaving the Negro Building, Turner and his companion s
down the Midway. Stopping in front of the Dahomey Village,
"remarked that here must be the 'new negro.'" Turner confron
white spieler: "'Why do you white men pursue the negro to
with your lying? You have for years lied about the negro
country, and now . . . you are lying about the negro at home
native heath.'" The spieler demanded to know what this ma
possibly know about Africa, to which Turner replied that
1 L. W. B., "Is He a New Negro?," Chicago Inter Ocean, October 2, 1895, p. 7, rep
"A News Item in the Chicago Inter Ocean," in Louis R. Harlan, ed., The Booker T. W
Papers. Vol. 4: 1895-98 (Urbana, 1975), 34—44, esp. 40-41 (first quotation on 4
quotation on 40). I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for the Journal of
History, whose critiques vastly improved this article. My supervisor, Rick Halpern, ha
tremendous support throughout the process, while I have relied on the historical i
Daniel Bender, Michael Wayne, Ian Rocksborough-Smith, and Camille Begin at the U
of Toronto. Last, and most important, I owe my biggest debt of gratitude to Laura An
Mr. Cardon holds a Ph.D. in history from the University of Toronto
The Journal of Southern History

Volume LXXX, No. 2, May 2014

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288 THE JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORY
recently spent time in Africa pursuing missionary and emigrationist

causes. Turner assured the gathering crowd that while West Africans
'"may be heathens and uncivilized,'" they were "'more peaceable an
gentle than many of you civilized and enlightened white men here in
America.'" To fairgoers at the Cotton States exposition, the Dahomey
Village was an authentic taste of Africa, but Turner suggested that th
"'wild negro cannibals you have here, cavorting around like apes and
baboons, never saw Africa. They are lazy, good-for-nothing negroes
from New York, or some other town, where they have been taught t
jump about like monkeys and yell like hyenas, while you tell thes
people that they are talking in their native tongue. Stop your lying
about the negro!'" The astonished journalist reported, "The crowd
shouted, the showman looked stupefied, and the Bishop walked o
down the Midway, telling me that there was no new negro.""
This brief anecdote makes clear that the international expositions
in the South created opportunities and opened spaces for African
Americans to challenge the white racial structure of the region and
nation. In the liminal and ephemeral space of the Midway, Bishop
Turner confronted a white man and the white race before a crowd of
white spectators. At a moment when the passage of Jim Crow laws
was limiting black political and social participation in southern soci
ety, Atlanta's Cotton States and International Exposition (1895) and
Nashville's Tennessee Centennial and International Exposition (1897)
gave African Americans an occasion to voice their own narrative of
the South's past, present, and future—a narrative that, in the discur
sive space of the fair, often contested the one presented by whites.3
At the same time, African American participation in southern expo
sitions demonstrates the dialogic nature of black identity in the late
nineteenth-century United States. Many African American leaders
adopted the rhetoric of progress and Social Darwinism. Far from
challenging the methods of racial science, they challenged its conclu
sions. Analysis of these expositions makes clear a growing stratifica
tion within the black community and a rising tension among black
spokespeople. Bishop Turner was prominent in emigrationist circles,
and while he supported the cause of the Negro Building, he believed
the future for black Americans was in Africa, not the United States. To
the commissioners and organizers of the so-called Negro exhibits, the
~ Ibid.. 41-42 (first and second quotations on 41; remaining quotations on 42).
On the liminal nature of such events, see David M. Guss, The Festive State: Race. Ethnicitw
and Nationalism as Cultural Performance (Berkeley, 2000), esp. 8-12.

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AFRICAN AMERICAN VISIONS OF PROGRESS 289
future embraced a different "New Negro" from the one disparaged by

Turner. In the spaces of the Negro Buildings, they hoped to demonstrat
the progress made since emancipation. To them, the modern represen
tative of the race was educated and well versed in the newest technique
of agriculture and industry. With an approach exemplified by Booker T
Washington's "Atlanta Compromise" speech at the Cotton States expo
sition, these black spokesmen located the future of African Americans
as a separate and vibrant race rooted in the South. Finally, while Turne
was wrong about the Dahomey Village—the performers in Atlant
really were West Africans—his report illuminates a growing divid
within the black community. Some working-class African Americans
joined the nascent culture industry and its commodification of black
culture as a way to escape the old economies of the South. Indeed, th
expositions' Old Plantation amusements, which featured black actors as
slaves, suggest how some African Americans exploited racist stere
types as a means to participate in modern and sophisticated art forms. In
an era and a region in which black people were excluded from holdin
even moderate-paying jobs, working as a minstrel artist offered
chance to escape agricultural and manual labor.4
In the face of these multiple performances and representations of
blackness, attempts to present an ordered vision of race at the fairs
came "unhinged.As Alice M. Bacon, a white teacher at Hampton
Normal and Agricultural Institute, wrote shortly after the Cotto
States and International Exposition: "Two surprises were in store for
the thousands of visitors who assembled in Atlanta .... One was the
negro exhibit, the other was the exhibit of the negro." The problem for
many observers was which "Negro" took center stage.6
4 On the multifaceted nature of plantation shows and other forms of black minstrel culture,
see Karen Sotiropoulos, Staging Race: Black Performers in Turn of the Century America
(Cambridge. Mass., 2006), esp. 2, 5-7; Lynn Abbott and Doug Seroff, Ragged But Right: Black
Traveling Shows, "Coon Songs," and the Dark Pathway to Blues and Jazz (Jackson. Miss.,
2007); and Barbara L. Webb, "Authentic Possibilities: Plantation Performance of the 1890s,"
Theatre Journal, 56 (March 2004), 63—82.
^ Paul Kramer, "Making Concessions: Race and Empire Revisited at the Philippine
Exposition, St. Louis, 1901—1905," Radical History Review, no. 73 (Winter 1999), 75-114, esp.
97-104 (quotation on 97).
6 Alice M. Bacon, The Negro and the Atlanta Exposition (Baltimore, 1896), 11. This article is
indebted to the analysis and insights of previous works on African American participation at the
expositions. See Bruce G. Harvey, "World's Fairs in a Southern Accent: Atlanta, Nashville,
Charleston, 1895-1902" (Ph.D. dissertation, Vanderbilt University, 1998); Judy L. Larson.
"Three Southern World's Fairs: Cotton States and International Exposition, Atlanta, 1895;
Tennessee Centennial, Nashville, 1897; South Carolina Inter-State and West Indian Exposition,
Charleston, 1901/02: Creating Regional Self-Portraits Through Expositions" (Ph.D. dissertation,
Emory University, 1998); Theda Perdue, Race and the Atlanta Cotton States Exposition of 1895
(Athens, Ga., 2010); Robert W. Rydell, All the World's a Pair: Visions of Empire at American

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This article explores the various performances of an emergent J

Crow modernity in the South. Southerners recognized that indust
modernity was a force that could not be resisted at the same time
they identified the "Negro question" as central to the formation of
New South.7 Jim Crow was not a premodern system but a rati
response by a racist society to the disorder of market capitalism.
backward-looking, the white South feared a future in which the m
ern forces of capitalism dissolved the long-standing divide betw
black and white.s For southern whites, then, Jim Crow modern
could constrain the liberating impulses of late-nineteenth-century
italism within the South's traditional racial and social hierarchy.
To this end, the South's fairs presented what historian Walte
Weare has labeled a "kind of Utopian apartheid" in which whites an
African Americans consented to a separate existence but agree
work together for the general progress of the region and nation.9
the white organizers of these fairs, the presence of the Negro Bui
ings testified to their paternalistic goodwill. Although the rhet
surrounding the exhibits had a tinge of equality, the fairs' organi
in fact viewed the buildings as a way to demonstrate whites' guida
of a supposedly childlike race.10 When placed in a racial hierarchy
International Expositions, I876-1916 (Chicago, 1984); Walter B. Weare, "New Negroes

New Century: Adaptability on Display," in Elizabeth Jacoway et al., eds., The Adaptable S
Essays in Honor of George Brown Tindall (Baton Rouge, 1991), 90—123; Mabel O. Wil
Negro Building: Black Americans in the World of Fairs and Museums (Berkeley, 2012
Ruth M. Winton, "Negro Participation in Southern Expositions, 1881 — 1915," Journal of Ne
Education, 16 (Winter 1947), 34-43.
7 The "Negro question"—also referred to as the "Negro problem" or the "race questio
was a phrase often used by white and black southerners to encapsulate the tensions and prop
solutions to African American life in the New South, and it was regularly invoked in refere
the Negro Buildings at the fairs. See ''Sayings about Atlanta." Savannah (Ga.) Tribun
December 7, 1895, p. 2; Bacon, Negro and the Atlanta Exposition, 5, 11; "The Little Negr
Atlanta Constitution, October 22, 1895, p. 12; J. W. E. Bowen, An Appeal to the King
Address Delivered on Negro Day in the Atlanta Exposition, October 21. 1895 ([Atlanta, 1
2; and W. E. Burghardt Du Bois, The Conservation of Races, American Negro Acade
Occasional Papers, No. 2 (Washington, D.C., 1897), 15. See also Paul M. Gaston, The N
South Creed: A Study in Southern Mythmaking (New York, 1970), esp. 92-99; Barbara J. F
"Origins of the New South and the Negro Question," Journal of Southern History, 67 (Novem
2001), 811-26; Khalil Gibran Muhammad, The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime,
the Making of Modern Urban America (Cambridge, Mass., 2010), 15-87; and Natalie J. R
The Problem South: Region, Empire, and the New Liberal State, 1880-1930 (Athens, Ga., 2
8 For the ways modernity and capitalism threatened the southern racial system, see G
Elizabeth Hale, Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890-1940 (
York, 1998). John W. Cell has argued that segregation was a modern and rational system
Cell, The Highest Stage of White Supremacy: The Origins of Segregation in South Africa and
American South (New York, 1982).
9 Weare, "New Negroes for a New Century," 110.
10 Walter G. Cooper, The Cotton States and International Exposition and South, Illustr
Including the Official History of the Exposition (Atlanta, 1896), 56-63; The Tennesse

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which black inferiority was taken as fact, white paternalism in support

of black progress created an image of a benevolent New South—and,
in whites' eyes, solid evidence for the South's progress as a whole.
Unlike the much-analyzed World's Columbian Exposition held in
Chicago in 1893 (at which, Bishop Turner lamented, "the only recogni
tion that was given to the Negro was to take care of the toilet rooms"),
the Atlanta and Nashville expositions gave African Americans an
opportunity to present their own vision of modernity within the fairs'
Negro Buildings." For southern blacks, the question came down to how
they would be included in the modern world, and, in the late nineteenth
century at least, many approved of Booker T. Washington's plan for
industrial and technical education. By reconstructing black agricultural
workers into a modem workforce, southern elite blacks believed that
they would be accepted into modern American society and that their
rights as American citizens and human beings would be recognized.
This article provides insight into the ways black southerners adopted a
modern persona and challenged images of African Americans as a static
and backward people in the years before the Great Migration. The
Negro Buildings' exhibits of progress and African American fairgoers'
performances of bourgeois sensibilities showed African Americans as
full participants in modernity, while at the same time confirming a
southern racial order that separated black from white. In doing so,
southern black spokesmen and spokeswomen contributed to the forma
tion of a Jim Crow modernity, in which African Americans functioned
in society as a separate yet modern people. Jim Crow modernity was not
a new idea—it was taking hold across the South—but at the expositions
it was distilled into a consumable ideology.
Speaking two months before the Tennessee Centennial exposition
opened, Richard Hill, chief of the Negro Department, asserted that
southern blacks were "on trial," facing "the most severe test as to what
we have done, and are now doing, since our emancipation."12 With
displays of African Americans' industrial, material, and educational
achievement, the Negro Buildings portrayed blacks as a progressive,
Centennial and International Exposition: Opens at Nashville May 1st, 1897 and Continues Six
Months (Nashville, 1897), 20, in Books of the Fairs: From the Holdings of the Smithsonian
Institution Libraries (microfilm, 174 reels; Woodbridge, Conn., 1989), reel 128, item 6; W. Y.
Atkinson, "The Atlanta Exposition," North American Review, 161 (October 1895), 385-93, esp.
392-93.
11 H. M. Turner, "To Colored People," Parsons (Kans.) Weekly Blade, February 9, 1895,
pp. 1, 4 (quotation).
12 Herman Justi, ed., Official History of the Tennessee Centennial Exposition: Opened May 1,
and Closed October 30, 1897 (Nashville, 1898), 195-96 (quotations on 196).

