African Americans, Africans, and Antiracism at Chicago's Columbian Exposition of 1893
2023; University of Illinois Press; Volume: 116; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.5406/23283335.116.4.04
ISSN2328-3335
Autores Tópico(s)American History and Culture
ResumoTHEOPHILUS GOULD STEWARD, chaplain for the Twenty-Fifth US Colored Infantry, the famous “Buffalo Soldiers,” spoke at the Columbian Exposition of 1893 and argued that the United States must found a new American race, rather than “getting all of its glory from a Saxonism long defunct, and that, in fact never had but slight foothold upon this Western world.” Recounting the manifold achievements of Americans who had founded and sustained a representative government, “rescued land from wilderness and filled it with cities,” and developed the most prosperous nation on earth, he asserted that such achievements were sufficient to found a people. The alternative was far less palatable: “Must the American people still learn their own character from the musty and unreliable records of a handful of transatlantic savages?” he asked, eviscerating the alleged superiority of white Anglo-Saxons by labeling them with a term more often applied to “uncivilized” peoples of color. “I know the American people are becoming daily more Christian in their treatment of the colored,” he continued, “and there is, as I believe, no ground for the fear or the belief that there will ever come in this land a deluge of Christless and conscienceless Saxonism that will sweep away the holy principles that now seem so deeply rooted in our soil.”1Black Americans were present at the Columbian Exposition, despite the fact that many historical textbooks and surveys today claim that they were not, even twenty-four years after Christopher Reed's landmark 2000 monograph, All the World Is Here!2 What is even more salient is what “colored” Americans said and did at the Columbian Exposition. This article expands on Reed's work by showing how “Afro-Americans” at the first Chicago world's fair articulated a thorough critique of racism rooted in the reigning stagist civizationism of their time and viewed African colonization and evangelism as tools of civilizational uplift.3 Whereas many scholars have heretofore emphasized the coupling of civizationism to racist Social Darwinism,4 when examined more closely, that stagist view of technological progress was also a vehicle of antiracism; it could condemn racism and simultaneously, in contrast, speak of Africans and contemporary Indigenous peoples as “savages.” Taking a closer look at the African participants and the people we call African Americans at the World's Columbian Exposition exposes the famous event to be a site of resistance as well as racism, but it was a form of contradictory resistance that doubled over itself in what John and Jean Comaroff termed “recalcitrance,” that is, equivocal resistance launched from within oppressive discourse.5 Black discourse at the White City illustrates that discourse transmits power, but discourse also “undermines and exposes it [power]; it renders it fragile and makes it possible to thwart it,” as Michel Foucault wrote.6 Recalcitrance is good for historians to think with, since it leavens the binaries of hegemonic assent versus revolutionary resistance with a third, more double-edged possibility between those dichotomous poles. Recalcitrance helps to describe the messy, contradictory form of consciousness that often muddies how people see the world, even as they struggle to change it.The story of Black exclusion from the planning and execution of the Chicago World's Fair is deservedly well known; yet that story silences another past, an equally interesting and worthy story of how African Americans and their white allies not only participated in the fair, but frequently used it to advance a searing critique of racism. This is true even if it was a critique launched from within the reigning discourse of civilization, with its twinned programs of religious evangelization and political imperialism.7 Legendary African American activists Ida B. Wells and Frederick Douglass, as well as journalist Irvine Garland Penn and lawyer Frederick Barnett (who would marry Wells in 1895), produced an oft-quoted pamphlet in August of 1893 entitled The Reason Why the Colored American Is Not in the World's Columbian Exposition.8 The quartet decried the exclusion of people of African descent from the committees that President Benjamin Harrison had appointed to plan the fair. Yet, as Reed has argued, the title of that pamphlet has for too long been accepted as an adequate description of Black exclusion from the fair, when in fact Black Americans were present in almost every phase of the event. Black fairgoers visited throughout the fair, not only on the designated “Colored American Day,” which brought many thousands to peruse its amusements. Frederick Douglas held court at the Haitian exhibit, receiving a steady stream of visitors, and three Black colleges had their own exhibits as well. Most