Teaching With Documents, Volume 2

Contents:

Petition for a Fair Representation of African Americas at the World’s Columbian Exposition

The study of an exposition or fair can provide a microcosmic glimpse of the culture and society of its day, giving teachers an opportunity to focus on social studies issues in a rich and unusual context. World’s fairs, the generic term for such events, showcase the technological and cultural advancements of a society through the exhibition of the latest inventions, the finest examples of cultural achievement, and items that typify the society. Fairs usually include amusement rides and attractions that add to the festive atmosphere.

The modern world’s fair movement began with the 1851 Crystal Palace Exhibition in London and extends through and beyond Expo ’92 held in Seville, Spain, to commemorate the quincentenary of the first Colombian exploration of North America. The World’s Colombian Exposition held in Chicago more than 100 hundred years ago marked the quadricentennial of Columbus’s first voyage to the continent. That exposition, belatedly held in 1893, clearly mirrored the racial climate of the United States in the late 19th century, and a study of it presents opportunities to discuss race relations then and now.

Twenty-one million people attended the 1893 World’s Colombian Exposition. They observed the noble achievements and technological and industrial progress made during the 400 years since Columbus’s first voyage; they walked amid the splendid buildings and statuary of the ethereal White City, with its grandiose architecture electrically illuminated; and they rode the wondrous new Ferris wheel and enjoyed a breathtaking view of the fairgrounds and the city of Chicago. They also saw an array of exhibits that included a copy of the Declaration of Independence, the 16th-century map first bearing the annotation "America," a full-size and seaworthy replica of one of Columbus’s vessels, the caravel Santa Maria, and a detailed model of the Brooklyn Bridge constructed of Ivory’ soap bars.

The World’s Colombian Exposition included some 220 buildings and "interesting places" situated in Jackson Park, a 1.3-mile-long tract bordered on the east by Lake Michigan. The main fairgrounds included buildings representing 39 states and theme structures such as the children’s, women’s, transportation, U.S. Government, and electricity buildings. The fairgrounds also contained special areas for open-air activities, such as the mile-long Midway Plaisance, a narrow rectangular tract that adjoined the western edge of the main fairgrounds and contained many novel amusements, including the world’s first Ferris wheel. Historian R. Reid Badger, in his study of the World’s Colombian Exposition, The Great American Fair, noted that for many visitors the Midway experience was their most cherished fair memory. The term "midway," used today to refer to any area where sideshows and other amusements are offered, has its origins in this area of the World’s Colombian Exposition.

Originally conceived as a "dignified and decorous" ethnological display, the Midway featuredoutdoor ethnological exhibits that sought to portray the lifestyles and cultures of a variety of peoples. Small groups of Laplanders, Egyptians, Arabs, Sudanese, Chinese, Algerians, and Africans appeared on display in recreations of their habitats. Exhibits such as the Yucatan Ruins, Samoan Village, South Sea Islanders Village, and Native American exhibits featured artifacts taken from mounds in the Southwest and the Ohio Valley and presented a cultural diversity unfamiliar to most fair attenders.

As fairgoers walked about the grounds in Victorian garb, what they did not see were many exhibits depicting the progress made by 8 million African Americans in the 30 years since the Emancipation Proclamation. Well-educated African Americans initially viewed the fair as a potential showcase for African American achievement, but their enthusiasm dampened when the white fair officials required that application for special exhibits be made through all-white state boards, effectively eliminating the possibility African Americans had to independently present their own version of African American achievement.

Fair officials deflected efforts to mount more African American exhibits. They allegedly did not wish to become enmeshed in a disagreement within the African American intellectual community over whether an African American achievement exhibit should be housed in its own building or whether evidence of their progress should be integrated into existing exhibits throughout the fair. Ferdinand L. Barnett, a prominent African American lawyer, urged fair officials to make a special effort to encourage African American exhibits and to display them in appropriate departments throughout the fair.

Although white officials did not respond to Barnett’s pleas, a few small African American displays were allowed. Deemed acceptable were vocational and industrial education displays such as the Hampton Institute exhibit submitted as part of the U.S. Department of Education display in the manufacturers and liberal arts building. Booths elsewhere on the grounds represented Wilberforce University, Tennessee Central College, and Atlanta University. Needlework and drawings from several African Americans from New York and Philadelphia were on display in the women’s building. On the whole, however, the displayed evidence of the role of African Americans in U.S. history and contemporary society was not sufficient to garner much public attention at the fair, and the lack of broad representation of African American life probably reinforced conventional stereotypes regarding supposed intellectual limitations.