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future-oriented people, an image that many hoped whites wo

notice.13 The exhibits clearly engaged a discourse of progress root
in late-nineteenth-century conceptions of modernity.14 Moreover,
were a direct challenge to an emerging racial science that sugge
blacks were degenerating and incapable of progress. Frederick
Hoffman, the influential actuarial scientist, claimed in 1896 that
African Americans' inherent racial "traits and tendencies must in
the end cause the extinction of the race." The evidence of material
and moral progress presented in the Negro Buildings explicitly

disputed these conclusions. For the buildings' organizers, Social
Darwinism was wrong on one level; they themselves were evidence
that not all African Americans were degenerating. They did not, how
ever, question its methods and instead transposed degeneration and
primitivism onto different classes and people.IS
The narrative of progress adopted by African Americans at the
expositions was simultaneously liberating and constraining, dialectic
and dialogic. The southern black elite argued that they were, culturally
and perhaps biologically, different from Africans and lower-class
blacks. The expositions' Dahomey Villages and other displays of
atavistic blackness portrayed the advancement of Africans in America
to both black and white visitors. By comparing themselves with
"primitive" people, black spokesmen embraced the science of Social
Darwinism and separated themselves from other people of color who
13 As W. Fitzhugh Brundage argues, the optie nature of the Negro Buildings was quite
intentional. See Brundage, "Meta Warrick's 1907 'Negro Tableaux' and (Re)Presenting African
American Historical Memory," Journal of American History. 89 (March 2003), 1368-1400,
esp. 1369.
14 In the late nineteenth century, "progress" gave meaning to the passage of time. The belief
that nations and people advanced in linear fashion from savagery to civilization was taken as
fact, as a law of history. J. B. Bury, The Idea of Progress: An Inquiry into Its Origin and Growth
(London, 1920), 5; Robert Nisbet, History of the Idea of Progress (New York, 1980); Leo Marx,
The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (New York, 1964).
'^Frederick L. Hoffman, "The Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro,"
Publications of the American Economic Association, 1st ser., 11, nos. 1-3 (1896), 1-329
(quotation on 176). The notion that blacks were biologically inferior and degenerating to the
point of extinction ebbed and flowed throughout the nineteenth century. In the 1890s a discourse
of eventual black extinction became salient in both intellectual and popular circles. See Lee D.
Baker, From Savage to Negro: Anthropology and the Construction of Race, 1896-1954
(Berkeley, 1998); Patrick Brantlinger, Dark Vanishings: Discourse on the Extinction of
Primitive Races, 1800-1930 (Ithaca, N.Y.. 2003); George M. Fredrickson, The Black Image in
the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817-1914 (New York,
1971), 228-55; Robert A. Nye, "Sociology and Degeneration: The Irony of Progress," in J.
Edward Chamberlin and Sander L. Gilman, eds., Degeneration: The Dark Side of Progress
(New York, 1985), 49-71; Dana Seitler, Atavistic Tendencies: The Culture of Science in
American Modernity (Minneapolis, 2008); and Nancy Stepan, "Biology and Degeneration:
Races and Proper Places," in Chamberlin and Gilman, eds.. Degeneration, 97-120.

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had yet to evolve to the level of the black middle class. Thus, in the
space of the fair, African Americans, like the Negro Buildings,
performed a definition of blackness that was linked to the narrative
of progress presented at the South's expositions. Those who succes
fully navigated the fair established themselves as "New Negroes" wit
a fully modern persona that suggested their ability to transcend histor
and enter the ranks of a progressive middle class.16
The organizers behind the Negro Buildings were drawn mainly from
the region's black elite. The so-called Negro Committees for the exposi
tions in both Atlanta and Nashville drew their members, locally and
beyond, from the ministerial, entrepreneurial, judicial, medical, and ed
cational professions. Many representatives had been born in slavery bu
with freedom had achieved positions of authority within the black com
munity.17 Despite being absent from the official discourse of the fairs
African American women also made their presence felt at the expositions.
Black women contributed to many of the exhibits in the Negro Buildings,
and meetings of women's organizations, including the National Associa
tion of Colored Women (NACW), raised women's profile.
Rooted in the cities of the New South, these elite men and women
went beyond the aspirational middle class identified by historians like
Kevin K. Gaines and Michele Mitchell. Through their economic
achievements these black southerners were the living embodiment of
the progressive spirit displayed in the Negro Buildings. They imbibed
the spirit of the southern "New Negro" and embraced the American
bourgeois values that formed what Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham has
called the "politics of respectability." Moreover, by participating in
status-building institutions such as the Negro Committees and in the
representational ventures of the expositions, these elite men and women
16 In her study of W. E. B. Du Bois's photography exhibit of middle-class African Americans

at the Paris Exposition of 1900, historian Shawn Michelle Smith detects a "counterarchive" that
contested both the scientific image of blacks and "the logics of biological racialism and
eugenics." This article avoids Smith's binary notion of a counterarchive, preferring instead a
dialogic model. Smith, Photography on the Color Line: W. E. B. Du Bois, Race, and Visual
Culture (Durham, N.C., 2004), 44. Writing on Meta Warrick's "Negro Tableaux" at the 1907
Jamestown Tercentennial Exposition, W. Fitzhugh Brundage comes to a similar conclusion:
"Warrick's work . . . was not a counternarrative per se but instead fit easily with the prevailing
grand narrative of social progress and upward mobility (for whites)." Brundage, "Meta Warrick's
1907 'Negro Tableaux' and (Re)Presenting African American Historical Memory," 1371-72.
See also Weare, "New Negroes for a New Century."
17 The Official Catalogue of the Cotton States and International Exposition, Atlanta,
Georgia, U.S.A., September 18 to December 31, 1895 (Atlanta, 1895), 134; Justi, ed., Official
History of the Tennessee Centennial Exposition, 195. The committeemen who appear in H. F.
Kletzing and W. H. Crogman, Progress of a Race: Or, the Remarkable Advancement of the Afro
American . . . (Atlanta, 1903), were all members of these professions.

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attempted to define African American identity on behalf of the lar

black community. In doing so, they helped reposition the discours
black progress in the late-nineteenth-century South, emphasizing r
solidarity while embracing an accommodationist approach to ra
inequality that justified economic and cultural stratification am
southern blacks.18
African Americans at the southern expositions thus exemplified t
complementary definitions of modernity: the belief in material, m
and economic progress on the one hand, and the participation in a n
commercialized public culture on the other. That different member
the race performed these definitions both simultaneously and separa
suggests the ambiguity of an "Afro-modernity" in the late nineteen
century.19 While the white middle class freely participated in comm
cial culture, many African Americans were wary of being associat
with a culture that traded in stereotypical images of blacks as licent
buffoons. African Americans at the expositions, then, pursued a var
of corresponding and contradictory goals. They offered accommoda
ist rhetoric alongside images of race pride and critiques of the Sou
racial system. They challenged the conclusions of Social Darwin
without questioning its methods. Blacks at the fair embodied mult
identities that elided perceptions of a homogeneous and united peo
The Negro Departments provide a window to a moment when the
Crow South became fluid at the very same time it was solidify
outside the space of the fairs. It was a moment when African Ameri
were given an opportunity to showcase their own version of the nat
past and present and to put forth their own dream of the future alongs
whites. In the end, the Negro Buildings' vision aligned well with s
ern whites' version of a Jim Crow modernity. Black spokesmen w
willing to work for progress as a separate people without immedia
IS Kevin K. Gaines, Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in
Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill, 1996), 14-17; Michele Mitchell, Righteous Propagatio
African Americans and the Politics of Racial Destiny after Reconstruction (Chapel Hill, 2
10; Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women's Movement in the
Baptist Church, 1880-1920 (Cambridge, Mass., 1993), 187; Martin Summers, Manliness an
Discontents: The Black Middle Class and the Transformation of Masculinity, 1900-19
(Chapel Hill, 2004); Allison Dorsey, To Build Our Lives Together: Community Formati
Black Atlanta, 1875-1906 (Athens, Ga., 2004).
19 On the concept of a unique "Afro-modernity," see Paul Gilroy, The Black Atla
Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, Mass., 1993); Michael Hanchard, "A
Modernity: Temporality, Politics, and the African Diaspora," in Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar,
Alternative Modernities (Durham, N.C., 2001), 272-98; Davarian L. Baldwin, Chicago's
Negroes: Modernity, the Great Migration, and Black Urban Life (Chapel Hill, 2007); and A
Green, Selling the Race: Culture, Community, and Black Chicago, 1940-1955 (Chicago, 200

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social equality. Yet at the same time, they created a discrete space
within southern society that allowed them to critique the white South.
For the South, a region often viewed as outside the processes of
modernization, international expositions were symbolic opportunities to
make clear its embrace of the North's discourse of industrial, cultural,
and racial progress. Beginning in 1881 with Atlanta's International
Cotton Exposition, southern cities hosted major fairs to attract northern
investment, to advertise the region's resources, and to promote southern
identity and culture. With the exception of the New Orleans World's
Industrial and Cotton Centennial Exposition in 1884-1885, these fairs
remained small and inconsequential. The World's Columbian Exposition
held in Chicago in 1893 fundamentally changed the scale and scope of
world's fairs in America. With just under 30 million visitors, the
Columbian was the cultural and social event of the decade.20 The south
ern fairs that followed, while not attempting to match the Chicago fair's
scale, did try to duplicate its scope and influence. At these fairs, the New
South elite endeavored to create a perfect southern world that would
draw investment and demonstrate to southerners the power of progress
and industrial development. In their celebration of modernity and indus
trial capitalism, the South's expositions were an attempt to break free
from images of the region as backward and agrarian.
Although the southern expositions aimed to replicate the World's
Columbian, they were rooted in the South's social, economic, and polit
ical realities. Management of the races was a central tenet of New South
ideology. New South spokesmen believed that northern investment
would only flow south if southerners opted for a restrained approach to
the "Negro question." With the participation of African Americans at the
expositions, New South boosters launched a public relations campaign
claiming that southerners alone had the answer to the question. Knowing
that the national spotlight was on their cities, the organizers planned to
use the exhibits in the Negro Buildings to confirm the South's supposed
racial harmony and ongoing uplift of black southerners.21
Atlanta's and Nashville's black leaders, despite some early reserva
tions, rallied behind the Negro Buildings as a way to promote the
advancement of African Americans in the South. The exhibits in the
Negro Buildings were drawn mostly from African American institutions
2,1 Rydell, All the World's a Fair, 38-71.

21 Cooper, Cotton States and International Exposition and South, Illustrated, 8; Justi, ed.,
Official History of the Tennessee Centennial Exposition, 193. On New South boosters' embrace
of African American progress and purported racial harmony, see Fredrickson, Black Image in the
White Mind, 215-16; and Gaston, New South Creed, 117-50.

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that focused on agriculture and industrial education. And while

separateness of the buildings was not uncontroversial, those seeking
showcase the progress of African Americans as a separate but vibr
race generally approved. On a practical level, as the Leavenwo
Herald, a black newspaper in Kansas, argued, an independent exhib
was needed because if the African American contributions were dispe
among the white exhibits, "the progress of the colored people . . . w
go wholly unnoticed by the visitors at the fair." The autonomy of
building was a source of race pride for the Herald, endorsing an ed
rial from the Savannah Tribune: "Some object to Negroes exhibi
because we will have a separate building. We ought to have a separa
building. We are American citizens, but we are a separate and disti
race. We would to God that we were more to ourselves, more united
ideas and actions and would stop being 'white.'"22 Atlanta pharmac
H. R. Butler echoed this sentiment in a speech reported by the Atla
Constitution-. "Why is it that at this late hour we are raising this k
about being separated? Why I am glad of it. I say that we should t
advantage of this opportunity and go into this work with our who
souls. We should show them what a separate people can do." As But
insisted, "I think it is time to show them that we, the colored peop
the south, have accomplished something—that we are indeed a gre
people, and that we have a future before us which very few of th
dream of."23 With the reality of Jim Crow settling in, some blacks in t
South were willing to embrace separation as a way to exhibit race pr
The inclusion of African Americans at the Cotton States exposit
was one part of a strategy by the fair's executive committee to ob
a federal appropriation for a government exhibit. In April 189
committee consisting of AME bishops Abram L. Grant and We
J. Gaines—two prominent black Atlantans—along with Booke
Washington went before Congress on behalf of the exposition
pany to solicit funds for the fair. Supported by Representative Geo
Washington Murray, a black congressman from South Carolin
the committee pushed for an appropriation on the basis that
""Atlanta Exposition," Leavenworth (Kans.) Herald, February 9, 1895, p. 2 (firs

quotation); ibid., March 9, 1895, p. 2 (second quotation).
23 "The Colored Exhibit," Atlanta Constitution, April 3, 1895, p. 8. Like many Afr
Americans involved in the exposition movement, Dr. H. R. Butler was a self-made man.
in North Carolina in 1862, he worked a variety of jobs while taking night classes. Eventually
attended Lincoln University and Meharry Medical College, where he earned his medical de
At the time of the Atlanta exposition, Butler was running a successful pharmacy and d
company. E. R. Carter, The Black Side: A Partial History of the Business, Religious
Educational Side of the Negro in Atlanta, Ga. (Atlanta, 1894), 137-38.