Black musicians were excluded from the grounds of the fair, but Scott Joplin, who went on to pioneer ragtime after the fair, played music just outside the Midway. Black Americans participated especially in the realm of work, filling many of the menial and manual jobs that they performed in the world at large. Black workers helped to move the many tons of dirt and construct the lagoon that transformed Jackson Park into the gracefully landscaped fairgrounds. Black men were the only people hired to fill the fair's hundreds of janitorial jobs. Black college students, including the future composer, diplomat, and NAACP president James Weldon Johnson, pushed weary fairgoers around the grounds as “chair boys,” and other Black workers served as lavatory attendants, including Paul Lawrence Dunbar, who later gained renown as the era's greatest Black poet and actually took a break from passing out hand towels to declaim poetry at the fair. In terms of sex work, an African American madam, Vina Fields, oversaw the largest brothel in the city, composed of sixty “Negro” and “mulatto” prostitutes who served exclusively white patrons during and after the fair.9Racism structured all of these forms of Black labor, from shoveling dirt to pushing wheelchairs to entertaining whites with music or sex. Yet the Black presence in the White City went far beyond the thousands of African Americans who labored there, or even the tens of thousands who paid admission fees and attended, and extended into an articulate critique of racism during the fair's African Ethnological Congress and in embodied terms on its multiracial Midway, whose very racial heterogeneity was remarkable in the eyes of some observers for the way it diverged from the binary sterility of Jim Crow segregation, then embarking on its strange career.10As with so many aspects of the complex, contradictory, and heterogeneous fair, African Americans’ roles and attitudes toward it were in constant dialogical tension: there was an active debate about whether Blacks should attend or boycott, and when more than a hundred thousand of them attended, they found displays that could be variously read as racist or antiracist. Like recent scholars who have pointed out the diverse, heterogeneous, and cacophonous nature of the fair, and Gilded Age culture in general, we can appreciate that the fair was a complex and contested terrain with far more Black voices, and far more dissent from racism and imperialism, than most scholarly monographs and textbooks portray.11 Moreover, reading anthropologists of the day who shaped the Gilded Age's evolutionary ideas of civilizational progress reveals the 1893 fair as not just a stop en route to the racist overseas imperialism of the twentieth century but also a notable station on the road toward the twentieth century's cultural relativism, associated in particular with Franz Boas, the anthropologist who co-directed the fair's Anthropological Building.12In sum, the narrative of racism, exclusion, and boycott tells only part of the story of the Columbian Exposition, with little room for the active debate among African Americans over whether or not to support the fair, either on Colored American Day or throughout the event. By returning to the Columbian Exposition with redoubled attention to newspapers and primary sources, we can better understand the ways in which African Americans engaged with and helped to shape the discourse of civilization, not only to justify missionizing and colonizing Africans but also to challenge racism at home and Euro-American imperialism abroad. Thus while it is possible to read the Columbian Exposition as the moment when Frederick Jackson Turner declared the closing of the American frontier and the country turned toward (overseas) empire building, as Robert Rydell and Mona Domosh do, it is also possible to read the same event as an important moment that brought together advocates of antiracism and opened critiques of racism in both thought and practice.13 We might discover in the process a greater appreciation for the complexity and contradiction within the fair's discussions of racism and imperialism, and make a greater place for recalcitrance in how we theorize the past.Historians have too often mistaken the campaign to boycott the world's fair's Colored American Day for a Black boycott of the fair in general, which simply never happened. In 1893, the Supreme Court had not yet sanctioned the practice of segregation in the infamous 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson ruling. In this environment, most Black Americans rejected any form of racial segregation in public spaces, even in the form of recognition of the achievements of the race. While it is true that the exposition planning committee did not grant a separate pavilion for African Americans, as some desired, Ferdinand Barnett himself had cosigned a group letter in 1891 declaring that most “colored” folks adamantly opposed having any divisions by race in the exposition or its planning, and wanted Black representatives