by Mia Bay
In Britain during most of the debates over Colored People’s Day, Wells arrived in Chicago in the summer of 1893 to find blacks divided on that subject, in ways that put the pamphlet plan in jeopardy. Not only was the pamphlet still unfunded, but Wells was also at odds with Douglass for the first time in their acquaintance. While she did not appreciate The Indianapolis Freeman’s attack on the pamphlet, she joined the paper in opposing any Colored People’s Day. By July, the day seemed like an increasingly dubious proposition, fueled by obvious profit motives on the part of the fair’s organizers. “Shut out of any other participation in the fair except to spend his money here,” Wells noted, the “colored brother…had not been doing so very freely.” Colored People’s Day was nothing more than “a cordial invitation to do so…given at the eleventh hour.” Moreover, by July, fair officials had announced plans for the event that seemed expressly designed to degrade black fairgoers. “The horticulture department,” Wells further noted, “has already pledged itself to put plenty of watermelons around on the grounds with the permission to the brother in black to ‘appropriate’ them.” The event promised to turn African American participation into a degrading racial show. “The spectacle of the class of our people which will come on that excursion roaming around the grounds munching on watermelon, will do more to lower the race in the estimation of the world than anything else.”26
This 1893 cartoon titled “Darkies’ Day at the Fair” realized African American fears that the World’s Columbian Exposition’s Colored People’s Day could become a degrading racial spectacle. Published in the world’s fair edition of the humor magazine Puck, it mocked the event with a racist representation of the kinship between black Americans and the various African peoples on display at the fair—who are all portrayed as sharing a common love of watermelon.
Wells’s dire predictions about the humiliating spectacle of a “horde” of black people attracted to the Columbian Exposition “by the dazzling prospect of free watermelon” spoke to the class prejudices of the black elite—who tended to see a strict conformity to middle-class behavior as a prerequisite for black racial progress. Douglass’s granddaughter Fredericka Sprague, for example, had a similar response. “So, one day has really been found for the colored people at the ‘World’s Fair,’” she wrote her grandfather, “and the very idea that they are going to the trouble of supplying them with free watermelons is enough to draw every dusky American from his castle and lure him to the Fair ground gates.”27
Still, African American opposition to Colored People’s Day was not just a matter of class anxieties. Wells and other opponents had every reason to believe that the day would be billed as a sideshow. Staged to present the peoples of the world in the context of an evolutionary vision of progress, the fair effectively relegated African Americans to the same level of development as the primitive African peoples on display—an impression that any Colored People’s Day festivities might help enforce.
A monument to white American progress, the fair featured an ideal model city, which excluded Africans and other peoples of color. The famous White City showcased American technology and industry in large, classically designed buildings finished with gleaming white paint. Devoted to displaying American manufactures, machinery, transportation, electricity, horticulture, agriculture, and mines and mining, it was flanked by other exhibits displaying the cultures and accomplishments of the peoples of the world—or in some cases the peoples themselves. Set off from the White City, on the midway in the fair’s entertainment area, were exhibits styled as replicas of cities and villages from around the world, arranged, as one visitor noted, on “a sliding scale of humanity.” At the far end were “the savage races, the African of Dahomey, and the North American Indian.”