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Atlanta exposition would be the first to allow the full participation of

African Americans.24
Their speeches at the hearing highlighted both the race pride and
the accommodationist rhetoric consistent with that of many southern
black leaders. Gaines, as reported in exposition literature, argued tha
the Atlanta fair would "give his race an opportunity to make an exhibi
of its development and progress," pointing out that such an opportu
nity had been denied in Chicago "because Congress and the Northern
people were afraid it would offend the South and drive away patron
age." Grant likewise reassured Congress that while African American
intended to demonstrate their development and progress, it would not
lead them to the nation's industrial heartland in the North. "The
negroes and the whites understood each other," Grant suggested, "and
the South was the negro's home. There he was going to stay."25
Months before Booker T. Washington's Cotton States exposition
address, in which he implored southern blacks and whites to cast down
their buckets, Atlanta's black leadership was assuring northern whites
that African Americans, no matter their economic or political prog
ress, belonged and would stay in the South.26
The final word of the session went to Representative Murray,
whose support for a separate Negro Department at the fair suggested
an inclusive vision of the nation: "The colored people of this country
want an opportunity to show that the progress that the civilization
which is now admired the world over, that the civilization which is
now leading the world, that the civilization which all the nations of
the world look up to and imitate, the colored people, I say, want an
opportunity to show that they, too, are part and parcel of that great
civilization." Thus reassured that this African American vision of
progress would remain geographically located in the South, Congress
approved the appropriation with an amendment that the Cotton States
exposition "provide a separate building for the Negro Exhibit, instead
of locating it in the Government Building, as had been proposed."27
24 Cooper, Cotton States and International Exposition and South, Illustrated, 23-24.
25 Ibid., 24.
26 Booker T. Washington, Up from Slavery: An Autobiography (New York, 1901), 217-37,
esp. 219-21.
27 Cooper, Cotton States and International Exposition and South, Illustrated, 27 (first
quotation), 28 (second quotation). Walter G. Cooper, the Atlanta exposition's official historian,
concluded, "Undoubtedly, their fthe Negro committee's] presence and the assurance of a Negro
exhibit did much to secure the appropriation." Ibid., 8. While Nashville organizers never
officially credited the Negro Department for obtaining federal funding, it can be safely assumed
that they took notice of the lesson of Atlanta.

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The Negro Building at the Atlanta exposition was located in the

southeast comer of the fairgrounds, away from the fair's main entranc
It was not, however, hidden. The building was, in fact, situated at th
busy Jackson Street entrance to the exposition park. At 25,000 squar
feet it was one of the larger buildings on the exposition grounds and
was erected by two black contractors at a cost of $10,000.2S The chie
of the Negro Department was I. Garland Penn, a school principal from
Lynchburg, Virginia. Born two years after the end of the Civil War, h
attended both grammar and high school. After completing his studie
Penn took a teaching job in Virginia, rising to the position of principa
Before taking his position as chief of the Atlanta exposition's Negro
Department, Penn was most well known for his compilation The Afr
American Press and Its Editors (1891), a history of African American
journalism. Twenty-eight years old at the time of the Atlanta exposition
Penn embodied the spirit of the southern "New Negro." He was ed
cated, proud of his race, and willing to work with whites to ensure th
maintenance of civil and social rights. Penn also placed himself at the
top of an increasingly stratified racial hierarchy. More educated than h
parents and more sophisticated than the black sharecroppers nea
Lynchburg, Penn saw it as his moral duty to uplift his race, whil
distancing himself from members of the black working class.29
The entrance to the Negro Building featured an allegorical pediment
that told the story of black progress since slavery. On one side of th
pediment was a depiction of a slave mammy in 1865, "with the on
room log cabin, the log church, the rake and basket." On the other sid
was Frederick Douglass, accompanied by what Penn described as "the
comfortable residence, the stone church and symbols of the race's pro
ress in science, art and literature, all representative of the new negro i
1895." In the center was a "plow and well-fed mule." According t
Penn, this grouping represented the freedom of African Americans from
~x I. Garland Penn, "Awakening of a Race: The Moral and Industrial Development of the
Negro as Shown at the Exposition," Atlanta Constitution, September 22, 1895, pp. 24—2
Perdue, Race and the Atlanta Cotton States Exposition, 23. Perdue suggests that the Neg
Building's peripheral position signaled its marginal status. Significantly, she notes that the
building did not appear in some of the bird's-eye renditions of the exposition.
29 I. Garland Penn, The Afro-American Press and Its Editors (Springfield, Mass., 1891
Cooper, Cotton States and International Exposition and South, Illustrated, 58; Joanne K
Harrison and Grant Harrison, The Life and Times of Irvine Garland Penn (Philadelphia,
2000), 17—37; Perdue, Race and the Atlanta Cotton States Exposition, 22; Wilson, Negro
Building, 30, 51. See also I. Garland Penn, "The Progress of the Afro-American Since
Emancipation," in Ida B. Wells et al., The Reason Why the Colored American Is Not in the
World's Columbian Exposition: The Afro-American s Contribution to Columbian Literature
(Chicago, 1893), 40-62.

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slavery, "for the colored man today plows his field, while thirty years
ago he, without almost an exception, plowed for another."30 A romantic
depiction given the number of blacks ensnared in the South's system of
sharecropping and debt peonage, the pediment's central image neverthe
less made explicit the race pride of the building's organizers and their
confrontation with white stereotypes that cast blacks as indolent.31 The
first image encountered at the Negro Building, then, was a progressive
allegory of black life in America.32
Entering the building, the visitor met a large statue, by sculptor W. C.
Hill, of a black man in a loincloth with broken chains around his wrists.
On the pedestal was the motto, "Chains broken but not off" (Figure 1).
The statue, like the pediment, was viewed as an allegory of progress.
Indeed, the New York commission to the Atlanta exposition reported
that "if the present rate of progress is maintained for twenty-five years
to come, it needs no optimism to predict that the chains will have
entirely disappeared and little, if any, trace remain of their having been
worn."33 Likewise, in his "Negro Day" address, the Reverend J. W. E.
Bowen, a professor at Gammon Theological Seminary, interpreted the
statue's "muscular and powerful" frame to be the "new Negro." "What
is he doing?" asked Bowen. "He is thinking! And by the power of
thought he will think off those chains and have both hands free to help
you build this country and make a grand destiny of himself."34
In many ways the statue alluded to the "best-known white abolition
ist image" of the nineteenth century, a praying slave pleading, "Am I
Not a Man and a Brother?"35 While the earlier image of the kneeling
slave maintained the African American body as servant and supplicant
30 Perm, "Awakening of a Race," 24.

31 On sharecropping and debt peonage in the South, see William Cohen, At Freedom's Edge:
Black Mobility and the Southern White Quest for Racial Control, 1X61-19/5 (Baton Rouge, 1991);
Pete Daniel, The Shadow of Slavery: Peonage in the South (Urbana, 1972); Leon F. Litwack, Been
in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery (New York, 1979); Edward Royce, The Origins of
Southern Sharecropping (Philadelphia, 1993); Michael Wayne, The Reshaping of Plantation
Society: The Natchez District, 1860-1880 (Baton Rouge, 1983); and Gavin Wright, Old South,
New South: Revolutions in the Southern Economy Since the Civil War (New York, 1986).
32The exposition's official history highlighted the pediment's progressive vision: "The bass
relief design over the entrance shows the old log cabin, mule and plow; the companion piece, a
neat, modern Negro's home, church and a design showing the arts which the Negro has now
mastered." The Atlanta Exposition and South Illustrated (Chicago, 1895), 30.
33 Report of the Board of Commissioners Representing the State of New York at the Cotton
States and International Exposition, Held at Atlanta, Georgia (Albany, N.Y., 1896), 198;
hereinafter cited as New York at the Cotton States and International Exposition.
34 Bowen, Appeal to the King, 7.
35 John Stauffer, "Creating an Image in Black: The Power of Abolition Pictures," in W.
Fitzhugh Brundage, ed.. Beyond Blackface: African Americans and the Creation of American
Popular Culture, 1890-1930 (Chapel Hill, 2011), 66-94 (quotation on 70).

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Figure 1. "Negro Building (Interior)." This photograph highlights sculptor

Hill's Negro with Chains Broken But Not Off, which stood near the entrance o
Negro Building at the Atlanta fair. Fred L. Howe 1895 Cotton States and In
tional Exposition Photographs Collection, Kenan Research Center, At
History Center.
to God and to whites, The Negro with Chains Broken But Not Off
powerful reimagining of that slave figure. Muscular and standing,
form asserted that African Americans were no longer supplican
vants but an independent people reliant on themselves. That the fi
retained his broken chains was a reminder that slavery's long-stand
effects—poverty, discrimination, and exploitation—continued t
borne by African Americans at the end of the nineteenth century.
The exhibits of the Negro Building were largely educational
agricultural. The first display that visitors encountered came from
District of Columbia. It consisted of "art and statuary" as well
number of patents held by African Americans. The exhibit also feat
portraits of Frederick Douglass, Congressman John Mercer Langsto
Virginia, Senator Blanche K. Bruce of Mississippi, and the chief
missioner for the District of Columbia exhibit, Jesse Lawson, by
black painter Daniel Freeman. Three sculptures by W. C. Hill d
nated the exhibit: a bust of Frederick Douglass, The Obstinate Shoe

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The Negro with Chains Broken But Not Off. A photography gallery
showed off the black public schools of Washington. D.C.36
Proceeding onward, Negro Building visitors perused displays from
several southern states. Virginia's was dominated by the Hampton
Normal and Agricultural Institute's 1,200-square-foot space. Alabama's
contribution featured agricultural and industrial displays by the
Tuskegee Institute and the Alabama State Agricultural and Mechanical
College for Negroes in Normal, Alabama. Near Alabama's were the
Tennessee exhibits, made up of contributions from Central Tennessee
College, Fisk University, Roger Williams University, Knoxville Col
lege, and LeMoyne Institute. Maryland's display was dominated by
Morgan College's exhibit and was located near the building's 4,000
square-foot restaurant and cafe, which was "patronized liberally by both
races without the slightest friction." The Georgia exhibit was so large
that it occupied both sides of the aisle toward the northern entrance. The
official history recorded, "Clark University, Atlanta University, Atlanta
Baptist Seminary, Spelman Seminary, Morris Brown College, Georgia
State Industrial College, [andj Gammon Theological Seminary make
exhibits of superior quality in industry."37 The last noteworthy feature
of Atlanta's Negro Building was an exhibit that displayed the opposite
of the progress presented in the building. Tucked away in a corner was a
representation of "the other extreme of the race," labeled "Uncivilized
Africa," featuring "crude manufactures" made by "the "uncivilized
natives, the heathen of that country."38 The black spokesmen behind
the Negro Building took great care to provide object lessons that made
clear the progress of African Americans.
The Negro Building's reception was generally positive in both the
white and the black press. "Most of the exhibit space," wrote the
Atlanta Constitution, "is devoted to the educational displays in this
building, and for that reason the exhibits are not gaudy and conspicu
ous as they are in other buildings." Likewise, the Leavenworth Herald
reported, "The 'Negro building' is not only one of the largest, but one
of the most attractive, and it is all their own. Everybody goes to see it,
and all white visitors, Northern or Southern speak of it as a revela
tion."~ There were, however, dissenting voices. Charles Kindrick,
16 Cooper, Cotton States and International Exposition and South, Illustrated, 60.
37 Ibid., 60-61 (second quotation on 61); "A Race Triumph," Parsons Weekly Blade,
November 23, 1895, p. 1 (first quotation),
38 "News Item in the Chicago Inter Ocean" 40.
39 "Great Week Ahead: Down in the Negro Building," Atlanta Constitution, September 29,
1895, p. 13; "Negro Day," Leavenworth Herald, December 28, 1895, p. 2.