on the planning committees based on professional qualifications alone.14 A similar militant commitment to integration had led Barnett's law partner John George Jones to oppose the creation of the Negro YMCA on the South Side of Chicago in 1889 and the South Side's Provident Hospital for Negroes in 1891.15 When the exposition planners chose only a few token Black members on the planning committees, “colored” people felt snubbed—but not because they wanted separate pavilions, since most opposed any separation of the races. Even Frederick Douglass and Ida B. Wells's plan to publish a pamphlet extolling Black progress at the fair was met with derisive disrespect. “Go there as a citizen Uncle Fred,” the Methodist Union advised. “We are colored enough to be distinguished by our neighbors from over the waters, and our progress is just as transparent.”16It was this pre-Plessy rejection of racial separatism that stirred opposition to the Black-generated plan for a Colored American Day at the fair. A committee of three “colored” women and three “colored” men from major cities on the East Coast lobbied the exposition planners to set aside Thursday, August 17 as a day “of praise and thanksgiving to Almighty God,” and to extol the progress the “colored people” had made in the prior thirty years while beseeching God for “protection of those of our brethren who are still deprived on their civil rights in this country.”17 The proposal split leading Black activists: Ida B. Wells opposed the day, but Frederick Douglass supported it.18 Even the Indianapolis Freeman, the greatest media advocate of the boycott, noted that “the division of opinion among the colored people as to the fitness and propriety of holding a demonstration was remarkable.”19 Frederick Douglass himself urged attendance, although he came close to joining the boycotters when he arrived on Colored American Day, which had been moved to Sunday, August 20, only to discover watermelon stands throughout the fairgrounds in anticipation of the missing Black crowds. Douglass overcame his qualms, and delivered a notable speech on that day, to an audience of 2,500, two thirds of whom were Black.20But many of those who opposed the day set aside for “colored” people supported “Afro-Americans” attending the fair. The very same newspapers that urged a boycott of the Colored American Day urged them to attend on other days and assured them it was their right to enjoy the grandeur of the fair as American citizens. Even the Indianapolis Freeman, which led the campaign to boycott Colored American Day, which it derisively termed “Nigger Day,” predicted that “the Negro” would be present at the fair by the tens of thousands, as both exhibitors and spectators.21 The Freeman even offered to give a sewing machine, five books by Black authors, and a three-day trip to the Columbian Exposition to anyone who signed up 150 new subscribers, telling its readers that Chicago would be the most celebrated city in the world that summer, and that the Exposition would be “a sight, a picture of a lifetime, and not by any means to be missed.”22 Likewise, the African American newspaper The Topeka Call urged its readers to attend the exposition, but not to permit themselves to be “huddled together” on a special Colored American Day at the fair since as American citizens all days were equally theirs.23 Special excursion trains to Chicago, sometimes stopping directly at the exposition gates, advertised their services to readers of Black newspapers in Cleveland, Indianapolis, and Topeka.24 Black travelers could also ride special exposition express trains from New York City, Washington, DC, and other major cities.25 After the fair ended, when asked whether Black people attended the fair, Frederick Douglass responded that their attendance “was creditable both in point of numbers and respectability,” that Black attendees were orderly and well dressed, and that even more would have attended had attempts not been made to exclude them and to ridicule those who went.26 Despite the controversy over the wisdom of holding a Colored American Day, more than one hundred thousand African Americans attended the fair.27 But far beyond simply attending the exposition, by critiquing racism and imperialism at the fair, “colored Americans” and their white allies harnessed dominant discourses for recalcitrant purposes, contradicting the by now widely accepted assertion that the Columbian Exposition led the masses to accept racist overseas imperialism.28The exposition's understudied African Ethnological Congress illustrates the complex and recalcitrant ways in which African Americans both articulated and undermined racist elements of the discourse of civilization. The 1893 fair's auxiliary congress on Africa and African America from August was one of the most popular congresses of the fair, and assembled many of the leading activists, both Black and white, in favor of expanding African American civil rights. It deserves mention alongside the much more famous Atlanta Cotton Exposition of 