What did gain attention at the fair was the Dahomey Village, where 100 native Africans lived in an artificial community purportedly demonstrating their domestic, religious, and marital customs. According to the venerable Frederick Douglass, the weekly Dahomey "tribal dance" further reinforced racist notions that Africans were "primitive savages" and suggested that African Americans were equally "barbaric." Indeed, most fair exhibits proclaimed the achievements of a Eurocentric white America, thus reflecting a commonly held western European and U.S. conviction that as their societies prospered in a material, cultural, and technological sense, they stood higher on an evolutionary scale of nations and peoples.

As a concession to those protesting the lack of adequate representation, the fair directors designated August 25, 1893, "Colored People’s Day." Having previously scheduled numerous similar celebrations for nationalities and groups such as the Germans, Swedes, and Irish, as well as for people from Brooklyn, the officials thought such an approach appropriate for African Americans. Antilynching firebrand Ida B. Wells viewed the notion of a Colored People’s Day as patronizing mockery. Contrarily, Frederick Douglass, otherwise a Wells ally on major civil rights issues, argued that having this separate occasion afforded an opportunity to display African American culture and "the real position" of their race.

Douglass delivered the day’s major address and proclaimed a belief that members of his race were "outside of the World’s Fair [which was] consistent with the fact that we are excluded from every respectable calling." Wells’s expressed antagonismtoward the special day proposal, combined with overwhelming support of her position in the African American press, apparently affected popular response-fewer than 5,000 African Americans attended. After Wells read newspaper reports of Douglass’s speech, she conceded his effectiveness in articulating African Americans’ pervasive sense of alienation from and disillusionment with the United States. He had made it clear that the fair not only symbolized the Nation’s technological and material progress, but also had inadvertently spotlighted its moral failure to treat its largest racial minority equitably.

For foreign visitors, who might otherwise fail to realize the considerable role African Americans had played in U.S. history, particularly in the years since slavery was abolished, Ida B. Wells compiled and edited a collection of essays entitled The Reason Why the Colored American Is Not in the World’s Colombian Exposition. As originally conceived, the free booklet was to be distributed in French, German, Spanish, and English. Because of a lack of funds, only the 20,000 English-language copies were printed. As one of its contributors, Frederick Douglass wrote, "The exhibit of the progress made by a race in 25 years of freedom as against 250 years of slavery, would have been the greatest tribute to the greatness and progressiveness of American institutions which could have been shown the world." He submitted that instead the exposition and its White City "to the colored people of America, morally speaking,... is a ’whited sepulcher."’

When it became clear that fair authorities would not acquiesce to the call for wider and better balanced African American representation, African Americans, according to Ferdinand Barnett, "hoped that the Nation would take enough interest in its former slaves to spend a few thousand dollars making an exhibit which would tell to the world what they as freedmen had done." They believed their last, best hope for recognition at the fair lay with the U.S. Government and its enormous 1.2 5-million-dollar exhibit building. As the featured document illustrates, a nationwide petition drive urged Congress to fund and authorize "the Board of Management and Control of the United States Government Exhibit to collect, compile for publication, and publish certain facts and statistics, pertaining to the labor-products, the moral, industrial and intellectual development of the colored people of African descent residing in the United States, from January, 1863, to January 1893 . . . and to form a part of the published report of the United States Government Exhibit."

Congress did not respond to the petitions. Barnett, in The Reason Why, ended his essay by remarking that "The World’s Columbian Exposition draws to a close and that which has been done is without remedy... Our failure to be represented is not of our own working and we can only hope that the spirit of freedom and fair play of which some Americans so loudly boast, will so inspire the Nation that in another great National endeavor the Colored American shall not plead for a place in vain."

The featured document is a petition dated November 21, 1892, addressed to the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives and signed by 59 citizens of New York. It is found in the Records of the U.S. Senate, Record Group 46, Select Committee on the Quadro-Centennial World’s Columbian Exposition, Petitions, Memorials, Resolutions of State Legislatures and Related Documents. Only page 1 of the petition is reproduced. Pages 2 and 3 contain the signatures of 55 additional residents of New York (mostly from Brooklyn). For copies of the two remaining pages, contact the National Archives education staff at 202-501-6172.

TEACHING ACTIVITIES

Document Analysis

1. Distribute copies of the document to your stu. dents and ask them the following questions: a. What type of document is this? b. What is the date of the document? c. Who created the document? d. Who received the document?

Class Discussion

2. Review the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution with your students, emphasizingthe right to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.


Click the image to view a larger version

3. Divide the class into four groups, assigning each group to read and analyze one paragraph of the petition based on, for example, the following prompts:

a. Paragraph 1: On what basis are the petitioners presenting their grievance to Congress? What grievances are expressed in this paragraph?

b. Paragraph 2: What grievances are expressed in this paragraph? What topics are presented to demonstrate what could be highlighted in an exhibit about African Americans?

c. Paragraph 3: What do the petitioners perceive to be the harm in not providing a representation of African Americans at the fair?

d. Paragraph 4: What do the petitioners request that Congress do in response to their concern? Why use January 1863 through January 1893 as the time period for review?

