Making history visible: World's fairs, expositions, and museums in the black metropolis, 1895-1995

This study examines the social and material production of the spaces---displays, expositions, museums, and cities---where blacks in America remembered their past and envisioned their future, in spite of the difficulties imposed by white racism. Up to now, the history of black participation at expositions has been written as an addendum to larger world's fair scholarship. While the few histories on black museums have reviewed the great collectors of African American culture who established their own private collections, historical societies, and museums at black colleges. Whereas this dissertation, merging social and urban history with museum studies, traces a genealogy of contemporary black museums to the world's fairs of the nineteenth century. It shows how blacks created extraordinary exhibits on art, education, business, and industrial arts that filled the aisles the Negro Buildings of the Southern fairs and the black organized expositions commemorating Emancipation convened in northern cities until the mid twentieth century. Participants and associations involved in the expositions would establish the first grassroots black museums in the 1960s. These events and institutions presented a visual rebuttal, eventually bolstered by advances in black historiography, to the representations and discourses of racial science proffered in mainstream museum exhibitions, to the displays of primitive peoples and stereotypical characters featured at the plantation concessions at the World's Fairs, and to the demeaning images circulating in magazines, motion pictures, and eventually, on television. My research inquires into how expositions and museums also functioned as sites for the cultivation of a cultural memory of enslavement and Emancipation. Expositions often promoted the ameliorative affects of industrialization, made possible by the hundred-year expansion of industrial capitalism begun after Reconstruction, and emergent ideologies of class and race that fostered the urbanization of black populations in Atlanta, New York City, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Detroit. Within these racially segregated urban enclaves, class distinctions gave rise to a black counterpublic sphere, led by race leaders such as Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Du Bois, Ida B. Wells. Horace Cayton, and a professional class whose social, political, and educational institutions, along with churches organized the expositions and founded the first black museums.