1895 as one of the more consequential gatherings of African Americans of the era. Unlike the fair's World Parliament of Religions, with its famous rejections of Christian and white supremacy, or even the twenty-five-thousand-person-strong Labor Congress, with its labor militancy, the African Ethnological Congress has almost entirely evaded scrutiny.29 African Americans and white allies planned an auxiliary congress on Africa and African America featuring many leading Black figures for eight days of August. The lead organizer was its secretary, Frederic Perry Noble, librarian at Chicago's Newberry Library, who had studied African subjects for twenty years. The organizers argued that Africa was no longer a “lost and hopeless continent,” that it had played a great part in ancient history in the past and held great importance in scientific terms in the present, and that the welfare of Africa and Africans must be considered for moral, philanthropic, and religious reasons. Of the three hundred members of the advisory council, fifteen were African Americans, which while still a distinct minority was markedly larger than the share of Black figures among the fair planners as a whole. Noble asked members to serve “for the sake of poor Africa and the wronged black man of the South.”30 The representation of Blacks in the congress itself was much higher; Wilberforce professor and former slave William Sanders Scarborough reported that about half of all the presenters and audience members were “members of the Negro race,” and newspapers remarked that the Black presenters were just as capable as the white ones.31The eight days of the African Congress between August 14 and 22 featured ninety African topics and twenty-eight “Afro-American” ones, divided into separate departments of geography, history, arts, literature, religion, science, and sociology. The congress held three sessions a day in the Art Palace, the building that is today the Museum of Science and Industry just south of the University of Chicago. The history section featured two figures who would come to be linked to two of the most momentous civil rights cases in Supreme Court history. Liberal activist and judge Albion W. Tourgée and famed orator and congressman John Mercer Langston expounded on “negro” history in America. Tourgée was a twice-wounded Civil War veteran who was the most famous white radical in the country at the time of the Exposition. His memoir of his time as a “carpetbagger” in Reconstruction-era North Carolina had been a national bestseller, and his radical opinions were syndicated widely in newspapers across the country. Only three years later, he would unsuccessfully defend Homer Plessy in the landmark Plessy v. Ferguson case that gave legal sanction to segregation, with the infamous standard of “separate but equal” accommodations. Tourgée lost the case but gave the nation a new term: color-blind justice.32 Langston, for his part, was one of the most famous African Americans of his time. An attorney, abolitionist, and activist who was elected to US Congress from Virginia in 1888, he later became the first dean of the law school at Howard University, the school that trained Thurgood Marshall and most of the NAACP legal team that helped to dismantle the legal edifice of segregation with the success of the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education ruling in 1954, reversing the standard established by Plessy. Langston also became the great-uncle and namesake of the poet Langston Hughes, a college classmate of Thurgood Marshall's at Lincoln University in the 1920s.33In the arts, two presenters and Booker T. Washington, director of the Tuskegee Institute, each reported on “negro” achievements in agriculture, fine arts, journalism, manufacturing, medicine, and trades. The foremost linguist of Africa, English-born Robert Needham Cust, contributed a paper on African philology, and others spoke on Egyptian mythology. African explorers were well represented, as were discussions of European imperialism from both Europeans and Africans. There was a talk by General Charles R. W. Chaille-Long-Bey, British general Charles Gordon's former chief of staff in Egypt during England's conquest of Egypt and the Sudan, answered by an Egyptian providing “a native view.” In the geography section, famed explorer Mrs. May French-Sheldon discussed her courteous treatment as a white woman in Black West Africa, a pointed refutation of the myth of Black sexual savagery that was part of some justifications of lynching.34The congress also gathered a sizeable number of the most prominent innovators of what would come to be called “Black Nationalism.” Many of these thinkers were themselves religious and were involved in settling African Americans in Africa and in missionizing Africans. Representatives of seventeen missionary societies participated, and Joseph Charles Price, founder and president of North Carolina's Livingstone University, hailed “the most eloquent negro in America,” discussed Black religion in America.35 