Good Morning POU!
The Exhibit of American Negroes was a sociological display within the Palace of Social Economy at the 1900 World’s Fair in Paris. The exhibit was actually a joint effort between Daniel Murray, the Assistant Librarian of Congress, Thomas Calloway, a lawyer and the primary organizer of the exhibit, and W.E.B. Du Bois with the goal of demonstrating the progress and commemorating the lives of African Americans at the turn of the century.
African American College Students, Roger Williams University–Nashville, TN 1890s
Class in Calculus
It included a statuette of Frederick Douglass, four bound volumes of nearly 400 official patents by African Americans, photographs from several educational institutions (Fisk University, Howard University, Roger Williams University, Tuskegee Institute, Claflin University, Berea College, North Carolina A&T), an African-American bibloigraphy by the Library of Congress containing 1,400 titles, and two social studies directed by W. E. B. Du Bois: “The Georgia Negro” (comprising 32 handmade graphs and charts), and a set of about 30 statistical graphics on the African-American population made by Du Bois’s students at Atlanta University. Most memorably, the exhibit displayed some five hundred photographs of African-American men and women, homes, churches, businesses and landscapes.
Charts comprised by Du Bois’s students for the 1900 Paris Exposition
Thomas Calloway, an African-American lawyer and educator, sent a letter to over one hundred African-American representatives in various sections of the United States, including Booker T. Washington, to solicit help in advocating for an exhibit to present at the world’s fair in Paris. The letter insists that, “thousands upon thousands will go [to the fair], and a well selected and prepared exhibit, representing the Negro’s development in his churches, his schools, his homes, his farms, his stores, his professions and pursuits in general will attract attention… and do a great and lasting good in convincing thinking people of the possibilities of the Negro.”
Bricklayers Union, Jacksonville FL
Washington appealed personally to President William McKinley and just four months before the opening of the Paris Exposition, Congress allocated fifteen thousand dollars to fund the exhibit. Calloway enlisted Du Bois, with whom he had formerly been classmates at Fisk, and Daniel Murray, Assistant to the Librarian of Congress, to assemble materials.
Carpentar’s Union, Jacksonville FL
Waiters Union, Atlanta GA
S.J. Gilpin shoe store, Richmond, VA
Richmond Steam Laundry, Richmond VA
Leigh Street Pharmacy, Richmond VA
African American boy seated on porch of house, another African American boy standing with bicycle on porch of another house, with two young African American women on steps, Georgia
