Contested Memories: Representations of African American Life and Culture in the Museum and Heritage Industry

Ask most scholars about the historical significance of the 1895 Atlanta Cotton Exposition and they would probably cite it as the date and location of Booker T. Washington’s Atlanta “Compromise” speech. It was, however, as Mabel Wilson points out, memorable for another reason. It was the first time in a white-run exposition that African Americans were provided with their own exhibition hall. At the time, this was such a departure from normal practice that it was viewed as arguably the most novel and original feature of the event. ‘“The Paris exposition had its Eiffel tower, the world’s fair its Ferris wheel,’ the Atlanta Constitution observed, ‘but Atlanta had its negro building’” (Wilson, quoted on pp. 30, 61). Although the smallest pavilion in the Exposition, the building still boasted a “vast hall” and “generous aisles” (p. 64). It was “the first ever Negro Building dedicated to the exhibition of black culture in America” and black Americans “in large numbers” came to view its exhibits over the 100-days duration of the Exposition (pp. 69, 82).

In a valuable new study, Wilson focuses attention on the now largely forgotten world of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century fairs and expositions. First popularized by the Great Exhibition in London in 1851, in later decades world fairs became both a highly successful form of public entertainment and a way to showcase the economic and cultural achievements of the nations and cities that hosted them. Lasting for as long as six months to a year, the most successful fairs attracted literally millions of visitors from around the world. In the United States, leading architects of the day such as Frederick Law Olmstead and Daniel Burnham were commissioned to design elaborate pavilions, creating “phantasmal dream worlds” that, for a few months at least, graced “metropolitan centers around the country” (p. 6).

Organized by leading white members of their respective communities, the fairs initially had little interest in highlighting African American achievements. Worse still, insofar as black life and black culture were represented, they typically took the form of demeaning, caricatured exhibits and displays of African tribal culture that reinforced contemporary perceptions of white racial supremacy. Understandably, African American communities increasingly resented such practices. In 1893 Chicago, this famously resulted in the publication of the protest pamphlet The Reasons Why the Colored American is Not Included in the World’s Columbian Exposition. Edited by Frederick Douglass and Ida B. Wells, the collection of essays rebuked the organizers of the exhibition in the city for denying black Americans the right to have their own pavilion.

Although the Chicago protest was unsuccessful, the Atlanta Exposition two years later marked an important breakthrough. From 1895 through to the outbreak of the First World War, black Americans were increasingly allocated their own pavilion in fairs and expositions. Wilson argues that these served as “black counterpublic spaces” that provided rare and important opportunities to present positive images of black American life that challenged the degrading racial stereotypes that were all too dominant in mainstream popular culture.

Interestingly, the pavilions also came to reflect the political and ideological divisions developing in African American society. The exhibits in the Negro Building at Atlanta thus highlighted the virtues of industrial education and “reinforced the notion that the appropriate home for the Negro was on the farm, away from urban life, and with no intellectual aspirations whatsoever” (p. 63). By the time of the 1900 Paris Exposition Universelle the growing concerns about this message in some African American communities were reflected in the “American Negro” exhibit organized by Thomas Calloway and W. E. B. Du Bois. Although highlighting the progress brought by industrial education, this also focused on the achievements...