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writing in the New Orleans Daily Picayune, was unimpressed by th

Negro Building's portrayal of African American progress. He argu
"The display shows that the negro has simply been carried along b
motion he could never generate." For other observers, the Ne
Building was the defining component of the exposition. The Picayu
in contrast to its correspondent, contended, "As the Eiffel tower
the striking feature of the Paris exposition, and as the Ferris wheel
the particular unique thing remembered at Chicago, the negro exh
and the negro building will constitute the striking and novel featur
the cotton states exposition."40
Two years after the Cotton States exposition, the organizers of
Tennessee Centennial exposition did not forget the lessons of
Atlanta experience and also included a Negro Building on the f
grounds. Indeed, the Nashville Negro Building featured prominent
in promotional material for the 1897 exposition. A pamphlet c
lated before the fair opened promised that the building would "ill
trate the progress of the race in America from the old plantation d
down to the present time. The colored people of Tennessee will thu
have the greatest opportunity ever offered them to demonstrate
history of the past and the hope and possibilities of the future."41
Indianapolis Freeman also came out in support of a Negro Building
Nashville. "This exposition promises to be a repetition of the Atlan
affair," reported the paper, "which did more good in bringing the r
in close relationship than anything that has happened in a quarter o
century." The official catalog of the Tennessee exposition highligh
the Negro Building as the most "beautiful building on the grou
and suggested it was "well worthy of a visit by all interested in th
progress of the Negro since the days of slavery."42
In charge of the Negro Department was Nashville schoolteach
Richard Hill, the son of "Uncle Jim Hill," a slave "fiddler and
prompter at balls and parties given by the best families of Tennessee."
For the fair's white directors, Hill symbolized "a milestone in the
history of a race to show how far up or down it has traveled in the
journey of life." According to historian Bobby L. Lovett, Hill's occu
pation as a teacher "brought him into black Nashville's middle class
40 Charles W. Kindrick, "The Negro Building at the Exposition," New Orleans Daily
Picayune, October 22, 1895, p. 12 (first quotation); "The Atlanta Exposition," ibid., September
19, 1895, p. 2 (second quotation).
41 All Roads Lead to Nashville (Nashville, 1897), 23, in Books of the Fairs, reel 127, item 15.
42 "The Tennessee Exposition," Indianapolis Freeman, November 28, 1896, p. 4; Official
Catalogue of the Tennessee Centennial Exposition (Nashville, 1897), 57.

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and to the fringes of its elite Negro circle." It also made him depen
dent on the city's white patronage system. This position was signifi
cant as Hill replaced the first chief of the department, the nationall
prominent Nashville lawyer James C. Napier. Napier had resigne
citing health concerns, but his resignation letter to the centennia
executive committee suggests that he was having disagreements with
the representation of African Americans at the fair. With the conte
tious Napier out of the way. Hill, a confirmed follower of Booker T.
Washington, set out to demonstrate the industrial and educationa
progress of African Americans in the South.43
The Negro Building at the Tennessee Centennial exposition was
250 feet long, at least 80 feet wide, and two stories tall, and it boasted
a rooftop garden. While some historians have suggested that it wa
given a poor place on the exposition grounds as "a concession to the
general white public," contemporary sources suggest otherwise. The
Indianapolis Freeman described the building as "conspicuously
located. It would be a difficult task to find a better location." Simi
larly, the New York Times reported that the Negro Building "occupies
a central position, indicating that the management was disposed to
afford the colored people of the South an advantageous position in
which to appear with the illustrations of their development."44
As in Atlanta, educational institutions dominated the building. The
entire first floor was given over to various black colleges and universi
ties. The second floor was made up of exhibits from around the country
and from the South's public schools. An art gallery featured work by
known and unknown African American artists. The Sons of New York
sent a collection of photographs of the exteriors of black churches and
schools as well as interior shots of members' apartments. In addition,
the building contained photographs of graduates of black dental and
medical schools. In an era when many could read music, the Negro
Building contained "five large volumes" of musical compositions, some
of which could be purchased. The Nashville Banner reported that the
43 Justi, ed., Official History of the Tennessee Centennial Exposition, 193 (first, second, and
third quotations); Bobby L. Lovett, The African-American History of Nashville, Tennessee,
1780-1930: Elites and Dilemmas (Fayetteville, Ark., 1999), 235-36 (fourth quotation on 236);
James C. Napier, "Letter to the Executive Committee of the Tennessee Centennial Company
City," August 31, 1896, Correspondence—February 24, 1890-August 31, 1896, James C. Napier
Papers (Special Collections and Archives, Fisk University, Nashville).
44 Official Catalogue of the Tennessee Centennial Exposition, 57; Justi, ed., Official History
of the Tennessee Centennial Exposition, 198; Lovett, African-American History of Nashville,
Tennessee, 236 (first quotation); "The Tennessee Centennial," Indianapolis Freeman, May 1,
1897, p. 4 (second quotation); E. G. D., "Nashville's Exposition," New York Times, June 20,
1897, p. 17 (third quotation).

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"Exposition souvenir of the negro national hymn" had proved part

larly popular "among both white and colored visitors."43
Now two years after the Atlanta exposition and a year after
Plessy v. Ferguson Supreme Court ruling, the stakes were raised f
black participation at a national event. In this short time blacks' f
tunes in the South had shifted significantly, and much of the race p
on view in Atlanta was absent in Nashville. Gone were the bust of
Douglass, the allegorical sculptures, and the pictures of progress, and in

their place was a far more accommodationist vision. Whereas the Atlant
exposition had been defined by Booker T. Washington's "compromise,
the Nashville Negro Department chose W. H. Councill as its repr
sentative orator. Councill, one of the most prominent African American
spokesmen of the day, often competed with Washington for whit
patronage. Going beyond a level of acceptable pragmatism, Council
supported much of the white supremacist rhetoric of the South.46
In a speech delivered at the laying of the cornerstone for the Negro
Building, Councill emphasized the friendly relations between the two
races and claimed that African Americans "received much more from
slavery than did the slave-holders." An accommodationist in the
extreme, Councill nevertheless saw the Negro Building as an opportu
nity to demonstrate African American progress and confront white
racism. While emphasizing blacks' fidelity, Councill responded to
whites' racism: "Negro history has solved the negro problem from
the negro side. There still remains the Caucasian problem. In view of
what the negro has done for this country, in view of what the white
man has done for the negro, will the white man continue and enlarge
the work of encouragement to the struggling race; or will he use the
shotgun instead of the Holy Bible; the bloody knife instead of the
spelling book? These are problems for Caucasian brains."47 Southern
African Americans, even those favoring accommodation, conceived of
the Negro Building as a space of resistance, a place where accommo
dationism opened the door to a critique of the white racial system.
45 "Empire State at Centennial," Nashville Banner, July 30, 1897, p. 3 (quotations); "Colored
People's Work," Baltimore Sun, August 16, 1897, p. 3; Official Catalogue of the Tennessee
Centennial Exposition, 59.
46 William Hooper Councill was Washington's great antagonist in the 1890s. Born a slave in
North Carolina and later brought to Huntsville, Alabama, by slave traders, Councill quickly rose
in stature following emancipation. A Republican during Reconstruction, Councill changed
allegiances with the Democratic return to power. He was a favorite of white Democrats as he
came to embrace a historical vision that aligned well with white-nationalist ideology. Robert J.
Norrell, Up from History: The Life of Booker T. Washington (Cambridge, Mass., 2009), 87-88.
47 Justi, ed., Official History of the Tennessee Centennial Exposition, 195-98 (quotations
on 197).

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The Negro Buildings at the expositions presented a largely mascul

narrative of racial progress. There were spaces, however, where Afr
American women contributed. At the Tennessee Centennial expositi
for example, the Memphis exhibit consisted of embroidery, fine a
and fashion by African American women. By presenting evidence
their bourgeois domesticity, black women challenged racist image
the black household as disorderly. The black women of Memphis d
onstrated the same domestic values on display in the all-white Wom
Building. The inclusion of the work of black women in the Ne
Building confirms historian Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore's observa
that African Americans in the late nineteenth century emphasized
ucation and "encourag[ed| more equitable domestic partnerships
an active place for women in public life."48 Unlike the white m
dominated Manufacturing and Liberal Arts Buildings, the Negro B
ings were open to women's exhibits. In Nashville, for example, Afr
American women formed a "Colored Woman's Board," charged wit
"the exhibits which represent the progress made by the colored r
I. Garland Penn conceded that in Atlanta black women "showed more
real interest and put forth more effort to install a creditable exhibit in
the negro building" than did many men.49
The southern African American elite wanted the displays of the
Negro Buildings to add up to a convincing vision of progress. "We only
ask for the opportunity," wrote a manager for the Negro Department in
Nashville, "and we will show to the world that we are enterprising and
progressive, skillful and energetic, and alive to all interests and possi
bilities concerned in this great American Commonwealth."50 Speaking
in 1895 at Alcorn A&M College in Lorman, Mississippi, Isaiah T.
Montgomery—a founder and onetime mayor of the all-black town of
Mound Bayou, Mississippi—encouraged the school's students to par
ticipate in and contribute to the Cotton States exposition. Montgomery
argued the Negro Building's exhibits "will tend to show to the world
and to ourselves the depths from which we have come; the height to
which we have ascended, and our grand possibilities in the future. In
these will appear the true relations that we sustain to the moral,
48 "The Tennessee Centennial," Indianapolis Freeman, May 15, 1897, p. 7; Glenda Elizabeth
Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina,
1896-1920 (Chapel Hill, 1996), 31-32.
49 "Relics Already Secured," New York Tribune, April 28, 1897, p. 5 (first and second
quotations); I. Garland Penn, "'New' Negro Woman," Atlanta Constitution, December 22,
1895, p. 22 (third quotation).
50 "The Negro Day," Indianapolis Freeman, June 5, 1897, pp. 1 (quotation), 5.

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industrial and social life of this great country."51 Such demonstratio

of progress was central to late-nineteenth-century claims to modern
civilization. Through the Negro Buildings, African Americans partic
ipated in a conversation about the boundaries of that civilization. By
emphasizing African Americans' progressive nature, they laid claim
to American modernity.
I. Garland Penn also hoped that the exhibits would make clear t
whites a cultural hierarchy within the black community based on the
adoption of American bourgeois values. He suggested that the Negro
Building showed that not all blacks were "like the indolent, indiffer
ent and loud-mouthed class who give us such a bad name and that the
progressive negro, such as will be at the exposition with his progress
is entitled to a different treatment than the low class, thriftless and
filthy negro." In light of the demonstrated ability and progress of the
black middle class, Penn argued, whites must recognize African
Americans' rights. "If from the showing the new negro makes at the
exposition he succeeds in securing the full measure of his rights h
will be better able to lift his race up," Penn told a white reporter. "A
it is in some cases the bad negro receives as good treatment as th
good negro and the latter has nothing to point him to without, as an
evidence that a man who respects himself will beget to himself hi
rights." Revealing the split nature of uplift ideology—claiming t
uplift the race while separating oneself from a lower order—Pen
intended for the Negro Building to be "a stimulus to our race" so tha
all African Americans "will strive each hereafter to do their best for
the salvation of the race and our common southland."52
By emphasizing African American industrial progress, the Negro
Buildings confronted head-on a burgeoning racial science that linked
race with industrial achievement. White racial theorists in the 1890s
developed a theory of "industrial evolution" that cast industry as a
racial accomplishment. Blacks, it was argued, could not become an
industrial race due to their tropical race traits, which prevented them
from meeting the demands of industry.53 As Hampton educator Alice
51 "A Commencement Address: Delivered by Hon. Isaiah T. Montgomery," Indianapolis

Freeman, August 17, 1895, pp. 2-3. For more on Montgomery see Janet Sharp Hermann, The
Pursuit of a Dream (New York, 1981), esp. chap. 7.
52 "The New Negro at Our Show," Atlanta Constitution, July 28, 1895. p. 4. Penn's rhetoric
illuminates the black leadership's attempt to shift their discourse of race from biology to culture.
Black elites were not asking for universal equality. Instead, equality was reserved for those who
had properly assimilated to white society. See Gaines, Uplifting the Race, 21.
5- Daniel E. Bender, American Abyss: Savagery and Civilization in the Age of Industry
(Ithaca, N.Y., 2009), 6 (quotation), 84-90.