Upon completion, a representative of each group should present the group’s ideas to the class.

4. Discuss the concept of "separate but equal" embedded in the argument about an African American exhibit at the World’s Colombian Exposition. See "Plessy v. Ferguson Mandate, 1896" in volume 1 of Teaching with Documents.

Discuss the changes in acceptable terms used over time to refer to Americans of African descent, such as colored, Afro-American, negro, Negro, black, Black, black American, Black American, person of color, and African American.

Writing Activities

6. Identify a grievance about which your students feel strongly. You may wish to guide their thinking by focusing on an issue of local importance or by choosing a topic of national or global importance. Designate or elect a committee to draft a petition for consideration by the class to send to an appropriate individual or organization. Discuss with your students who or what groups should receive the petition.

Research Activities

7. Ask your students to research and present reports on topics reflected in the petition such as the following:

a. In the context of equal rights, how did the U.S. Constitution treat slaves as originally stated in Article I, section 2, and as modified under the 14th Amendment?

b. What provisions are made in U.S. society today to compensate for the deprivation of "equal opportunities in making . . . progress in the pursuit of moral, educational and industrial advancement." Consider programs such as affirmative action and educational loans for minority groups. How are these programs threatened today?

c. What national "resources" were developed by slaves during their more than 200 years of labor?

d. What "patriotic services" were rendered by African Americans in the Civil War, as alluded to in the petition, as well as during World Wars I and II and the Korean, Vietnam, and Persian Gulf Wars?

e. There was a conspicuous absence of an African American presence at the World’s Colombian Exposition, which commemorated the 400th anniversary of Columbus’s first voyage to North America. How were African Americans represented at Expo ’92 in Seville, Spain, which commemorated the 500th anniversary of the voyage?

f. In 1895, two years after the World’s Colombian Exposition, a separate exhibit devoted to African Americans was erected at the Cotton States and International Exposition held in Atlanta, GA. Ask your students to research that exhibit and present a report on how it represented African Americans. Include in the study Ida B. Wells’s and Ferdinand Barnett’s reactions to the exhibit.

g. Review some of the components of the 1893 World’s Colombian Exposition with your students, and ask them to research buildings, exhibits, or attractions of interest and to present reports or prepare an exhibit commemorating the 1993 centennial of the fair.

References

Badger, R. Reid. The Great American Fair: The World’s Colombian Exposition and American Culture. Chicago: Nelson Hall, 1979.

Harris, Trudier, comp. Selected Works of Ida B. Wells. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991

Rudwick, Elliott M., and August Meier. "Black Man in the ’White City’: Negroes and the Colombian Exposition, 1893." Phylon 26, no. 4 (1965): 361.

Contents:

Download Options


Title: Teaching With Documents, Volume 2

Select an option:

*Note: A download may not start for up to 60 seconds.

Email Options


Title: Teaching With Documents, Volume 2

Select an option:

Email addres:

*Note: It may take up to 60 seconds for for the email to be generated.

Chicago: "Petition for a Fair Representation of African Americas at the World’s Columbian Exposition," Teaching With Documents, Volume 2 in Teaching With Documents: Using Primary Sources from the National Archives, ed. Wynell B. Schamel (Washington, D.C.: National Archives Trust Fund Board for the National Archives and Records Administration and National Council for the Social Studies, 1998), 96–101. Original Sources, accessed March 28, 2024, http://originalsources.com/Document.aspx?DocID=MEGKFSGDUZXEJS3.

MLA: . "Petition for a Fair Representation of African Americas at the World’s Columbian Exposition." Teaching With Documents, Volume 2, in Teaching With Documents: Using Primary Sources from the National Archives, edited by Wynell B. Schamel, Vol. 2, Washington, D.C., National Archives Trust Fund Board for the National Archives and Records Administration and National Council for the Social Studies, 1998, pp. 96–101. Original Sources. 28 Mar. 2024. http://originalsources.com/Document.aspx?DocID=MEGKFSGDUZXEJS3.

Harvard: , 'Petition for a Fair Representation of African Americas at the World’s Columbian Exposition' in Teaching With Documents, Volume 2. cited in 1998, Teaching With Documents: Using Primary Sources from the National Archives, ed. , National Archives Trust Fund Board for the National Archives and Records Administration and National Council for the Social Studies, Washington, D.C., pp.96–101. Original Sources, retrieved 28 March 2024, from http://originalsources.com/Document.aspx?DocID=MEGKFSGDUZXEJS3.