Bishop Henry McNeal Turner and Bishop Benjamin T. Tanner of the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church gave talks, as did the president of Howard University, J. E. Rankin. Born to free parents in South Carolina in 1833, Turner was the first African American chaplain ever commissioned by President Lincoln. He was active in Reconstruction politics in Georgia and served two terms in the state legislature, working for the passage of civil rights legislation before returning to the ministry. Head of the publication department of the AME Church after Reconstruction ended, he became a bishop in 1880, overseeing the African conferences of the church. Like many men of his generation who had seen the collapse of Reconstruction, Turner had no faith in the future of “colored people” in the United States. A fellow traveler in more ways than one, the Rev. Edward Wilmot Blyden made the journey from Liberia to give a talk on “Mohamedanism in Africa,” three years after the publication of his landmark text Christianity, Islam, and the Negro Race, a work that argued that Islamic societies were uniquely antiracist and well adapted for Africans and their descendants. Blyden's book was an international sensation and helped to cement the association between Africa and Islam in the western imagination.36Only twenty-eight years after the end of chattel slavery in the United States, there were two debates on reparations at the African Ethnological Congress of the Columbian Exposition—both whether America and European nations owed Africans reparations for colonialism and whether the United States owed American “negroes” reparations for slavery.37 The 1893 African Ethnological Congress tackled both the Arab slave trade and the Christian rum trade in Africa. There also were debates about “whether American negroes owe aught to Africans, and whether they should colonize Africa,” argued pro and con by both white and Black men.38 The congress also debated “the Southern problem,” a euphemism that belonged in scare quotes even in 1893, as well as the “negro” in relation to the fourteenth and fifteenth amendments protecting due process and voting rights, “handled without partisanship or politics by the men best equipped for treating them.”39 Former Congressman Langston, considered by many the greatest orator of the race, proved that “the African in America can talk” with his stinging reply to John J. Ingalls, former senator from Kansas, who had predicted, quite accurately it turned out, that the “negro” would be left “to tread the wine-press politically and socially alone,” and would be “crowded to the wall” by the Saxon race.40 Though overshadowed today by other similar African and Afro-American Congresses in the early nineties, the Chicago Columbian Exposition's African Ethnological Congress certainly had ambitions to make history by convening so many interested and sympathetic parties on African and African American affairs. “Justice should be done there as well as here,” former slave William Sanders Scarborough declared. “The Africans should be treated as human beings and not as sticks and stones. Let Christianity and its civilizing influences operate there as well as here, and the results will take care of themselves.”41 The erasure of such antiracist sentiments from accounts of the Columbian Exposition is all the more unjustified given that the African Ethnological Congress was one of the best-attended auxiliary congresses of the exposition.42On Colored American Day, held on Sunday, August 20 in conjunction with the African Congress, famed abolitionist Frederick Douglass held a crowd of 2,500 spellbound with a half hour speech. “There is always witchery in his oratory,” the Daily Inter Ocean reported.43 As previously mentioned, two thirds of his listeners were “negroes,” including many who had come as families. He excoriated the planners of the exposition for excluding Blacks from planning committees (only the Women's Auxiliary Board had a Black member) and argued passionately for “negro” rights. “We fought for your country. We ask that we be treated as well as those who fought against your country,” Douglass thundered, shaking his white mane and trembling with vehemence. “We love your country. We ask that you treat us as well as you do those who love but a part of it.”44 The famous abolitionist ably connected the struggle against slavery and the battles of the Civil War with the current disenfranchisement and terrorization of Black people. “Men talk of the negro problem. There is no negro problem,” Douglass boldly proclaimed. “The problem is whether the American people have honesty enough, patriotism enough to live up to their own Constitution.” Douglass, like speakers such as Dr. William Hayes Ward, of the New York Independent, Newberry librarian Noble, Bishop Henry McNeal Turner, Newark's Rev. Dr. M. E. Strieby, and French-Canadian historian Dr. Joseph-Edmund Roy, offered speeches emphasizing that “equality before the law, a fair and equal chance, must be granted to the Blacks, whatever