"All the World Is Here!" The Black Presence at White City

Abstract

The 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago was a significant event for all Chica goans. For city fathers it offered an opportunity to showcase the city and to illustrate its growth. African Americans hoped to use the exposition as a platform to illustrate their progress in the aftermath of enslavement and emancipation. While civic leaders felt in the end the exposition served them well, African Americans had mixed feelings as to whether they had accomplished their goals. In this engaging book Christopher Robert Reed seeks to analyze the issues confronting African Americans as they sought an appropriate place for themselves in the operation of the exposition. The diversity of perspectives on this issue was quite broad, according to Reed, because the Chicago African American community was much more striated by this time than previous studies indicated. His examination of its members revealed a multitiered group with a complex set of views regarding integration, separation, and pragmatic progress. This perspective runs counter to previous views that arg ued that the publication The Reason Why the Colored American Is Not in the World's Columbian Exposition (1893) encapsulated the experiences of African Americans regarding the event.