While a professor of sociology at Atlanta University, W. E. B. Du Bois contributed maps, documents and photographs of African Americans in Georgia to an exhibit for the 1900 Paris Exposition. Using the common parlance of the time, the exhibit was entitled “The American Negro.” Du Bois selected images of African American people and their communities as examples of the accomplishments and progress they had made in the almost 40 years since Emancipation.
Origins of the African-American Exhibit
African-American lawyer and educator Thomas Calloway organized the exhibit. Calloway recognized the opportunity to present African Americans’ achievements to a broad international audience. Calloway appealed to distinguished African-American scholars and activists including Du Bois, Booker T. Washington and Mary Church Terrell.
Calloway explained the intention of the exhibit was to show examples of African-American history, education, literacy and economic status. A bibliography of over 1,400 titles written by African Americans including pamphlets, periodicals and 200 books was compiled by the staff of the Library of Congress under the direction of Assistant to the Librarian of Congress Daniel A. P. Murray. A list of 350 patents granted to African-American inventors since 1834 were also prepared.
Du Bois concentrated his efforts on compiling statistics and photographs of African Americans in the state of Georgia, the state with the highest population of black Americans. Du Bois emphasized the rise of public school enrollment and its positive effect on literacy rates. He also noted the extent of African American land ownership and payment of property taxes as examples of prosperity; and institutions of higher learning including Atlanta, Howard and Fisk Universities and Hampton and Tuskegee Institutes.
Du Bois described the show as “an honest, straightforward exhibit of a small nation of people, picturing their life and development without apology or gloss, and above all made by themselves.” Du Bois and Calloway emphasized the positive, essentially omitting the negative aspects of race relations in America. The purpose of the exhibit was to celebrate African American achievement, much the way all the exhibits at the Paris Exposition celebrated the ideals of industry and progress.
The portraits Du Bois chose show prosperous, educated, confident, well-dressed African Americans posing in studios, their homes, churches or places of business. Du Bois summarized the exhibit as an “encouraging” representation of African Americans “studying, examining, and thinking of their own progress and prospects.”
Media Coverage and Official Recognition
African-American newspapers including the Colored American favorably covered the exhibit, but major European and American news outlets, with a few exceptions, largely ignored it. The judges for the Exposition honored it with a total of fifteen medals. Calloway and Du Bois each received a gold medal for their work: Du Bois for the Georgia Exhibit and Calloway for conceiving and producing the overall exhibition. The entire exhibit was awarded a Grand Prix.
The Long Road to Civil Rights
As historian Ronald L. F. Davis wrote in The Paris Exposition of 1900 and W.E.B. Du Bois, “the exhibit was a visual appeal for the world to recognize that talented African Americans were ready and prepared to take their place among the most civilized people of the coming modern age. Less than a summation of the past, Du Bois' exhibit portrayed a vision of the future.”
The “most unique exhibit in the American section” of the Paris Exposition remains a tribute to the hard-won achievements of African Americans. Yet a difficult journey to equality and enfranchisement lay ahead. More than 60 years would pass until the momentous Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Sources:
- Calloway, Thomas J. 1901. "The Negro Exhibit," pp.463-467 in the Report of the Commissioner-General for the United States to the International Universal Exposition, Paris, 1900. Volume II. U.S. Senate Document No. 232 (56th Congress, 2d Session). Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office.
- Du Bois, W. E. B., “The American Negro at Paris,” American Monthly Review of Reviews: An International Magazine, Vol. 22, No. 5 (November, 1900), pp. 575-577
- Provenzo, Jr., Ph.D., Eugene F., School of Education, University of Miami, The Exhibit of American Negroes, World’s Fair, Paris 1900: An Historical and Archival Reconstruction, 2005,
- www.fofweb.com/Onfiles/Afhc/afparis1900/1paris1900index.htm
- Library of Congress with Essays by David Levering Lewis and Deborah Willis, A Small Nation of People: W. E. B. Du Bois and African American Portraits of Progress, Amistad, 2003
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