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Bacon noted, "Travellers looked out of their car windows at Sout

railway stations and saw black loafers lounging on the platform,
the primitive agricultural methods, the worn-out farms, the girdled
in the gloomy tracts of dying forest, the log cabins, the forlorn asp
the South in general, and concluded that the negro was hopeles
pable of progress, if not actually retrograding." The buildings' d
of industry and progress thus combated prevalent theories of
degeneration on the American continent.54
African Americans confronted a scientific landscape that clas
them as outside modernity not by invalidating the science but b
ing its conclusions. History was progressive, African American
men conceded; some races and people were destined to be left b
The Negro Building's vision, however, insisted that African Ame
who were "frugal, thrifty, and intelligent" were not on the losing e
modernity's progressive narrative. By foregrounding black south
bourgeois values and material progress, the organizers of the N
Building contended that African Americans, of a certain standing
part of American civilization. "[A] few more of these Southern
tions," wrote a school principal from Greenville, Mississippi, "w
back the mist and the educated and refined, the thrifty, and ind
Negro will be seen as a brilliant orb, making his way athwa
heavens of progress and civilization."'
The Negro Buildings positioned southern African Americans
the pervasive logic of evolutionary progress, and both white and
observers spoke of the exhibits in explicitly evolutionary term
official history of the Cotton States exposition claimed that the
exhibit .... was a sociological study, an ethnological fact markin
progress of an important branch of the human race under circum
not hitherto existing." In the eyes of white southerners, the "g
experiment" of freedom, as evidenced by the exhibits, forecast
future not just of African Americans "but of many more mill
the same race on other continents." Whites at the expositions t
the role of detached scientist observing blacks' evolutionary pr
and black southerners for the most part provided the evidence.56
54 Bacon, Negro and the Atlanta Exposition, 6. For northerners' losing interest in sou
African Americans, see David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in A
Memory (Cambridge, Mass., 2001), 35-39.
55 "The New Negro at Our Show," Atlanta Constitution, July 28, 1895, p. 4 (first quo
Lizzie C. Williams, "The Athens of the South," Indianapolis Freeman, June 26, 1
(se.cond and third quotations).
56 Cooper, Cotton States and International Exposition and South, Illustrated, 57. The
Constitution described in January 1895 the proposed arrangement of the Negro Build

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At the same time, the Negro Buildings' displays of technologica

achievement challenged scientists and anthropologists who put al
people of African descent at the bottom of a civilization-evolutionary
scale. For the elite African Americans who viewed themselves as
fulfilling an evolutionary narrative, the exhibits served as object les
sons of their successful movement toward civilization and away from
savagery.57 The Negro Committee for the Nashville exposition made
this distance explicit when it stationed John Tevy, a native of West
Africa, on the steps of the Negro Building. Tevy's purpose was to talk
"entertainingly of the contrast between the American negro and the
Dahomean."58 Tevy, like other artifacts of the past, was the perfect
starting point for the building's linear narrative of racial progress.
Yet representations of the race were not confined to the Negro Build
ings. At the Cotton States exposition, fairgoers could visit both a sup
posedly authentic Dahomey Village and an Old Plantation. The
Tennessee Centennial exposition organizers opted not to include a
Dahomey Village but did feature a plantation amusement.59 Both of
these amusements denied people of African descent coevality.60 The
Dahomey Village represented West Africans as primitive people not far
removed from the Stone Age (Figure 2). The Atlanta Constitution
stressed the Dahomeyans' primitive state, frequently referring to their
nudity ("black and savagely nude," one description ran). West Africans
various exhibits will be placed in their proper sequence and relation to each other, and the casual
visitor may note the progress of the race as step by step it moved up to the present." In the end,
the Negro Committee abandoned this evolutionary sequence. "Progress of a Race," Atlanta
Constitution, January 20, 1895, p. 17.
57 Baker, From Savage to Negro, 43^45; George W. Stocking Jr., Race, Culture. and
Evolution: Essays in the History of Anthropology (New York, 1968).
s"Tenn. Exposition: Magnificent Exhibit Made by the Afro-Americans," Saint Paul and
Minneapolis Appeal, August 14, 1897, p. 4 (quotation). See also Larson, "Three Southern
World's Fairs," 149.
9 The lack of a Dahomey Village at the Tennessee Centennial exposition was likely due to
the Dahomeyans' treatment at the Cotton States exposition. In early January 1896 a mob of
armed West Africans attempted to take the life of a concessionaire on the Midway. Since the end
of the exposition, the concessionaire had scarcely fed the Africans because he had lost most of
his money. The New Orleans Daily Picayune reported, "The condition of the savages is
deplorable. They say they have had nothing to eat except bread for several days, and because of
their rude huts and thin clothing they have suffered a great deal from the cold of the past few
days." "Riot on the Midway," New Orleans Daily Picayune, January 3, 1896, p. 1.
60 Borrowing from Johannes Fabian's Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its
Object (New York, 1983), Loren Kruger writes, "The power of civilization as idea and ensemble
of practices . . . depended on a paradoxical relation between modern citizen-spectator and colonial
other; late 19th-century anthropology, as Johannes Fabian notes, recognized the 'primitive' as our
'contemporary ancestor' while at the same time denying their 'coevalness' ... by assigning the
primitive to a relic of prehistory rather than to modern time." Loren Kruger, "'White Cities,'
'Diamond Zulus,' and the 'African Contribution to Human Advancement': African Modernities
and the World's Fairs," TDR: The Drama Review, 51 (Fall 2(X)7), 19^5 (quotation on 21).

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Figure 2. "Dahomey Village." In contrast to the "primitive" state that West Africans lived
in, the African American middle class hoped to make their evolutionary development
clear to both white and black fairgoers. Fred L. Howe 1895 Cotton States and Interna
tional Exposition Photographs Collection, Kenan Research Center, Atlanta History Center.
were visually dissected in the press to reveal their evolutionary inferior

ity. Such displays of foreign primitivism allowed southern white fair
goers to measure their race and their nation's supremacy. For the Negro
Committees, such atavisms could be devastating. Indeed, many white
fairgoers did not draw hard distinctions between the Dahomey Village,
the Negro Building, and African American fairgoers. Maude Andrews in
the Constitution reported that a Dahomeyan dance made her "think of a
negro laborer scattering corn in the field." Given how all people of
African descent were placed outside civilization, it should be unsurpris
ing to learn that black laborers working on the Atlanta exposition's
grounds attempted to break "through the gates enclosing the strange
people several times" when they first arrived at the exposition.61
African American laborers, whose status was precarious in the New
South, were anxious not to be lumped in with the atavism of the Midway.
61 "Her Gates Ajar," Atlanta Constitution, September 18, 1895, p. 2 (first and third
quotations); Maude Andrews, "This Is Woman's Busy Day," ibid., December 8, 1895, p. 6
(second quotation); "A Day at the Fair," ibid., September 27, 1895, p. 9.

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However, for those blacks placing themselves atop an intraracial hierar

chy, such portrayals bolstered their own claims to progress. Atavism
confirm modernity by establishing its difference to and break from th
past. As literary critic Dana Seitler has noted, "atavism is not just an
abjected form of modern life, a sign indicating modernity's Other
rather, it is an operation that makes modernity possible."62 For African
Americans concerned with evolutionary development, the Dahome
Village confirmed the modernity of the black elite.
While many white visitors to the Atlanta exposition expected to find
the Negro Building "filled with evidences of a rude and barbarous race,
the Salt Lake City Broad Ax, a black newspaper, reported the opposite
"But all such [fairgoers] were pleasantly disappointed; on the contrary
they had the opportunity of beholding a characteristic Dahomey village
placed in contrast with the achievements of the race, in civilization, in
literature, in industrial lines, in finance and in the high arts." Echoing the
Constitution's views of West Africans, the Broad Av reported, "The
village representing the lowest savage life of darkest Africa, with its
half-clothed, unkempt natives, proves a wonderful contrast with the
surrounding evidences of culture and refinement of the American
negroes."63 African American fairgoers were also taken aback by the
primitiveness of the West Africans. "An educated, well-dressed, beaver
hatted negro man pauses in the promenade," wrote Maude Andrews in
Leslie's Weekly, "to frown disapprovingly on this musical expression of
real African sentiments."64 It was clear to black fairgoers that th
Dahomeyans were not modern or civilized. Such anthropological com
parisons confirmed the Negro Building's narrative of progress. Standing
side by side with Africans, African Americans believed whites would
surely see they were a modern people. The black elite transferred the
image of black primitiveness from themselves to Africans. 5
h2 Seitler, Atavistic Tendencies, 26 (emphasis in original).

63 "The Colored Race at Atlanta," Salt Lake City Broad Av, December 7, 1895, p. 1. As
conciliatory note, the Broad Ax did give the Africans some credit: "The exhibit also contains many
things from Africa, showing what the race is capable of even without the aid of high civilization
64 Maude Andrews, "The Atlanta Exposition," Leslie's Weekly Illustrated, September 26,
1895, p. 199. Given Andrews's racial predilections, she probably meant this story to b
humorous—in that the sophisticated African American observed a difference between himse
and Africans that did not exist. Nevertheless, the anecdote does offer a glimpse into how Africa
American fairgoers responded to the Dahomey Village.
65 Frederick Douglass had asserted as much two years earlier: while African Americans were
denied participation in the Chicago fair, Douglass complained, the Dahomeyans were there "as
to shame the Negro,... to exhibit the Negro as a repulsive savage." Douglass was concerned th
the Dahomeyans. who he implied were neither "Negro" nor "civilized," would transfer thei
savagery to African Americans in the eyes of whites. In this way, Douglass both contested an
confirmed the discourse of civilization prevalent at the World's Columbian Exposition.

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African American fairgoers' reaction to the Dahomey Village

makes clear the complicated relationship between southern blacks
and the ongoing colonization of Africa in the late nineteenth century.
On the one hand, the village confirmed black advancement in the
Americas; on the other hand, the collapsing of the distinction between
Africans and African Americans in the white press compelled black
visitors to reimagine their connections with Africa. As Jim Crow
tightened its hold on the South, emigrationists like Henry McNeal
Turner suggested that African Americans could only fulfill their des
tiny as a separate and distinct race outside the United States. At the
same time, the Negro Buildings' designed contrast to the primitive
depictions of West Africans undermined the emigrationist cause, help
ing explain Turner's outburst at the Atlanta fair. The Negro Buildings'
support of a Jim Crow modernity located in the South forestalled a
need to emigrate to Africa. African Americans could become a strong
and separate people within the South. Their relationship to Africa was
to uplift Africans. In this way, the work of the Negro Buildings
aligned well with that of the African American missionaries of the
period who, as historian James T. Campbell notes, viewed "uplifting
their benighted brethren as an opportunity for African Americans to
demonstrate their own relative progress and thereby advance their
claim to full American citizenship." Emigrationists like Turner, who
placed the future of African Americans in Africa and not the United
States, were left out of the "New Negro" paradigm.66
Like the Dahomey Village, the Midway's Old Plantation amusement
highlighted the atavism of people of African descent. Rather than
locating blacks' backwardness and primitivism on foreign soil, the Old
Plantation suggested that contemporary rural African Americans were
outside modernity. If the racial harmony of the Negro Building was to
convince northerners that southern whites had a humane answer to the
"Negro Problem," the Old Plantation eased northerners' minds that the
proper place for blacks was the South.67
For southern white spectators, the Old Plantation was a piece of
nostalgia. Here blacks were part not of a foreign country but of a
Frederick Douglass, "Introduction," in Wells et al., Reason Why the Colored American Is Not in
the World's Columbian Exposition, 2-12 (quotation on 9).
66 James T. Campbell, Middle Passages: African American Journeys to Africa, 1787-2005
(New York, 2006), 144. On Turner's complicated and sometimes tortured logic for African
American emigration, see ibid., 123, 133-34.
67 Old Plantation amusements functioned this way at northern fairs, too. The 1901 Buffalo Pan
American Exposition's guide emphasized the southemness and authenticity of the Old Plantation act.
Richard H. Barry, Snap Shots on the Midway of the Pan-Am-Expo (Buffalo, N.Y., 1901), 125-28.

