From the moment African-Americans could set pen to paper, there was the black-owned newspaper. The role of the black press reached its heights in the postbellum era, as millions of the formerly enslaved black Americans hungered for a voice amidst the clamor and fuss of Reconstruction. This voice grew increasingly important as America shifted towards the Progressive Era, where white newspapers and writers hashed out their thoughts on the “negro problem,” nearly erasing the role in which blacks played in their own lives. Not only were black-owned newspapers a source of information, but they were a sign of a thriving community–when blacks formed neighborhoods in urban areas, or even founded their own towns, the existence of at least one newspaper showed others the success and relative prosperity of the black inhabitants.

William Calvin Chase

One of the most famous and influential black newspapers of the Progressive era was The Washington Bee. The Bee was published weekly from 1882 through 1922, and William Calvin Chase was its sole proprietor and editor until his death in 1921. Chase, a native Washingtonian born in 1854, was also born free, and was college educated and a lawyer, which placed him in a unique position during the highly-charged atmosphere for blacks around the time he became editor of The Bee. In his 1891 book, The Afro-American Press and Its Editors, Irvine Garland Penn described The Bee’s reputation thus: “Nothing stings Washington City, and in fact, the Bourbons of the South, as The Bee.” The paper’s own motto “Honey for Friends, Stings for Enemies” summed up Chase’s approach to journalism; he could be fulsome with praise and sincerity towards those he respected, but just as easily scorned and castigated those he didn’t. As a result, many of Chase’s friends found his blunt style indiscreet, for he “never failed to expose, in the most condemnatory manner, any fraud unjust attack or evil that caught his vigilant eye.”

Offices of The Washington Bee, 1109 I Street, NW

However, this sort of disapproval spurred Chase on to action, and though he was a Republican and served as District of Columbia delegate to the party’s national convention in 1900 and again in 1912, he did not mince words about which policies he did not like. Chase also didn’t mince words when it came to black Americans themselves, and he considered it his mission to shine a light on the racism and exclusivity of the black upper-class Washingtonians, who frequently looked down upon the masses of Southern blacks who began to move into the city, and who were appalled by Jim Crow, as they considered themselves a buffer between “low class” blacks and whites. He also called out the black leaders of the day, finding them either too too accommodating or too theoretical to make much of a difference in the lives of ordinary black Americans.

So fearless was Chase, he did not mind losing a government post:

It is related, that on one occasion when Mr. Chase called on President Cleveland, he showed [the President] a copy of The Bee, in which [Chase] had said that in consideration of the number of outrages perpetrated in the South upon the Afro-Americans by the whites, it would cost the lives of millions to inaugurate Grover Cleveland, if elected. Mr. Chase did not deny being the author of the article. Although Cleveland was elected and inaugurated without any bloodshed, and Chase supported in a measure his administration, yet he received his discharge a few weeks afterward, at the instance of the president and Secretary of War Endicott, from the position he held in the government printing-office.

This sort of brazenness had more than once brought Chase to court, where he was five times indicted for libel, and acquitted in every case except one, in which he was fined fifty dollars. Nonetheless, Chase was known and respected by nearly every African-American newspaper editor, writer, etc, regardless of agreement with his editorials, because of the steadfastness with which he held to what he thought was right.

Read issues of The Washington Bee, courtesy of the Library of Congress.

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

Sissieretta Jones

Opera singers were the world’s first pop stars, and the nineteenth century saw the apex of diva and divo worship, with hundreds of thousands left spellbound by the heavenly voices of Jenny Lind, Nelli Melba, Enrico Caruso, and Jean de Rezke, to name a few stars. Since this was before radio, and definitely before television and sound motion pictures, the opera found fans across the spectrum of class, social status, and even race. Into this unique setting, Matilda Sissieretta Joyner Jones made her debut.

