The Negro Exhibit at the 1900 Paris Exposition
February 8th, 2010 | No Comments
A major development of the nineteenth century was the emergence of world’s fairs, all of which served to entertain visitors and impress them with the technological and cultural advances of Western nations and their colonies which increased exponentially–and dazzlingly–after the 1851 Great Exhibition hosted by England under the auspices of the Prince Consort. By the 1900 world’s fair, which was held in Paris, there had been eleven other expositions, held in such places as Vienna, Philadelphia, Sydney, New Orleans, Barcelona, and Chicago, which introduced a variety of inventions and cultures to awed visitors.
Though there were three more expositions of significance by the dawn of WWI (St Louis in 1904, Seattle in 1909, and San Francisco in 1915), the one held in 1900 was unique in that it was the first and last fair to bridge the gap between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This was also the pinnacle of imperialism, and the “nadir of race relations in America.” After witnessing the successful campaign for the inclusion of African-Americans in the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893, African-Americans viewed the Paris Exhibition as another avenue to promote the progress of their people in the thirty-five years since the end of slavery. The year before the fair, W.E.B. Du Bois, a noted sociologist and activist for African-Americans, began to collect material for the display, and focused on “creating charts, maps, and graphs recording the growth of population, economic power, and literacy among African Americans in Georgia.” In conjunction with Daniel A.P. Murray, assistant to the Librarian of Congress, Du Bois was able to assemble a large collection of written works, which included a bibliography of 1400 titles, 200 books, and many of the 150 periodicals published by black Americans.
Du Bois stated that the objective of the exhibit was quadruple, and by displaying it he hoped to illustrate “the History of the American Negro, the Present condition of the Negro, the Education of the Negro, and Literature of the Negro.” he project was backed with a $15,000 budget appropriated from the American government and amounted to numerous artifacts, including “musical compositions, books by African American authors, and the poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar, their award-winning display of photographs, books, models, maps, patents, and plans from several black universities, including Atlanta, Fisk, Howard, Hampton, and Tuskegee, showed the world African Americans “studying, examining, and thinking of their own progress, and prospect.”
One highlight of the exhibit utilized nine model displays to depict the progress of Negroes from slavery to the present day. The models began with the homeless freedman and end[ed] with the modern brick schoolhouse and its teachers. Finally, to illustrate the increase in population of the race and to demonstrate other contributions, there were charts showing population growth, the decline in illiteracy and a record of the more than 350 patents granted to black men since 1834. Du Bois stated, concerning the exhibit “we have thus, it may be seen, 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.” As a result of its great success, the Negro Exhibit was awarded with seventeen medals during its time on display at the Paris Exposition. Specifically, it received “two grand prizes, four gold medals, seven silver medals, two bronze medals and two honorable mentions” in the various categories of appraisal.
Further Reading:
About Du Bois and the Paris Exposition
The 1900 Paris Exposition
The Exhibit of American Negroes
W.E.B. Du Bois and the 1900 Paris Exhibition
Africans, Darkies and Negroes: Black Faces at the Pan American Exposition of 1901, Buffalo, New York
A small nation of people: W.E.B. Du Bois and African American portraits of progress from the Library of Congress with essays by David Levering Lewis and Deborah Willis.
The Exhibit Online






In the late nineteenth century, feminism, suffrage, political action, self-culture and self-help devolved in the women’s club movement, which enjoyed a heyday from the 1890s through the 1920s. Though this movement transformed the lives of upper- and middle-class women of all ethnicities, it made a particular impact on African-American women.
The movement turned from social and literary pursuits to social justice and activism in the 1890s with the demise of Reconstruction and the rise of Jim Crowism, which killed any idea held by the black elite that their conduct and class would convince whites that blacks could be their equals. The 1890s was also the era of lynchings, and the decade was characterized by the watershed of blood staining the soil of the South (not only black Southerners, but Jewish Southerners, Italians, etc). Out of this violence came Ida B. Wells, a journalist who gained fame in the mid-1880s when she refused to give up her train seat to a white man and move to a Jim Crow car. Wells was dragged from the train, but she immediately hired a lawyer to sue the railroad company. She won her case in 1884, and received a settlement of $500. Though the railroad appealed the case, Wells gained a reputation as a powerful voice against racism and oppression. By the 1890s, Wells anti-lynching crusade was taken up by the various women’s clubs across the nation, and that issue, along with women’s suffrage, became the platforms upon which the National Association of Colored Women was founded in 1896.
Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin was born in Boston of a Franco-African father from Martinique and a Cornish mother. She made waves early on in life first by her marriage to George Lewis Ruffin, the first black Harvard graduate and the first African American to serve on the Boston City Council, the Massachusetts state legislature, and as Boston’s first black municipal judge, and secondly by her association with Julia Ward Howe and Lucy Stone to form the American Woman Suffrage Association in 1869. After her husband’s early death in 1884, Ruffin founded Woman’s Era, the first newspaper written by and for black American women, and called for her audience to agitate for the rights of their race and their sex. Even as she formed the National Federation of Afro-American Women and became a part of the NAWC, Ruffin remained a member of white women’s clubs, a matter which revealed the unyielding split between race and gender when the General Federation of Woman’s Clubs met in Milwaukee in 1900 and Ruffin was permitted to represent the white women’s clubs she belonged to, but not the black woman’s club, New Era. Nonetheless, Ruffin remained a force in the women’s club movement and became a charter member of the NAACP when it was formed in 1910.
Mary Church Terrell came from a life of extreme privilege, being the daughter of Robert Church, the wealthiest black man in Memphis, Tennessee, where he owned extensive real estate. When she graduated from Oberlin College in 1884 with a bachelor’s degree, she was one of the first African-American women known to have earned a college degree, and she went on to earn a master’s degree from Oberlin in 1888. After college, Terrell traveled to Europe for more education, and became fluent in French, German, and Italian, a skill which served her well when she achieved international stature. She married Robert H. Terrell, a lawyer who became the first black municipal court judge in Washington, DC, where she also became the first black woman in the United States to be appointed to the District of Columbia Board of Education. As with most educated black women, Terrell took to the pen, and though she was loathe to call herself a journalist, under the name Euphemia Kirk,” her articles appeared in both white and black newspapers where she “communicated a consistent message that effectively and decisively aligned with that of the African American Women’s Club Movement and the overall struggle of black women and the black race for equality.”
Other influential leaders included Fannie Barrier Williams, a Pennsylvania native who moved to Chicago in the 1890s who became involved in the establishment of Provident Hospital, an inter-racial medical facility that included a nursing training school that admitted black women, Frederick Douglass Center, a settlement house, and the Phillis Wheatley Home for Girls, among other notable achievements. When Barrier Williams was nominated to the prestigious Chicago Women’s Club in 1894, she and her supporters received threats, both public and private. Barrier Williams continued to fight for inclusion and was admitted in 1895. She was also the first black and the first woman on the Chicago Library Board. Her most lasting influence was during the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, where she fought for the inclusion of black achievements and was appointed as Clerk in charge of Colored Interests in the Department of Publicity and Promotions. Barrier then gave two speeches, “The Intellectual Progress of the Colored Women of the United States Since the Emancipation Proclamation,” which disputed the notion that slavery had rendered African-American women incapable of the same moral and intellectual levels as other women, and “What Can Religion Further Do to Advance the condition of the American Negro?”, which called upon churches, particularly those in the South, to open their doors to all people, regardless of race.