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foreign time. The Tennessee Centennial's official catalog described th

amusement as "a representation of home scenes on the Old Plantation a
it was before the war." It confirmed that the "participants are negroes
altogether, and their songs, dances, cakewalks and stump speaking ar
interspersed with music on the banjo, crap-shooting scenes, and all the
events of the happy days long gone. It is not minstrel entertainment
purely, but an effort to show the sunny side of the olden times, and th
innocent, joyous amusements of a time that has passed away. An
which is only remembered by the older men and women of the South.
As historian Karl Hagstrom Miller has pointed out, such plantatio
shows borrowed from both the popular minstrel stage and anthropolog
ical exhibits to depict a "folkloric isolation" that helped relieve the new
urban middle class's unease with modern civilization.'1*
The Old Plantation played into well-circulated stereotypes of blacks
as a happy-go-lucky people and undercut the seriousness of the Negr
Building.69 Maude Andrews, writing for Harper's Weekly, explicitly
connected the Old Plantation to the Dahomey Village, presenting
vision of blackness that crossed time and space. At the Old Plantation
she noted, "Real negroes are on the platform before us, dancing wildly
and singing in that queer crooning animal way that always makes one
look about for the wild beasts of [Rudyard] Kipling's jungle stories. No
very different in their movements and voices are these darkies, who
have lived all their lives amid civilization, from those wild creatures in
the Dahomey Village."70 In the end, the Old Plantation was a cros
68 Official Catalogue of the Tennessee Centennial Exposition, 161 (first and secon
quotations); Karl Hagstrom Miller, Segregating Sound: Inventing Folk and Pop Music in t
Age of Jim Crow (Durham. N.C., 2010), 101 (third quotation).
mThe way that caricature could undermine the mission of the Negro Building was made
clear during President William McKinley's visit to the Tennessee Centennial exposition. The
Baltimore Sun reported, "The most amusing incident of the visit occurred while the Presiden
was passing through the Agricultural Building. He had just visited the Negro Building an
listened with evident pleasure to the singing of rare old plantation melodies and jubilees by the
Jubilee Club of Fisk University. The President was still talking of this wonderful performan
when his progress was suddenly blocked by the appearance of twenty or thirty colored peop
dressed in the most grotesque and characteristic costumes imaginable, who began to sing som
improvised verses about 'Bill McKinley and his last great race." When they concluded the son
with a hilarious buck dance the President's efforts to maintain his dignity failed him and h
broke into a hearty laugh." No matter the extent of progress exhibited by African Americans a
the expositions, it continued to be undermined by popular stereotypes that positioned Africa
Americans as humorous sideshows. "Exposition's Climax," Baltimore Sun, June 19. 1897. p. 7
70 Maude Andrews, "The Midway at the Atlanta Exposition." Harper's Weekly, Novembe
23, 1X95, p. 1109. Similarly. Emma Allensworth of Nashville, visiting the World's Columbi
Exposition, connected the supposed racial traits of African Americans to Dahomeyans: "The
are like the negro in laziness too. It was about one' o'clock when we went in and nearly all we
lying around sleeping, smoking and talking." Entry dated July 6. 1893, Emma H. Allenswor
Diary. #3214-/. (Southern Historical Collection. Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at
Chapel Hill).

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between plantation shows like the South Before the War (1

Nate Salsbury's Black America (1895) and living anthropo
exhibits like the Dahomey Village.71
Although it is easy to dismiss the Old Plantation as yet a
representation of the racism found at expositions, contained
the performances was a multivocality that incorporated "hidd
scripts." The Old Plantation was one of the few spaces to enac
commercial modernity that was both absent from elite bl
courses of high culture and hidden from the eyes of whites.
ing racist images with modern identities and pleasures, th
actors of the Old Plantation connected the South with the ascendant
commercial culture of the northern metropolises.
While whites interpreted the "songs, dances, cakewalks and stump
speaking . . . interspersed with music on the banjo" as the "events of
the happy days long gone," black fairgoers could see and hear some
thing far different. The "weird and guttural sounds" accompanying "the
scraping of the fiddle and the old banjo" would be familiar to some
African Americans not as anachronisms but as modem sounds that
spoke of the alienation of life in the Jim Crow South.73 Quartet singing
and the cakewalk came directly from late-nineteenth-century African
American cultural sites and were popular among working-class black
folk. Compared with the performances of the Fisk Jubilee Singers at the
Negro Building, the syncopated rhythms of the Old Plantation presented
a sophisticated sound grounded in the here-and-now realities of racial
oppression, exploitation, and commercial possibility. By the early twen
tieth century, such rhythms and sounds defined the sonic landscape of
modernity. Far from being a premodern people locked in a rural econ
omy, then, the southern black performers of the Old Plantation were
modem people exploiting the racial undercurrents of American society
to their own advantage, even if middle-class whites and blacks only
heard primitive rhythms and sounds. Not simply a "white fantasy," the
71 Sotiropoulos, Staging Race, 22-26, 37. For an uncritical description of Black America that
nevertheless gives insight into the appearance and performance of plantation shows, see Roger
Allan Hall, "Black America: Nate Salsbury's 'Afro-American Exhibition,Educational Theatre
Journal, 29 (March 1977), 49-60.
72 James C. Scott. Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven,
1990). On the multifaceted nature of plantation shows and other forms of black minstrel
culture, see Sotiropoulos, Staging Race, 2. For black public culture's "hidden transcripts," see
Robin D. G. Kelley, Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class (New York.
1994). 7-8. 32-44, 77-79.
73 Official Catalogue of the Tennessee Centennial Exposition, 161 (first and second
quotations); Justi, ed., Official History of the Tennessee Centennial Exposition, 209 (third and
fourth quotations).

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Old Plantation was on the forefront of modern commercial entertain
ment and African American popular music and culture.74

The Old Plantation made clear how the black elite could lose
control of a defined image of blackness in the anarchy of the con

marketplace. On the one hand, though blackface and minstrel am
ments were able to carry hidden transcripts to a black audience,
also constrained the actors within popular and damaging stereoty
On the other hand, the freedom from nineteenth-century musica
dards led to the development of blues and rag and jumpstarte
careers of African American artists. These multiple performance
blackness were prescient of a commercial and public racial ide
As much as the Old Plantation was a performance, so too wa
black elite's participation in the fairs a performance of white-insc
standards of acceptable bourgeois behavior. If the Negro Building
the black elite's enactment of bourgeois comportment hid th
straints placed on African Americans in the Jim Crow South, th
Plantation brought them to the fore.75 The Old Plantation, Daho
Village, and the Negro Buildings became contested sites in a
public sphere closely monitored by whites.
Confronted with multiple performances of blackness that
undermined their vision of the New Negro, the black elite attemp
use the Negro Buildings to uplift members of the race they view
lagging behind. The exhibits of the Negro Buildings were more t
evidence of racial progress; they were to serve as instructional to
those blacks not as "evolved" as the black elite. The black new
the Savannah Tribune reported that the exhibits, like the careers o
Atlanta organizers themselves, were a "splendid object lesson to th
industrious and intelligent of [thej race." The exhibits could even
lyze the evolutionary process among lower-class blacks. "Whi
Exposition was not created to teach the world better," wro
Indianapolis Freeman of the Tennessee Centennial, "the enterpris
74 Webb, "Authentic Possibilities," 65-73 (quotation on 65); Miller, Segregating Sound. F

ways plantation and black-performed minstrel shows reflected real African American
articulations, see Lynn Abbott and Doug Seroff, "'They Cert'ly Sound Good to Me': Shee
Southern Vaudeville, and the Commercial Ascendancy of the Blues," in David Eva
Ramblin on My Mind: New Perspectives on the Blues (Urbana, 20()8), 49-104; Abbo
Seroff, Ragged But Right; Lynn Abbott and Doug Seroff, Out of Sight: The Rise of A
American Popular Music, 1889-/895 (Jackson, Miss., 2002); Alan Lomax, The Land Wh
Blues Began (New York, 1993); Ronald Radano, Lying up a Nation: Race and Black M
(Chicago, 2003); and Sotiropoulos, Staging Race, 1-11. For the ways the black and white
class may not have fully heard the performances of the Old Plantation, see Clare Corbould,
Sounds and Identity in Interwar Harlem," Journal of Social History, 40 (Summer 2007), 85
" On the collision of the consumer marketplace, the public sphere, and black intellectu
in the early twentieth century, see Baldwin, Chicago's New Negroes.

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afford an opportunity for the Negro to teach the world a great

themselves. The natural progression of evolution in many
too slow; and a little forced culture is nothing amiss."76 Ac
this logic, evolution among people of African descent move
ent paces. It was clear to members of the black elite tha
evolved to a point where they were equal to whites and
treated as such. The entire presentation of the Negro Buildin
that many local African American leaders had adopted a La
view of human development, which emphasized the her
acquired characteristics, placing elite blacks on an equal
whites and separated from other peoples of African descent
in the Negro Buildings' exhibitions of progress was the sugg
the African American elite had evolved to be a distinct race from
Africans and perhaps even from lower-class blacks.78

The black elite was not ready, however, to abandon those left behind.
As a result, lower-class blacks needed to be uplifted, while Africans
needed to be civilized. This lesson was not lost on white observers.
Leslie's Weekly reported that the Negro Building was "representative
of the more advanced class of blacks, but is suggestive of possibilities
of growth and development which are most hopeful and encouraging."
Alice Bacon commented that the Negro Building "was a revelation"
to "ignorant country [black] people." She thought that "those who went
away after seeing and believing, carried with them a new incentive
to industry, a new hope for the future, and a new reason for bearing
patiently present disadvantages in the certainty that they were but tem
porary and could be overcome by effort."79 Thus, both white and black
observers hoped that those fairgoers who had not internalized the
76 "The Negro in Atlanta," Savannah Tribune, July 20, 1895, p. 2; "Annent the Centennial,"
Indianapolis Freeman, June 5, 1897, p. 4.
77 As Robert A. Nye notes, it is important to remember that in the late nineteenth century the
individual and society were viewed on a continuum, not as binary opposites. Individual displays
of African American progress could stand in for the group. Nye, "Sociology and
Degeneration," 50.
78 Given the pervasiveness of evolutionary discourse in the late nineteenth century, this
conclusion was not as great a stretch as one might think. For instance, two years after the
Tennessee Centennial exposition, Henry Parks, an AME reverend, published Africa: The
Problem of a New Century (1899), in which he argued that Africans and African Americans
were two distinct races of people. Replicating the narrative of the Negro Buildings, Parks argued
that African Americans had evolved due to their three hundred years' contact with Anglo
America, while Africans remained trapped in the past. Mitchell, Righteous Propagation, 54-55.
Kevin Gaines has also noted the pervasiveness of Social Darwinian thought, heredity science,
and eugenics among the black elite. Gaines, Uplifting the Race, 81-82.
79 John Y. Foster, "The Meaning of the Atlanta Exposition," Leslie's Weekly Illustrated,
December 5, 1895, p. 363; Bacon, Negro and the Atlanta Exposition, 24.

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lessons of civilization and modern progress would be overwhel

by the displays and conform to the moral and social standards of
New South. Moreover, they believed that in doing so the "Negro question
could be answered by a slow incrementalism that did not openly challeng
the South's racial hierarchies.
Given the pervasiveness and popularization of evolutionary theory

in the late nineteenth century, it is not surprising that prominent
African Americans were influenced by its logic. Faced with an ideol
ogy of progress on one side and degeneration on the other, the black
elite, as historian Walter Weare correctly contends, was given "little
choice except to believe passionately that the race, like [Booker T.J
Washington himself, was going to go up from slavery, that history was
on their side, that the invisible hand of Darwin would favor the man
farthest down, whose greater struggle rendered him the fittest."80 Even
W. E. B. Du Bois, who later moved away from a biological conception
of race, initially adopted such notions of evolutionary progress.81 Yet
by adopting a narrative of progress that was based on racial science
that excluded them from civilization, the black elite challenged the
conclusions but not the science. The exhibits of the Negro Buildings
may have asserted the elite's right to equality, but they confirmed the
ideology of a racial hierarchy of human life for white observers.
If the Negro Buildings were representative of race progress, then
black fairgoers were living object lessons of African American devel
opment. Some historians have interpreted the expositions as segregated
spaces.82 And while it is true that the expositions were discriminatory
spaces, they were not officially segregated; and their organizers worked
hard to make it known that the black community was welcome. For
members of an aspiring class, the entire exposition, and not just the
Negro Building, became an important stage on which to present and
perform the progress made since emancipation. Significantly, the expo
sitions operated more as open than closed space, at a moment when de
s0Weare, "New Negroes for a New Century," 93. That international expositions were key
vehicles for the dissemination of social and biological evolutionary science is an important point
of Rydell, All the World's a Fair.
111 As part of his proposed creed for the American Negro Academy. Du Bois wrote. "As a
means to this end we advocate, not such social equality between these races as would disregard
human likes and dislikes, but such a social equilibrium as would, throughout all the complicated
relations of life, give due and just consideration to culture, ability, and moral worth, whether they
be found under white or black skins." Du Bois, Conservation of Races, 9—10, 12, 15 (quotation).
See also Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in
the United States, 1880-1917 (Chicago, 1995), 27.
82 Hale, Making Whiteness, 147-51; Rydell, All the World's a Fair, K5: Perdue, Race and the
Atlanta Cotton States Exposition, 31.

