September 26 Assignment - Address how race impacted the Paris Universelle of 1900

Race played a crucial role at the Paris Universelle of 1900 under the direction of Thomas Calloway, an African American educator and activist, and noted African American sociologist, W. E. B. Du Bois, who organized a pioneering exhibition called the Exposition des Nègres d’Amérique - the Exhibit of American Negroes. The exhibit included not only portraits of what Du Bois termed “typical Negro faces,” but also photographs of a thriving African American middle class as evidenced in the hundreds of professionally documented homes, businesses, churches, and school settings in Georgia. In the exhibition, Du Bois also included charts, graphs, and artifacts to further demonstrate the sociological advances of African Americans at the turn of the 19^th century, a period that was just thirty five years after the end of the Civil War.

In Photography on the Color Line: W. E. B. Du Bois, Race and Visual Culture, Shawn Michelle Smith states that Booker T. Washington’s “Atlanta Compromise” speech at the 1895 Atlanta Cotton States and International Exposition heavily influenced Calloway and provided him with the framework for the project. At that time, Washington, was the foremost post-slavery black leader and founder of Tuskegee University in Alabama. In this influential speech, Washington pledges the cooperation of “his race” and indicates that the “agitation of questions of social equality is extremist folly.”(Louis R. Harlan, ed., The Booker T. Washington Papers, Vol. 3, (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1974)

Smith writes that according to Calloway, in order for African Americans, particularly in the South to further leverage the excitement over their inclusion in the Atlanta Exposition as well the Tennessee Centennial of 1897, Calloway argued for a strategic approach to being included on the international stage. The two-pronged agenda was stated as the following: “African Americans need occasional opportunities to show in a distinctive way the evidences of their progress, and to prove their value to the body politic.” For Calloway, “the American Negro Exhibit could prove U.S. beneficence, and legitimize U.S. imperialism, by showing how much better off men and women of color were under the civilizing influence of the United States. “

Though the intent of the exhibition might be deemed “accommodationist” in its original aims, it went on to win the fair’s highest honor, a Grand Prix in advancing “la grande famillle humain” – (the great human family). The following year, this important series traveled to the 1901 Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York. Calloway and Du Bois’s efforts were a vast leap forward from the anger that occurred as a result of the barring of African Americans from any meaningful inclusion in the planning of the 1893 Chicago Columbia Exposition.