be the feeling against them,” in the summation of participant Scarborough.45Rejecting the African resettlement plan once advocated by Crummell, Blyden, and the American Colonization Society, Douglass announced “negro” intentions to stake their futures on America—and to teach America its own values in the process: “We negroes have made up our minds to stay just where we are. We intend that the American people shall learn the fatherhood of God from our presence among them.”46 Douglass, like so many of the racial progressives of the time, frequently attempted to remind the nation of the terrible sacrifice African Americans had made during the Civil War and to hold up in contrast the abysmal depths of lynching lawlessness that stalked the land after white terrorists and the Democratic Party wrested back control of the South from Republican Reconstruction governments. He had been accompanied on stage that Colored People's Day in Chicago by suffragist Isabella Beecher Hooker, sister of preacher Henry Ward Beecher and Uncle Tom's Cabin author Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Hooker was accompanied by her nieces, daughters of Colonel James Hooker, the man who raised the first “colored” regiment during the Civil War. This abolitionist party with Civil War connections was received with thunderous applause in 1893. Now Douglass, his eyes scanning his thousands of rapt listeners, his body quivering with feverish eloquence, reminded the nation of its faulty debt to its negro citizens: “During the war we were eyes to your blind, legs to your lame, shelter to your shelterless among your sons. Have you forgotten that now?” It certainly seemed so, at a time when “a desperate attempt is being made to blacken the character of the negro and to brand him as a moral monster,” when the character of all eight million negroes was being tarnished and when mobs in fourteen states had hung, shot, and burned “men of my race without justice and without right.” In 1893, Douglass concluded sadly, “negroes” were barred “out of almost every reputable and decent employment.”47But at his speech's darkest point, as some white members of the audience began to heckle him, Douglass achieved his talk's most inspiring climax as his mind, perhaps drifting over the landscape of the nearby Midway and the foreign exhibits contained therein, alighted on the exhibition of the “primitive” Dahomeyans. “But stop,” he commanded, speaking in stentorian tones and drowning out the hecklers. “Look at the progress the negro has made in thirty years! We have come up out of Dahomey into this. Measure the negro. But not by the standard of the splendid civilization of the Caucasian.” Now he bent over and pointed to the stage, letting his white locks fall dramatically over his face, “all the wrongs of his race afire in his voice,” according to one account, “Bend down and measure him—measure him—from the depths out of which he has risen!”48 And thus the most famous Black American of the nineteenth century, the most famous abolitionist, and perhaps one of the most eloquent advocates for racial justice America has ever known, staked the progress of “negro” Americans not just on their achievements since the Civil War but on their distinction from their African kinfolk toiling on the Midway nearby.Frederick Douglass condemned the inclusion of Dahomeyans on the Midway and the large-scale exclusion of Black Americans. “Apparently they want us to be represented by the music and by the civilization of Dahomey,” Douglass complained from the speaker's rostrum. “They have filled the Fair with the sound of barbaric music, and with sights of barbaric rites, and denied to the colored American any representation.”49 Douglass had been extolling “the negro's” capacity for acquiring civilization for forty years, which made the Columbian Exposition's treatment of “negro” topics a particularly galling insult.50 In marked contrast to the “barbaric music” of the Dahomeyans, Black concert singer Harry Burleigh mounted the stage that day and joined a group of Jubilee Singers in selections from Scenes from the Opera of Uncle Tom's Cabin by Black composer William Marion Cook, as well as Negro Spirituals sung in European operatic style. Finally, Douglass's own son Joseph played European classical music on the violin.51Most scholars have argued that the racial politics of the Word's Fair were decidedly reactionary, part of the countless celebrations in that age that attempted to bury the hatchet between Northern and Southern whites and reforge the white republic.52 There is certainly an element of truth to this view, even if it does not encapsulate the entire sprawling event. For example, Chicago Day at the fair featured a “Grand Reunion of the States by Youths and Maidens,” signaling that the white citizens of North and South were ready to forget past differences and unite around a celebration of white American nationalism.53 Yet Douglass's speech, and the reception of the relatives of abolit
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