Jones was born in Portsmouth, Virginia, in 1869 to Jeremiah Malachi Joyner, an AME minister, and Henrietta Beale, from whom Jones is said to have inherited her voice. When she was seven, the family moved to Providence, Rhode Island in search of better economic and social opportunities, and it was in her new home where Jones began the many steps which led to her lasting fame. She enrolled in the Providence Academy of Music in 1883, the same year in which she wed David Richard Jones, a hotel bellman who was to become her great sorrow until their divorce in 1900, and later at the New England Conservatory of Music. She made her formal debut in Boston before an audience of 5,000, and 1892 was the year in which she garnered the name “the Black Patti”:

If Mme Jones is not the equal of Adelina Patti, she at least can come nearer it than anything the American public has heard. Her notes are as clear as a mockingbird’s and her annunciation perfect.

Though she preferred to be called “Madame Jones,” the nickname stuck.

The 1890s were the pinnacle of Jones’s career. She performed throughout the United States, Europe, Australia, the Caribbean, South America, and South Africa; sang before four U.S. Presidents (Harrison, Cleveland, McKinley, and Roosevelt) and the British royal family; and became the first African-American to sing at the Music Hall in New York (renamed Carnegie Hall in 1893). She also collaborated with Czech composer Antonín Dvořák, singing parts of his Symphony No. 9, and a solo he wrote especially for her.

Despite this outstanding success, Jones found the doors to most of America’s concert halls closed to her, and when she formed the Black Patti Troubadours, the soprano diva discovered she had to walk the tightrope of American race relations as the group’s first shows featured only the minstrel and musical skits allowed to black performers. Jones was troubled by the minstrel skits, finding them demeaning, and she soon found a way to integrate opera arias and spirituals into the show to balance their image. Between the years 1896 to 1915, “Black Patti’s Troubadours” traveled internationally, performing operatic arias, art songs, and sentimental ballads, and served as training ground for thousands of black performers, including Bert Williams of Williams and Walker fame.

By the early 1900s, Black Patti’s Troubadours tightened its repertoire and now included original pieces which featured Jones in the diva roles denied to her: A Trip to Africa (1909-10), In the Jungles (1911-12), Captain Jaspar (1912-13), and Lucky Sam from Alabam’ (1914-15). During the travels of the group, later renamed the Black Patti Musical Comedy Company, accolades both written and tangible piled on her, and “Jones was given many gifts from admirers, among them, a medal from President Hippolyte of Haiti, a bar of diamonds and emeralds from the citizens of St. Thomas, an emerald shamrock from the Irish people of Providence and a diamond tiara from the governor general of a West Indies island. And she often wore her 17 medals across her chest during performances.”

Sissieretta gave two final performances: at the Grand Theater in Chicago and at the Lafayette Theater in New York City in October 1915, and returned home to Providence to care for her ailing mother. Her stint with the Black Patti Troubadours was rumored to bring in excess of $20,000 a year in profits, but Jones was penniless in her retirement, and she was forced to sell three of her four houses, and her jewels and mementos to remain solvent. When she died of cancer in 1933, at the age of 74, William Freeman, a real estate agent and president of the local NAACP had provided money for her bills and living expenses during the last years of her life, and he also paid for her burial in Grace Church Cemetery in Providence. A rather ignoble end for such a success, but Sissieretta Jones nonetheless paved the way for respected black entertainers to come, including Marian Anderson, who in 1955 was given the opportunity to sing in the Metropolitan Opera House of New York, which was denied to Jones in her lifetime.

Death of Cleopatra, 1876

Critical Response:

Miss Lewis is by no means a prodigy; she has great natural genius, originality, earnestness, and a simple, genuine taste. Her works are as yet those of a girl. She has read Evangeline, and some others of Longfellow’s poems, and has caught from them a girlish sentimentality, but has rather improved upon her author’s conceptions in the process of giving them shape and reality. By and by, when her horizon of knowledge becomes more expanded, and her grasp on it firmer, she will leave the prettinesses of poems, and give us Pocahontas, Logan. Pontiac, Tecumseh, Red Jacket, and, it may be, Black Hawk and Osceola. Or if these may seem too near and real, and admitting less of effective accessories, there lie behind them all the great dramatic characters, Montezuma, Guatimozin, Huascar, and Atahualpa, to say nothing of the Malinche, that lost her country that she might save her love.”
~ J. S. Ingram 1876

