Drawing a Global Color Line: \u2018The American Negro Exhibit\u2019 at the 1900 Paris Exposition

This chapter examines the role African Americans had in the 1900 Paris Exposition. It focuses on \u201cThe American Negro Exhibit,\u201d set up by prominent African American activists and intellectuals, such as W.E.B. Du Bois, Booker T. Washington and Thomas J. Calloway, in order to represent the progress and achievements of blacks in the US in the three decades following the end of the Civil War. Based on research carried out in the Daniel Murray Pamphlet Collection and the Booker T. Washington Papers at the Library of Congress, the Archives Nationales and the Bibliot\ue8que Nationale in Paris, this chapter highlights the ways in which the 1900 Paris Exposition became a way for Afircan Americans of challenging the forms of racism against blacks and colonized people carried out in the so-called \u201cnative villages,\u201d and more broadly in society, and establish new forms of solidarity and political activism, domestically and internationally. At the World\u2019s Columbian Exposition, held in 1893 in Chicago, African Americans had already criticized the US government for denying them fair representations, through the pamphlet, The Reason Why the Colored American is Not in the World\u2019s Columbian Exposition. In 1900, they demanded the right to be assigned a space where to set up \u201can exhibit of the progress of the American negroes in education and industry.\u201d \u201cThe American Negro Exhibit\u201d presented African Americans\u2019 success in education, literature, industry and commerce, by making wide use of photography, charts and graphs. Its main aim was to challenge the idea that African Americans were \u201ca mass of rapists, ready to attack every white woman exposed, and a drug in civilized society,\u201d and highlighted the achievements of the so-called New Negroes. The images showed middle-class, respectable urban blacks, members of a generation that had not experienced slavery, while at the same time emphasizing the emergence of new forms of racism and violence in the South. \u201cThe American Negro Exhibit\u201d served as a turning point in the history of African American activism. Indeed, in the context of the 1900 Paris Exposition, Washington and Du Bois grew further apart, offering profoundly different understandings of race relations in the US and globally. On the one hand, Washington advanced the idea that the forms of racial integration promoted by the Tuskegee Institute should serve as a model for African colonies, uplifting Africans through work and discipline. On the other hand, in one of the plates displayed at the exhibition, Du Bois introduced the notion that, \u201cthe problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line,\u201d a statement he later presented at the First Pan-African Conference, held in London in July 1900. For both leaders, the 1900 Paris Exposition allowed for the establishment of new transnational alliances with activists in Europe and Africa, which flourished after the First World War