Negro Building: Black Americans in the World of Fairs and Museums

Abstract

Employing the lens of African American public history and contested public spaces, Negro Building demonstrates how blacks in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America used community spaces as platforms for activism. Beginning with the 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia and ending with several black-organized expositions in 1963, Mabel O. Wilson contends that fairs and museums played a critical role in the creation of African American identity. Designed to demonstrate African American progress, the exhibitions and fairs also revealed black anxieties about participation in museums they had been historically barred from visiting or exhibiting in. Wilson examines the challenges, strategies, and receptions of some of the most significant black exhibitions at museums and fairs. She does an excellent job in revealing the conflicts between African American elites and white commissioners and curators about the foci, goals, and types of exhibits. However, while Negro Building provides a comprehensive analysis of the difficult and complex decisions made by Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, Daniel Murray, Alain Locke, Carter G. Woodson, and a number of other members of the African American intelligentsia, the book would have benefited immensely from both gender and class analysis.