One of the great attractions on the midway was the sixty-seven Fon people on exhibit. Housed in a replica of a West African village, they were the fair’s only major black exhibit and an exotic display of man at his most primitive. Imported, employed, and exploited by a French manager named Xavier Pene, the Fon people hailed from the West African kingdom of Abomey, also known as Dahomey. Scantily clad in clothing designed for their African homeland, the Fon were on hand, as a guidebook to the fair noted, to amuse the public with “war dances, songs, and specimens of savage amusements that made our native Indian seem a ‘thing of beauty and a thing of joy forever.’” Black Americans tended to view them as “African savages brought here to act like the monkey.” The Fon’s well-publicized presence made the issue of African American representation at the exposition especially troubling.28 Little wonder, then, that black Chicagoans like Wells feared that Colored People’s Day would merely confirm the fair’s “total exclusion of the negro from all participation except as a part of the ethnological exhibit.” A special day would set black Americans apart from other Americans, they maintained, classing them with various African “exhibits.”29
Anxious to avoid any association with the Fon, Wells and her contemporaries never noticed that the African visitors were subject to their own racist representation. Far from home, the Fon were at a linguistic disadvantage when it came to representing themselves. None spoke English, and only three of them spoke French, so they had to rely on Pene as both their manager and spokesman. Moreover, they were at odds with Pene, who paid them very little and kept them in Chicago far longer than they had agreed to stay—all the while concealing the Fon’s dissatisfaction from the press. Nonetheless, four months into their stay, the Africans managed to stage and publicize a successful strike. They prevailed over Pene by shutting down all activity in their village until he agreed to double their previous wages—and supply them with twelve gallons of Claret, five cases of Chicago beer, and two and a half cases of whiskey. They also used the strike to negotiate a return date with their manager, who had hoped to make his popular Dahomey village part of the permanent amusement park that succeeded the fair’s midway.
Indeed, the Fon’s primitive savagery seems to have been largely staged by Pene, who required “his Negroes [to] dance on the top of the outer wall” of their village and “howl to attract visitors.” Once inside, visitors were promised “bizarre exhibitions” performed by half-naked Fon men and women, regardless of Chicago temperatures. The Fon had arrived in Chicago in early May wearing full-length clothing topped by hooded overcoats, but thereafter they were invariably described as wearing loincloths—even in weather that had them complaining about the cold. The experience cannot have been pleasant: late-season reports on the group describe them as a “blue lipped shivering lot.”30 However, Pene’s staging of the Fon as howling naked primitives was not lost on visitors to the fair, who invariably described them as “barbarians, savages or cannibals.” Women’s rights leader Susan B. Anthony’s visit to the Dahomey village made her think twice about the unity of the human species. “I wonder if humanity sprang from such as this. It seems pretty low down, doesn’t it? But I don’t think Adam knew much more than this.”31
What African Americans noted, by contrast, were the frequent and unflattering comparisons drawn between the Dahomeans and their own group. A correspondent for Frank Leslie’s Popular Monthly, who described the Fon as “blacker than buried midnight and degraded as the animals which prowl the jungles of their dark land,” was one case in point. “In these wild people,” he went on to observe, “we easily detect many of the characteristics of the American Negro.”32 Meanwhile, the humor magazine Puck ran a sketch suggesting that African Americans and the Dahomeans were all but identical, and that the Dahomeans might well be the more cultured of the two. Titled “A Sable Surprise,” it mocked both men—one African, the other African American—with a report on a surprise encounter between the two. “One was a dude from Dahomey, one was from Illinois,” it began, but “if they had changed their costume you [could not] have told which was which.”
The same velvet-black epidermis;—the very same contour of face, with lips that were thick and protruding, and flat noses, broad at the base; with smiles, as they
looked at each other permitting their white teeth to show; the tops of their heads scattered over with wool where wool ought to grow…They stood contemplating each other, a sight that was funny to see—but that which most paralyzed me—which gave me a shock of amazement, and my large sense of fitness a wrench, was to hear the darky’s dialect answered in polished and elegant French.33
