Commerce in Color: Race, Consumer Culture, and American Literature, 1893-1933

2. "Stage Business" as Citizenship: Ida B. Wells at the World's Columbian Exposition

2 “Stage Business” as Citizenship ida b. wells at the world’s columbian exposition May we not hope that the lessons here learned, transmitted to the future, will be potent forces long after the multitudes which will throng these aisles shall have measured their span and faded away? —Potter Palmer, president of the World’s Columbian Commission, October 12, 1892 The personality of Aunt Jemima completely absorbed the identity of Miss Green. She was Aunt Jemima for the remainder of her life. —Arthur Marquette, Brands, Trademarks, and Goodwill Visitors to the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition saw “Negroes” but few, if any, African Americans. An ethnological display exhibited the Fon people of Dahomey (now the West African nation of Benin), but African American endeavors had been scrupulously suppressed . By and large, the only African Americans in the “White City” were the paying visitors who could afford the price of admission, for while fair of‹cials prohibited African Americans from producing the fair, they did not prohibit their consuming it. However, there were a few who managed to circumvent the systematic exclusion of African Americans , and three such exceptions constitute the framework for this chapter ’s discussion. One was Nancy Green. “I’se in town, honey!” she cried daily, breathing life into the Quaker Oats trademark Aunt Jemima at the 1893 fair. Born into slavery in Montgomery County, Kentucky, Green was a ‹fty64 nine-year-old Chicago South Sider when she was cast in the part of this southern mammy stereotype (Marquette 144). Chris Rutt and Charles Underwood, white entrepreneurs from St. Joseph’s, Missouri, bought a local ›our mill in 1889 and marketed their self-rising pancake mix by naming it after a character in the Baker and Farrell minstrel show that had performed in town that fall (Manring 64–67). Four years later in Chicago, Nancy Green’s performance of their trademark proved so popular that fairgoers jammed the aisles of the display, bought lapel buttons emblazoned with her likeness, and turned “I’se in town, honey!” into “the catchline of the Fair” (Marquette 146). “On the lookout for a Negro woman who might exemplify southern hospitality, a suf‹ciently poised and talented actress to demonstrate the self-rising pancake mix,” Rutt and Underwood had chosen Green because she was “utterly unselfconscious ,” as one corporate historian puts it: “she loved crowds and loved to talk about her own slave days, her stories no doubt partly apocryphal but nonetheless entertaining” (Marquette 144–45).1 By contrast, another of the few African American women who appeared with some regularity on the fairgrounds, antilynching activist and journalist Ida B. Wells, was quite self-conscious and, in her own words, “not given to public demonstrations” (Crusade 80). Wells offers this self-characterization in her account of lecturing in New York’s Lyric Hall in October 1892. Recently run out of her hometown of Memphis for her strident antilynching editorials in Free Speech, Wells went to Philadelphia to stay with a friend, novelist Francis E. W. Harper, before ‹nding refuge and employment at editor T. Thomas Fortune’s New York Age. The Lyric Hall event was organized to raise funds for a piece Wells was eager to publish denouncing lynching. Though she had long been vocal in print, Wells writes that this was “the ‹rst time I had ever been called on to deliver an honest-to-goodness address,” adding, “I had no knowledge of stage business” (Crusade 79–80). Nevertheless, the following summer, this author-activist with a self-described aversion to public demonstrations and “no knowledge of stage business” would make an extended public appearance. For three months, she appeared daily in the Haiti Building of the Chicago fair in order to disseminate The Reason Why the Colored American Is Not in the World’s Columbian Exposition, an eighty-one-page pamphlet written in collaboration with other public intellectuals in response to the fair’s systematic exclusion of African “stage business” as citizenship 65 Americans. Unbidden and unwelcome, Wells staged what Ann Massa has called “a radical black symposium . . . not on of‹cial display” (335). Downtown, in the newly constructed Memorial Art Palace (now the Chicago Art Institute), a third transgression of the fair’s policy of racial exclusion occurred when six prominent African Americans delivered addresses during the weeklong Congress of Representative Women convened by the fair’s Education Department. Among the roughly three hundred women who participated, Frances...