To consider 

Black America’s reception, we must first understand its appeal. Already a popular
theme on the minstrel stage and in song-sheets purchased for home performance, this form of

sentimental nostalgia (Blackface performers singing about heartache and maternal instincts)
furthered abolition interests as well as commercial attempts to capitalize on the popularity of
sentimental European song.19 Urbanites without personal experience of slavery’s atrocities

related to musical themes of simple rural life, carefree living, and a caretaking Mammy. Songs

like Black composer James Bland’s “Carry Me Back to Ol’ Virginny'' played on a plantation
nostalgia onto which immigrants and newly urban migrants could transfer their own feelings of
homesickness.20 Black America extrapolated this plantation nostalgia, adding in a mixture of

pseudo-educational ethnographic racial display, recently popular at the World’s Columbian

Exhibition in Chicago, and a racial-uplift staging designed to present a progressive model of

African Americans, from enslaved plantation dwellers to proper cosmopolitan citizens.

These themes of nostalgia and progress surfaced in specific performance forms. The cakewalk
was well known in the North, but audiences of Black America perceived it as something entirely

different: the authentic cakewalk of Southern heritage. Developed originally by enslaved people
as a satirical masquerade mocking the stilted promenades of their upper-class enslavers, the

cakewalk shifted into a more stylized promenade competition dance, commonly added as an act
to minstrel shows by both Black and White performers. The “‘Ole Virginny’ cakewalk [featured

in Black America was] something quite different from the fancy cakewalks the people of the
North ha[d] been in habit of seeing”, a performance difference chalked up by Northern viewers
to a sign that they were witnessing the cakewalk in its original form.21
 Programme for Black America — Source.

The choruses too were seen as uniquely Black in a Southern manner and therefore more Black
than the local New York performers. “All doubts as to these being genuine Southern negroes
instead of performers imported in East River ferryboats is dissipated by their singing of the
plantation melodies”, wrote one viewer.22 Others commented on what they perceived as the

uniquely Black vocal qualities of the hundred-plus person chorus:

. . . the volume of sound and the blending of the voices with that unique metallic quality of tone
which charmed Dvorak and led him to write music especially for a choir of negroes combine to
produce an effect entirely novel to one familiar only with American or German choruses.23

The praise given to the performances links to the earlier ethnographic framing of Black America.

These were not skilled performers; they were authentic and organic Southern Blacks, imbued
with creative skill from birth. Given the period and cited locales from which some of the

performers came, we know that at least a portion of the singers and dancers in Black
America were formally trained professionals, and can assume that others were informally trained

in their own artistic communities. The presentation, however, attempted to add value to Black
Americans in the Northern eye by showcasing the natural goods of not only talent but also of

citizenship.
Regarding citizenship, Black America’s stage production ended with an almost unimaginable

spectacle, an act called “Historical Pictures”. The chorus of hundreds gathered on the stage to
sing patriotic songs as massive ten-foot by twenty-foot portraits were unfurled, one by one: John

Brown, Frederick Douglass, William Tecumseh Sherman, Ulysses S. Grant, and Abraham
Lincoln.24 All of the performances of the day, from the living plantation to the brass band of the

historic Ninth U.S. Cavalry, culminated in this scene of patriotism and modernity, marking an
end to the previous era and attempting to introduce Black America as something new.25
 "John Brown's portrait", a photograph of what looks to be the “Historical
Pictures” act. From a review of Black America, in Illustrated American (June 29,
1895) — Source. — Source.

While we have descriptions from the press and the reminiscences of Vaudevillians, what is most
mysterious and fascinating to imagine is the experience of Black American attendees to Black

America. Earlier scholarship has been unclear on whether Black America was a Whites-only

event,26 but there was at least one day when Black women and children were in attendance, as

noted in the particularly florid and insensitive journalistic style of the early twentieth century :
Raphael cherubs done in chocolate were thick as blackberries at Ambrose park yesterday. Nate
Salisbury [sic], the manager of “Black America,” had invited every colored mother having a
baby under 2 years old to appear with her offspring and inspect the antics of the colored
brethren from the South. The colored mothers went, and so did a considerable delegation of
white parents, who took their own pickaninnies down to see the fun.27

We have the reporter’s interpretation of how those Black mothers felt about walking through a

plantation with their children, then entering an arena to see buck dancing, cakewalks, and a
recreation camp meeting, but we have nothing in their own voices. Black America is primarily
available to us today in the mediated voices of professionals and exists mainly as a mystery. We

know how several White Americans felt about it, but can only speculate as to how the Black
Americans on stage and in the crowd experienced Black America in 1895.