Meanwhile, in the fair’s Food building, a saleswoman for Quaker Oats reinforced these homegrown racial stereotypes. Hired by the cereal company to bring the advertising icon “Aunt Jemima” to life, ex-slave Nancy Green staged one of the exposition’s most popular commercial exhibits. Aunt Jemima originated as a Mammy character in a blackface minstrel show staged in 1889, and became associated with pancakes when the businessman Chris L. Rutt used this image of a plantation cook to promote his new invention, a self-rising pancake mix. But not until the 1893 world’s fair did Aunt Jemima become a household name. A popular performer, Nancy Green was a stout, dark-skinned woman who held court on top of a giant flour barrel dressed as Aunt Jemima, cooking pancakes for the crowd. “I’s in town, Honey,” she declared from her barrel-top stage, coining a phrase that became “the catch line of the fair.” Tremendously popular, the Aunt Jemima promotion generated fifty thousand orders for pancake mix. Nancy Green’s Aunt Jemima was the personification of a product that promised to liberate women from household labor—much like the plantation Mammy of the past. Apparently untroubled by this nostalgia, Green excelled in her role. “Three hundred pounds of affable kitchen wisdom,” Green loved to talk about her own slave days, one Quaker Oats executive recalled. “Her stories were no doubt apocryphal but nonetheless entertaining.”34
Wells never mentioned Nancy Green’s popular performance as Aunt Jemima, but she could not have missed her altogether. Fairgoers sported “lapel buttons emblazoned with her likeness” and the phrase “I’s in town, Honey” echoed throughout the fair. Moreover, Wells spent much of the fair in the Haitian building, working on the pamphlet with Frederick Douglass. The only site at the fair under the control of an African American, the Haitian building was located a short distance from the Food building and Aunt Jemima. Like the Dahomey village, the public spectacle that Nancy Green’s Aunt Jemima offered fairgoers no doubt added to Wells’s anxieties about Colored People’s Day. Green was a living reminder that African Americans could indeed personify white stereotypes about blacks—much as Wells feared that watermelon-eating black visitors might do. So with these issues in mind, Wells was anxious to get her protest pamphlet in circulation well before Colored People’s Day on August 25, 1893.
With Wells and Douglass at odds over the event, The Indianapolis Freeman had been gleefully predicting that both “the ‘Pamphlet’ and the ‘Jubilee Day’ are dead already.” But the Freeman underestimated both Wells and Douglass, who managed to agree to disagree about Jubilee Day while continuing to collaborate on the pamphlet. The atmosphere between the two was no doubt strained that summer, which saw Douglass working on his plans for the August 25 ceremony without “any aid from the hotheads,” as Wells would later describe herself and other opponents of the Colored People’s Day.35 But Douglass nonetheless set Wells up with a desk in the Haitian building and worked with her as she completed the pamphlet, which featured one chapter by Douglass, three by Wells, and a concluding couple of chapters by two additional recruits, the newspaperman Irvine Garland Penn and Wells’s lawyer Ferdinand L. Barnett.
Adding two more authors no doubt helped Wells and Douglass finish up the pamphlet quickly, and Ferdinand Barnett, in particular, was a natural addition. An editor as well as an attorney, he was among the Chicago blacks who had long lobbied for greater African American representation at the exposition. His efforts had been fruitless, so he shared Wells’s and Douglass’s many reservations about the world’s fair—siding with Ida in her opposition to Colored People’s Day. A fellow activist and excellent local contact, Barnett was already acquainted with both Wells and Douglass. He had corresponded with Wells about a possible lawsuit just a few months earlier; and he knew the older man through his law partner S. Laing Williams, who, along with his wife, Fannie Barrier Williams, opened his Chicago home to Douglass during his world’s fair visit. Meanwhile, I. Garland Penn was a veteran educator who also knew all of his coauthors. The author of an 1891 work titled The Afro-American Press and Its Editors, he had included profiles of Douglass, Barnett, and Wells in the book.36
Described by Wells as a “creditable little volume,” The Reason Why the Colored American Is Not in the World’s Columbian Exposition exposed much of what the White City sought to hide. A preface by Wells framed the pamphlet’s guiding question. “The wealth created by [African American] industry has afforded to the white people of this country the leisure essential to their great progress and civilization,” she noted. So “why are not the colored people, who constitute so large an element of the American population and who have contributed so large a share to American greatness, more visibly present and better represented at this World’s Exposition?”37 Frederick Douglass’s contribution, which comprised the pamphlet’s introduction and its first chapter, turned to history for an answer. The baneful influence of slavery still compromised the nation’s character, he explained. The “moral progress of the American people” lagged behind their “material and economic development,” making the White City little more than “a whited sepulcher”—a hollow mockery of American values. The nation had fought a great war to end slavery, but African Americans still had few rights that whites were willing to honor. The “people of the South” had no more respect for black life than they did before emancipation—“except perhaps that now they think they can murder with a decided advantage in the point of economy.” In the time of slavery, if a Negro was killed, the owner sustained a loss of property. Now he was not restrained by any such loss. Instead, the race was terrorized by “men who count it as no crime to falsify the ballot box and cheat the Negro of his lawful vote.” And the nation’s leaders stood by “the Negroes’ disenfranchisement in clear defiance of the constitution they have sworn to support.”38
