"Looking at One's Self through the Eyes of Others": Representations of the Progressive Era Middle Class in W. E. B. Du Bois's The Star of Ethiopia

{ 187 } \ “Looking at One’s Self through the Eyes of Others” Representations of the Progressive Era Middle Class in W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Star of Ethiopia —Rebecca Hewett Eleanor Curtis, an African Ameri­ can actress, walked onto an outdoor stage arranged on a baseball field before a crowd of fourteen thousand spectators in Washington, D.C. Her floor-­ length dress was adorned with a single necklace and sleeves so wide and long they trailed the ground as she walked across the stage. A tiara sat atop her head. On her back she wore wings that stretched out on either side of her body. The wings were rounded and, from the front, gave the impression that this young woman was perhaps wearing a heart on her back. Curtis gripped a paper star in her hand; once onstage, she stood facing the crowd and slowly raised the star above her head.As the title character in W. E. B. Du Bois’s pageant The Star of Ethiopia, she embodied the symbolic protector for Africans and African Ameri­ cans through hundreds of years of world history. Du Bois wrote the first draft of what would later become The Star of Ethiopia in 1911 and presented it to the officers of the National Association for the Advancement of ColoredPeople(NAACP)asasuggestionforafund-­ raiser.DuBois’s colleagues at the NAACP were not convinced of the pageant’s efficacy, however, and the project was temporarily abandoned. Du Bois found a way to resurrect it two years later. The year 1913 marked the fiftieth anniversary of the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation; the event was remembered publicly in the United States through special issues of journals, public speeches, commemorative figurines of civil rights leaders, and public expositions modeled on world’s fairs. The state legislatures of New Jersey, Illinois, Pennsylvania, and New York { 188 } Rebecca Hewett each appropriated funds for large expositions devoted to “black progress.”1 The New York Emancipation Exposition was a ten-­ day celebration from October 22 to 31 in Manhattan at the Twelfth Regiment Armory near Sixty-­ second Street and Broadway. With a budget of twenty-­ five thousand dollars, the New York Emancipation Exposition was the largest of all the state expositions.2 New York governor William Sulzer appointed Du Bois as one of nine members of the exposition ’s organizing committee; Du Bois found in it an opportunity to revisit his pageant. To commemorate the occasion, his pageant sought to re-­ create thousands of years in African and African Ameri­ can history. His project, was, in part, meant to change the historical narrative assigned to African Ameri­ cans in the United States during the Progressive Era and, by extension, to create a new cultural memory of African Ameri­ can history. In attempting this, both the original production in 1913 and its revival two years later embodied Du Bois’s desire for African Ameri­ cans to enter the middle class in the United States as a part of his vision of a “talented tenth.” Although meant to inspire and educate, the pageant also functioned as a disciplinary tool, able to instruct and encourage its audience in re-­ creating middle-­ class values. This article argues that through The Star of Ethiopia Du Bois sought to instruct his audience in the trappings of Progressive Era middle-­ class behavior; as the pageant went through major revisions, its focus sharpened on the role of African Ameri­ can women in pushing African Ameri­ cans into the middle class. This article explores how, through an attempt to create this alternative historical record through The Star of Ethiopia, Du Bois simultaneously created and promoted an image of black women that attempted to mirror the public image of the virtuous and chaste middle-­ class white woman during the Progressive Era. I examine The Star of Ethiopia to understand how, over its first two incarnations , Du Bois advocated for African Ameri­ cans to work toward middle-­ class status. In the 1913 production Du Bois struggled to portray African Ameri­ cans as both having descended from ancient civilizations and having worked diligently to attain a place in the Ameri­ can workforce. Later, in the 1915 production , the depiction of African Ameri...