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jure segregation was sweeping the South.In the limina

exposition grounds, southerners presented an image of p
tence between the races, one that many African American
to utilize even if they had to ride a Jim Crow railcar to get t
Not all African Americans, however, were in favor of
tions. The main opposition came from the northern black
the Cleveland Gazette*4 As early as February 1895, the G
on African Americans to boycott the Atlanta exposition.
and others, emphasized the fair's Jim Crow character, ru
about discrimination at the Atlanta exposition. "In m
amusement," reported the Gazette, "black visitors are no
all." Similarly, the Washington (D.C.) Bee described "prej
worst extreme." Even though it claimed that "Northern N
treated fair in the South," the Kansas City Topics report
Kansans would not make an exhibit or attend the Atlant
because "[they] strongly hate the South and do not feel that t
go there because there is a jim crow law and colorline." Tw
the Cleveland Gazette emerged as a strong opponent of t
Centennial exposition, again interpreting the Negro B
extension of Jim Crow.'ss African Americans faced discri
ply going to and from the expositions. Many northern blac
that a trip south put them in danger and made a good calc
visit was not worth it. That African Americans had to ride
railcars upon entering the South "will keep from the exp
sands of northern colored people," reported the Kansas C
"The evidence presented by black participation in the Atlanta and Nashv

suggests the fluidity of the color line into the 1890s. Nevertheless, African Ame
in southern expositions at whites" pleasure, ensuring that whites never gave up
South's system of racial hierarchy. See C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career
York. 1957); Howard N. Rabinowitz, Race Relations in the Urban South, 1X65
1978); and Mark Schultz. The Rural Face of White Supremacy: Beyond Jim Cro
s4 Some black Nashvillians, led by the Nashville Citizen, did try to organize
1897 exposition. Kansas City (Kans.) American Citizen, March 12, 1897, p. 2.
85 "TTie Exposition a Farce," Cleveland Gazette, February 9. 1895, p. 2; "T
Cleveland Gazette, December 7, 1895, p. I (first and second quotations): "
Truth," Washington Bee, November 30, 1895, p. 1 (third quotation); "No Negr
City (Kans.) Topics, August 22, 1895, p. 2 (fourth and fifth quotations); "Tenne
Cleveland Gazette, April 10, 1897, p. 2.
SCl "Negro Exposition." Kansas City Topics, August 8, 1895, p. I (quo
Triumph." Parsons Weekly Blade, November 23, 1895, p. 1. The Southern R
seeing an opportunity, frequently advertised in the black press during th
African Americans would be "treated well" on its cars. "Every convenience
road to the colored people," it advertised in late October 1895. "The Sou
Washington Bee, October 12, 1895, p. 1 (first quotation in note); "The Sout
Atlanta," Washington Bee, October 26, 1895. p. 1 (second quotation in note).

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Yet others took the expositions as an opportunity to agitate aga

segregation and discrimination. The Chicago Conservator deman
that the Tennessee Centennial executive committee end the discrimina
tion against African Americans on the railroads in time for the fair. As
an article in the Parsons (Kansas) Weekly Blade contended, "this expo
sition will do more to break up this diabolical outrage than anything that
has ever happened."87
Other black newspapers were in favor of the expositions and
reported on their "most enjoyable feature"—a relative "absence of race
prejudice." x And, indeed, when the Cotton States and International
Exposition opened on September 18, 1895, Booker T. Washington was
not the only black representative at the fair. As the exposition execu
tives marched with the United States Army through the streets of
Atlanta to the fairgrounds, they were accompanied by the Second Bat
talion of the Colored Infantry, commanded by Lieutenant Colonel F. H.
Crumbley, and the Lincoln Guards, an African American militia unit
from Macon, Georgia. Increasingly denied a strong public military
presence, black soldiers made their participation known.8'' Moreover,
African Americans, like whites, flooded the fairgrounds on opening
day. The New York World reported that in Atlanta "the people swarmed
into the buildings—black and white, Georgia Colonels and all." Blacks
attended in decent numbers throughout the course of the expositions,
with attendance peaking during special congresses and on days devoted
to African Americans. They may not have attended the fairs at any
where near the rates of whites, but African Americans nevertheless had
a salient presence at the expositions.90
87 Kansas City American Citizen, February 12, 1897. p. 2; "A Race Triumph," Parsons
Weekly Blade, November 23, 1895, p. 1.
Kt< Charles H. Stewart. "The Tennessee Centennial: A Visit to the Sunny South," Indianapolis
Freeman, May I, 1897. p. 8 (quotations); "The Negro Day," ibid.. June 5, 1897, pp. 1, 5;
Williams. "Athens of the South." 1. The Indianapolis Freeman, Salt Lake City Broad Ay,
Charlotte Observer, Parsons Weekly Blade. Savannah Tribune. Kansas City Topics, Baltimore
Afro-American, and Leavenworth Herald all had positive reviews of the Negro Buildings.
"Miles of Moving Soldiers," Atlanta Constitution, September 19, 1895, p. 2. On the
importance of military display in maintaining black rights, see Kathleen Ann Clark, Defining
Moments: African American Commemoration and Political Culture in the South. 1863-1913
(Chapel Hili, 2005); and Steven Hahn, A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in
the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration (Cambridge, Mass., 2003).
1,0 James Creelman, "South's New Epoch." New York World, September 19, 1895, p. 3,
reprinted as "An Article in the New York World," in Harlan, ed., Booker T. Washington
Papers. 4:3—15 (quotation on 13). It is difficult to determine, with any degree of accuracy, the
number of African Americans who took in the fairs. The Tennessee Centennial exposition's
official history noted, "The attendance of negroes on special days, and in fact at all times, was
large." Justi, ed.. Official History of the Tennessee Centennial Exposition, 198. The Savannah
Tribune reported of the Cotton States exposition that "attendance of the colored people is fair.

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To combat stories circulating in the black press about discrimin

tion at the Atlanta exposition, I. Garland Penn frequently emphasized
the openness of the exhibition space. For example, to a question from
the Toronto Christian Guardian in Canada regarding the exclusion of
blacks at the exposition, Penn responded, "There are no such signs on
exhibit buildings . . . , and the colored people are welcome to al
buildings, and reports to the contrary are only circulated by designin
men of our race to prevent an attendance of colored people .... Th
fact is the colored people are treated exceptionally good (just as their
exhibit and demeanor merits)—far better than many expected." B
including testimony from five prominent black Atlantans who all had
attended the exposition without problems, Penn also suggested, how
ever, that only a certain class of blacks—those whose "exhibit and
demeanor merits"—could expect to be treated well.91 Alice Bacon
seconded Penn's assertions, commenting, "While there was no social
mingling of the two races, they met and observed each other on the
fair grounds, in the street cars, at the railway stations, at public mee
ings, in their walks about the city streets. They shopped in the same
stores, they looked at and discussed the same exhibits and they
exchanged ideas now and then as they passed each other that produced
their effect on both sides." The Savannah Tribune reported that "negr
visitors can enter any building that is open to the whites, and there is
no limit to their enjoyment of the exhibits and side shows." In Atlanta
for a brief moment, the color line became fluid.92
The Tennessee Centennial exposition was similarly accused of being
a segregated space. In response, African American journalist Joh
Edward Bruce, under his pen name Bruce Grit, published an account
of his visit, confirming the Nashville exposition's open nature:
I visited every building on the grounds, especially those to which the local
kickers said negroes would not be admitted, viz, the Woman's building and
the Auditorium. At both these places I was treated courteously, as I was in all
other buildings I visited. It was said also that negroes could not buy refreshing
especially those of other states. The colored citizens of Atlanta are doing much to solve the
Negro question by conducting various kinds of paying business." "Sayings about Atlanta
Savannah Tribune, December 7, 1895, p. 2. The Baltimore Sun reported that twenty thousand
African Americans attended the Tennessee Centennial exposition on Negro Day. "Colore
People's Work," Baltimore Sun, August 16. 1897, p. 3.
91 "Negro Editors Meet," Atlanta Constitution, November 22, 1895, p. 11.
92 Bacon, Negro and the Atlanta Exposition, 23; "The Negro at the Exposition," Savannah
Tribune, November 2, 1895, p. 1. Stewart M. Lewis, an African American editor from
Washington. D.C., told the Atlanta Constitution, "I went into every building and studied the
exhibits. Nowhere was discourtesy shown me. The negro is treated as well here as he is treate
anywhere." "The Colored Press," Atlanta Constitution, November 8, 1895, p. 11.

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drinks in the Agricultural building, where there is a soda water fountain. I

went over there, bought soda water and drank it on the spot. The roof didn't
fall in, and nobody called me "nigra" either. I had similar refreshment in the
Machinery building, where I also partook of some delightful sweet cider, which
was served to me by a white woman of tender years and prepossessing face,
who politely requested me to call again.9"
While discrimination surely took place at the fairs, the most soli
evidence suggests that the expositions enabled African America
participation not simply as objects on display but also as fairgoer
free to engage in most aspects of the fairs. At the expositions African
American visitors, side by side with whites, performed a Jim
Crow modernity.
It served the interests of white executives to have African Americans
attend the expositions—not only to convince northerners of the South's

harmonious race relations but also to bring in much-needed revenue. On
both counts they were successful. The Brooklyn (New York) Eagle
reported that "everywhere you see the negro" and that there was "no
place about the exhibition where he is not as good as anybody else."
The New York committee in its summary of the Atlanta exposition
noted that the "negroes are another never-failing subject for the obser
vation and the study of Northern and foreign visitors. They abound
everywhere." The Atlanta Constitution described how northern visitors
were taken aback by the sophistication of African Americans at the
Cotton States exposition. Northerners had forgotten that blacks had
been in "close and familiar contact with the most refined and highly
civilized people to be found in the world, and that the most progressive
of the race have imbibed something of the energy, enteiprise and aspi
rations of the people with whom their lot is cast." Thus hijacking
African Americans' performances of progress, southern whites took
credit for blacks' development to insist that white southerners had the
answer to the "Negro question."94
Whereas southern whites claimed African Americans' progress and
behavior as evidence of whites' expert guidance, the performance of
bourgeois sensibilities was paramount to the educated black elite's
assertion that they should be treated as equal partners in American
citizenship. As a result, African American newspapers frequently
93 Bruce Grit, "Colored Men in Business," Salt Lake City Broad Ax, September 18, 1897, p. 4.
94 "The Negro Board," Atlanta Constitution, June 14, 1895, p. 9; Hand Book to the Cotton
States and International Exposition: Being a Faithful Account of What a Representative of the
Brooklyn Eagle Saw When He Visited the Fair (Atlanta, 1895), 11-12 (first and second
quotations), in Books of the Fairs, reel 126, item 3; New York at the Cotton States and
International Exposition, 278-79 (third quotation on 278); "Negro Day," Atlanta Constitution,
October 20, 1895, p. 16 (fourth quotation).

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commented on the behavior and dress of black fairgoers

correspondent professed, "The easy, graceful polite attention
ladies and gentlemen in charge of the exhibits were among th
to be very highly commended."95 Charles R. Douglass, son
recently deceased Frederick Douglass, emphasized the importa
African Americans' performing middle-class sensibilities at th
sitions. "A large gathering of well dressed, intelligent an
behaved colored people," said Douglass, "cannot but make a fav
impression among those who know us as menials in rags a
rance." Such performances, Douglass suggested, could im
whites' treatment of a certain class of blacks.96
In Nashville, African Americans continued to focus on their b
as a sign of racial progress. The Indianapolis Freeman warn
fairgoers that they would be watched and should behave accor
"The thousands of our people . . . should conduct themse
dently, because we are on dress-parade." Apparently black
took the Freeman's, advice. "The behavior of the colored
upon the grounds," wrote Charles H. Stewart, "the immen
dance and the good natured humor displayed in every incid
during every hour of the day reflect with credit upon the m
the patriotism and the character of the colored people of t
and State." Recognizing both the scrutiny and the racial stere
many African Americans took extra steps to ensure that they
middle-class standards to confirm their modernity.97
For African American women in particular, the expositio
was key to moving beyond stereotypes of black women as
Jezebels or domestic servants. 8 At gatherings within and out
fairs, southern black women defined themselves as respectable
oriented members of southern society. In the days before Ch
the Cotton States exposition played host to a National Con
Women organized by the Negro Department. One purpos
" "A Race Triumph," Parsons Weekly Blade, November 23, 1895, p. 1.
96 Quoted in Bacon, Negro and the Atlanta Exposition, 23. Douglass went o
favorable impression was noticeable to a remarkable degree in the manner of our t
public conveyances and in the shops of Atlanta. . . . Now I claim that our going to
such numbers, with heads erect, acting and talking like free men and women had
with our respectful treatment." Ibid., 23-24.
l> M. A. Majors, "Nashville Tennessee," Indianapolis Freeman, May 29, 1897, p
quotation); Charles H. Stewart, "Crowned with Success," ibid., June 12, 1897, p. 5 (
third quotations). On the importance of public performance to the black midd
Mitchell, Righteous Propagation, 115.
98 For analysis of this imagery, albeit in an earlier period, see Deborah Gray Wh
/ a Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South (New York, 1985).