The most remarkable piece of sculpture in the American section was perhaps that in marble of The Death of Cleopatra by Edmonia Lewis, the sculptress and protégée of Charlotte Cushman. The great queen was seated in a chair, her head drooping over her left shoulder. The face of the figure was really fine in its naturalness and the gracefulness of the lines. The face was full of pain, and for some reason – perhaps to intensify the expression – the classic standard had been departed from, and the features were not even Egyptian in their outline, but of a decidedly Jewish cast. The human heads which ornamented the arms of the chair were obtrusive, and detracted from the dignity which the artist succeeded in gaining in the figure. A canopy of Oriental brightness in color had been placed over the statue.
~ William J. Clark 1878

An even more remarkable sculpture from the hand of a female artist than Miss Foley’s fountain which was in the Centennial Exhibition was the Cleopatra of Edmonia Lewis. This was not a beautiful work, but it was a very original and very striking one, and it deserves particular comment, as its ideal was so radically different from those adopted by Story and Gould in their statues of the Egyptian Queen. Story gave his Cleopatra Nubian features, and achieved an artistic if not a historical success by so doing. The Cleopatra of Gould suggests a Greek lineage. Miss Lewis, on the other hand, has followed the coins, medals, and other authentic records in giving her Cleopatra an aquiline nose and a prominent chin of the Roman type, for the Egyptian Queen appears to have had such features rather than such as would more positively suggest her Grecian descent. This Cleopatra, therefore, more nearly resembled the real heroine of history than either of the others, which, however, it should be remembered, laid no claims to being other than purely ideal works. Miss Lewis’ Cleopatra, like the figures sculptured by Story and Gould, is seated in a chair; the poison of the asp has done its work, and the Queen is dead. The effects of death are represented with such skill as to be absolutely repellant – and it is a question whether a statue of the ghastly characteristics of this one does not overstep the bounds of legitimate art. Apart from all questions of taste, however, the striking qualities of the work are undeniable, and it could only have been reproduced by a sculptor of very genuine endowments. … the real power of her Cleopatra was a revelation.

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 club movement grew out of the literary and self-improvement groups nicknamed “universities for middle-aged women,” which filled the need for continued learning for women denied a college education after the Civil War. For black women, these groups manifested themselves in two-fold: one, a desire to emulate their white upper- and middle-class counterparts, and two, an outlet to express their frustration over the issue of being black and female. The widely held view of black women at this time was of inherent immorality and promiscuity, which, according to Fannie Barrier Williams, was held equally by whites and black men. Black women of the Progressive Era, feeling that they did not “bask in the sunlight of man’s chivalry, admiration, and even worship,” pointed to Martin R. Delany’s 1852 treatise, The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States, which stressed that “no people are ever elevated above the condition of their females.”

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 Crow, 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 earned 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.

The NAWC was the result of a merger of the National Federation of Afro-American Women, the Women’s Era Club of Boston, and the National League of Colored Women of Washington, DC, as well as smaller organizations that had arisen from the African-American women’s club movement. High profile founders included Harriet Tubman, Margaret Murray Washington, Frances E.W. Harper, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, and Mary Church Terrell. But its two leading members were Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin and Mary Church Terrell, whose original intention was “to furnish evidence of the moral, mental and material progress made by people of color through the efforts of our women.”

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.

Though the women’s club movement was criticized by the black community as being elitist, these women saw themselves as forming a model for correct behavior, and as taking advantage of their social status and wealth to fight for the rights of their race and their sex. The motto, “Lifting as We Climb,” characterized their goals and achievements, which, as African-Americans and as women in the 19th and early 20th centuries, were outstanding.

Further Reading:
Aristocrats of Color: the Black Elite, 1880-1920 by Willard B. Gatewood
To Tell the Truth Freely: The Life of Ida B. Wells by Mia Bay
A Colored Woman in a White World by Mary Church Terrell
African American women in the struggle for the vote, 1850-1920‎ by Rosalyn Terborg-Penn
Lifting As They Climb by Elizabeth Lindsay Davis
African American women and the vote, 1837-1965‎ by Ann Dexter Gordon & Bettye Collier-Thomas