Wells followed up Douglass with three chapters describing the political and economic system that kept blacks subjugated in the South. “Class Legislation” segregated, disenfranchised, and disempowered black Southerners, she explained in Chapter 2, leaving the “entire political, legislative and executive machinery of the country in the hands of the white people.” Her two subsequent chapters dealt with the “two great outgrowths” of class legislation: the “Convict Lease System” and “Lynch Law.” Both maintained white supremacy. Lynching helped Southern whites drive black men out of politics, while the convict lease system allowed them to profit from the disenfranchised black underclass they created. Instead of educating African American youth, Southern states allowed them to “grow up in ignorance and vice” and then exploited their petty crimes by turning them into convicts who would be worked for “cheap labor, and pay the states a handsome revenue.”39
Meanwhile, Ferdinand Barnett rounded out the volume with a detailed account of these efforts, which revealed that blacks had been systematically excluded from even working as security guards at the fair, which as of August 25, 1893, employed only two “colored persons…whose occupations were of a higher grade than that of janitor, laborer and porter”—and these two were clerks. The exposition was “literally and figuratively, a ‘White City,’” Barnett concluded. “Only as a menial is the Colored American to be seen—the Nation’s deliberate and cowardly tribute to the Southern demand ‘to keep the Negro in his place.’”40
The only upbeat contribution to the pamphlet was Irvine Garland Penn’s essay on “The Progress of the Afro-American since Emancipation.” Penn chronicled the accomplishments of African Americans in business, industry, education, and the arts in an essay that outlined the exhibit that African Americans might have contributed.41
Even as she readied these essays for publication, Wells was still hard at work soliciting the funds n
eeded to have it printed. Fortunately, she was able to enlist the aid of Chicago’s “representative Negro women,” who were still smarting from their dealings with the exposition’s Board of Lady Managers. Rallying around Wells much as women in New York and Brooklyn had in 1892, they helped Wells organize a successful series of Sunday afternoon gatherings at black churches. With Douglass presiding at each, Wells presented an eloquent appeal for donations to support the pamphlet, and collected five hundred dollars in short order. While not enough to support the multilingual publishing plan originally envisioned, with additional commitments of fifty dollars from Douglass and Loudin, Wells now had the funds to produce ten thousand copies of her “little book.” It featured prefaces in German, French, and English, as a nod to an international constituency.
By the end of August, if not before Colored People’s Day, Wells had her pamphlet out, and spent the remainder of the fair on “duty in the Haitian building…putting the pamphlet in the hands of the Foreigners.” She also made amends with Douglass. Wells sat out Colored People’s Day, which was poorly attended, but read newspaper reports of Douglass’s speech, which convinced her that the “grand old man” had been right in thinking “it better to have half a loaf than no loaf at all.” In an address that was reported “from one end of the country to the other,” Douglass spoke before an audience of 2,500. His “full, rich and deep” voice rose in “sonorous tones,” the young black poet Paul Lawrence Dunbar remembered. Despite his age, Douglass drowned out catcalls from some white men in the rear of the crowd “as an organ would a penny whistle.” “Men talk of the negro problem. There is no negro problem,” Douglass thundered. “The problem is whether the American people have honesty enough, loyalty enough, honour enough, patriotism enough to live up to their own Constitution.”42 Douglass also rebuked exposition officials for “ignoring the progress” that African Americans had made in the thirty years since emancipation. The Dahomean villagers had been brought to the fair to “exhibit the Negro as a repulsive savage,” Douglass complained, encouraging fairgoers to instead see the Dahomeans as a living measure of African American advancement: “We have come from the Dahomey out of this. Measure the Negro. Not by the standards of this splendid civilization of the Caucasian. Bend down and measure him—measure him—from the depths out of which he has risen.”43