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congress was to celebrate the "intelligence, beauty, and virtue"

African American women. The speakers included "lawyers, teacher
physicians, lecturers, journalists, authors, principals and instructo
as well as the wives of prominent African American men. The goa
the congress were to continue the uplift work of the African Amer
middle class and to demonstrate to white southerners that African
American home life was representative of the domestic ideal. "The
women of our race, as the women of any race, can make or break us,"
reflected Penn in the pages of the Atlanta Constitution. "The colored
women's congress has a fixed purpose and that is to promote intelli
gence, refinement and morality in the negro home .... By delibera
tion they mean to ascertain for themselves all that is before them for
the proper uplift of their people, to note the opportunities that are open
to them and to prepare the womanhood of the race for the snares that
are in wait for them."99 Black women, then, were in the vanguard of
disrupting racist stereotypes of the black family.
In her study of the Cotton States exposition, historian Theda Perdue
suggests that the Congress on Women in Atlanta featured the most
explicit attacks on racism.100 Likewise, the Tennessee Centennial expo
sition witnessed the establishment of the National Association of Col
ored Women's first constitution. The organization, "united in the effort
to lift the masses as they rise," took aim at the South's racial system.
Meeting in Nashville in conjunction with the centennial exhibition, the
association adopted a resolution against Jim Crow railcar laws,
demanded first- and second-class coaches where such Jim Crow laws
existed, and condemned rapists, lynching, and "the wholesale publica
tion of crime by the newspapers." It also resolved that "the convict lease
system be humanized" and endorsed the Frederick Douglass memorial
monument.101 Ultimately, the organizers of the NACW convention
were disappointed by the turnout, blaming low attendance on a "yellow
fever outbreak and the belief that Northern women stayed home rather
than ride Jim Crow railroad cars into Nashville."102 At the Atlanta
and Nashville expositions African American women took very public
positions as "cultural authorities." In a much more explicit fashion than
99 Penn, "'New' Negro Woman," 22.

100 Perdue, Race and the Atlanta Cotton States Exposition, 45-48; Wilson, Negro
Building, 76-77.
101 "The National Association of Colored Women Meet in Nashville, Tenn.," Indianapolis
Freeman, October 2, 1897, p. 2.
102 Joan Marie Johnson, Southern Ladies, New Women: Race, Region, and Clubwomen in
South Carolina, 1890-1930 (Gainesville, Fla., 2004), 101.

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men did at the fairs, African American women vocally took a stand
against the South's racial order.103
Although white observers were generally pleased by the order
displayed by African American fairgoers, the black elite was sensitiv
to the presence of the lower class.104 In their view, the behavior of
poor blacks undermined performances of middle-class sensibilities
John Edward Bruce noted that while there was a "well-dressed and
well-ordered crowd" at the Tennessee Centennial exposition, there
were also African Americans in Nashville who were "bumptious,
overbearing, odoriferous and greasy in public places."105 Bruce's
objections to lower-class blacks seem out of character. Bruce, who
later became Marcus Garvey's personal secretary, was often a
defender of the poor black masses. Biographer Ralph L. Crowder
describes Bruce's ideological position as "combining] elements of
Black nationalism and separation with political and civil protest."106
That Bruce was complaining about individuals contradicting a vision
of progress suggests the stakes for middle-class African Americans at
the South's expositions. The appearances and smells of lower-class
blacks threatened the images of progress performed by middle-class
African Americans at the fair.
With this desire to demonstrate progress through accommodation, it
is unsurprising that Booker T. Washington emerged as spokesman at
the Atlanta fair. Prior to his address at the Cotton States and Inter
national Exposition, Washington was a well-known but not famous
African American educator. His speech at the opening day exer
cises propelled him overnight to become the most prominent African
American in the nation. While Washington's accommodationist pro
gram of industrial education has since been met with scorn, in 1895 it
was generally accepted as a prudent course of action. Indeed, W. E. B.
Du Bois, Washington's great antagonist, initially responded favorably
to the speech he later deemed "The Atlanta Compromise": it was "the
basis of a real settlement between whites and blacks in the South."
Like the Negro Building and the black middle class at the fairs,
Washington represented African Americans as law-abiding, well
behaved, and willing to work hard in the South. As Washington
1 "Francesca Morgan, Women and Patriotism in Jim Crow America (Chapel Hill, 2005), 9.
l04"Big Crowds [illegible] of Negro [illegible]," Nashville Banner, August 25, 1897,
pp. 1, 7.
11,5 Bruce Grit, "Opening of the Negro Building," Salt Lake City Broad Av, July 17, 1897,
p. 4. See also Larson, "Three Southern World's Fairs," 168.
106 Ralph L. Crowder. John Edward Bruce: Politician, Journalist, and Self-Trained Historian
of the African Diaspora (New York, 2004), 6.

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biographer Robert J. Norrell has argued, "In its larger thrust, th

Atlanta exposition speech represented Washington's attempt to coun
ter the belief that free blacks had declined in character and morality
from the time of slavery."107 For southern African Americans at th
turn of the twentieth century, this approach was viewed as a genuin
way to improve the economic conditions of their race and challenge
the social order of the New South.108
Black opposition to the Negro Departments came less from riva
ideological camps than from regional experiences that influenced the
social and political agendas of their proponents. It is unsurprising tha
northern black newspapers took exception to the Negro Buildings. Bette
off socially, economically, and politically, northern African Americans in
the 1890s had achieved many of the goals still out of reach for their
southern counterparts. They could not comprehend the level of daily
racial terror faced by black southerners and harshly judged those seen a
collaborating with a racial system that so plainly exploited them.109
Black southerners were not insensitive to the accusation. Bishop
Turner made clear in his defense of the Negro Building in Atlanta that
he was not a "white man's nigger." He condemned northern blacks fo
not supporting the exposition because of the discrimination faced by
blacks in the South. Noting that the Chicago world's fair saw blacks
"Jim Crowed by the nation," Turner suggested that African American
take every opportunity to assert their worth and self-respect. "If I ha
to choose between the railroad degradation and the exposition degra
dation," argued Turner, "I would infinitely prefer the latter, for the
exposition allows me an opportunity to show to the world that I can b
clean, mannerly, cultured and refined and deserve better treatment,
and it is the surest way to get it."110 African American northerners
107 Norrell, Up from History, 277 (first quotation), 125-35 (second quotation on 128; third
quotation on 125).
108 Washington later abandoned these plans after becoming involved with the colonia
German government in Togo to replicate the labor system of the New South in West Afric
Andrew Zimmerman, Alabama in Africa: Booker T. Washington, the German Empire, and th
Globalization of the New South (Princeton, 2010).
109 The Cleveland Gazette made this point a month before the Tennessee Centennia
exposition: "The Afro-American visitor from the northern states must leave all self-respec
behind and be prepared to yield to every degree of insulting discrimination while in this s
called commonwealth of ours. The indignities usually imposed upon us are not consider
particularly offensive to the Afro-Americans of the south, simply because they are used to them
and, in this state anyhow, they are afraid to make an earnest effort for the improvement of the
condition, but to the northerner, contemptuous treatment must seem condemnable." "Tennessee
Centennial," Cleveland Gazette, April 10, 1897, p. 2.
""Turner, "To Colored People," 1 (first quotation), 4 (second, third, and fourth quotations)
This appeal was published in a number of black newspapers as well as in the Atlant

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were right to argue that the white oppression in the South was intole
able, but what they failed to see was that the expositions offered a rar
chance for black southerners to present a counter-program of rac
pride in a region and nation increasingly convinced that African
Americans were degenerating.
Even as Booker T. Washington stood before a full auditorium at the
Cotton States and International Exposition saying, "In all things that
are purely social, we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the
hand in all things essential to mutual progress," the truth of the expo
sition presented a more complicated reality.1'' While the Negro Build
ing surely represented Washington's proverbial "hand," African
American fairgoers suggested that they might not be the easily sepa
rated "fingers" that he claimed. In their dress and behavior, in their
exhibits of agricultural, industrial, and educational attainments, and in
the adoption of the language of evolutionary science, southern African
Americans presented a case for black progress and modernity.
Late-nineteenth-century Americans embraced what historian Steven
Conn has called an "object-based epistemology." To most Americans,
objects were as important as texts in producing knowledge and mean
ing. In the late-nineteenth-century museum, visitors would stare and
consider an object on its own terms and then in the context of surroun
ing objects.11" In the case of the Atlanta and Nashville expositions, th
Negro Building in toto was contrasted with the other representations o
progress and primitiveness scattered throughout the fairgrounds. Th
exhibits in the Negro Building, then, were more than simple celebra
tions of African American progress; they were object lessons tha
argued for a new appreciation and understanding of black life.
Nineteenth-century international expositions presented Africans and
African Americans as members of a backward, primitive race whose
progress was static. The fairs' organizers created a temporal disjunctur
in which African and African American peoples constantly fell behind
Euro-Americans' progress. Ethnographical showcases of "primitive
Africans and amusing and nostalgic performances of slave life
Constitution, January 13, 1895, p. 3. Throughout the run of the expositions, the Negr
Department committees expressed exasperation with the northern black press, chalking th
negative reviews of the Negro Buildings up to northern ignorance: "Quite a deal of ignoranc
was shown by some Northern colored people regarding the South—they seeming to fancy it was
inhabited solely by barbarians. It is to be hoped that some of them will go there and find a blac
face is treated no worse there than in the Capital City of the country." "Washington City News
Indianapolis Freeman, June 8, 1895, p. 3.
111 Washington, Up from Slavery, 221-22.
112 Steven Conn, Museums and American Intellectual Life, 1876-1926 (Chicago, 1998), 4.

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reinforced the ideological distance between blacks and modern whi

Americans. However, the southern expositions' Negro Buildings
vided space for African Americans to assert themselves as contem
raries, integrating themselves into the fairs' and the nation's discou
of progress.
At modernity's core was a belief in perpetual material and m
progress through scientific rationality, secularism, and individuali
By the end of the nineteenth century, societal modernization
allowed these traits to permeate much of everyday life. South
African Americans engaged in this conversation, insisting that th
were not the backward people so often depicted in late-ninetee
century popular culture. Nor were they degenerating and becom
extinct, as the day's evolutionary science would have it. Inste
southern African Americans argued that they were a vibrant yet
rate race, whose material, moral, and industrial progress deman
they be considered equal partners in American civilization.
The southern black elite saw it as their mission, through the ex
sitions, to bring to members of their race the bourgeois culture a
ated with modernity, while pressing for the civilization of Africa
who, in their mind, clearly lagged behind. Consequently, they did
completely challenge the period's racial science, offering a dialo
as opposed to a dialectic, critique. The Negro Buildings offere
present of peace and goodwill and a future of harmonious relat
with whites, while ignoring the racial turmoil and violence engulf
the South. In the end, however, the New Negroes of the New S
presented a southern interpretation of their race and in doing
endorsed a discourse of civilization and progress that they were of
excluded from.

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Cardon-The South's New Negroes' and African American

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Cardon-The South's New Negroes' and African American

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The South's "New Negroes" and African American Visions of Progress at the Atlanta

and Nashville International Expositions, 1895–1897

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/23799160

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On a late September day in 1895, the prominent A

Mr. Cardon holds a Ph.D. in history from the University of Toronto

The Journal of Southern History

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recently spent time in Africa pursuing missionary and emigrationist

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future embraced a different "New Negro" from the one disparaged by

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This article explores the various performances of an emergent J

International Expositions, I876-1916 (Chicago, 1984); Walter B. Weare, "New Negroes

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which black inferiority was taken as fact, white paternalism in support

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future-oriented people, an image that many hoped whites wo

and moral progress presented in the Negro Buildings explicitly

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16 In her study of W. E. B. Du Bois's photography exhibit of middle-class African Americans

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attempted to define African American identity on behalf of the lar

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2,1 Rydell, All the World's a Fair, 38-71.

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that focused on agriculture and industrial education. And while

""Atlanta Exposition," Leavenworth (Kans.) Herald, February 9, 1895, p. 2 (firs

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Atlanta exposition would be the first to allow the full participation of

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The Negro Building at the Atlanta exposition was located in the

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30 Perm, "Awakening of a Race," 24.

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Figure 1. "Negro Building (Interior)." This photograph highlights sculptor

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writing in the New Orleans Daily Picayune, was unimpressed by th

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"Exposition souvenir of the negro national hymn" had proved part

Douglass, the allegorical sculptures, and the pictures of progress, and in

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The Negro Buildings at the expositions presented a largely mascul

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industrial and social life of this great country."51 Such demonstratio

51 "A Commencement Address: Delivered by Hon. Isaiah T. Montgomery," Indianapolis

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Bacon noted, "Travellers looked out of their car windows at Sout

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At the same time, the Negro Buildings' displays of technologica

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were visually dissected in the press to reveal their evolutionary inferior

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However, for those blacks placing themselves atop an intraracial hierar

h2 Seitler, Atavistic Tendencies, 26 (emphasis in original).

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African American fairgoers' reaction to the Dahomey Village

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foreign time. The Tennessee Centennial's official catalog described th

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