WORLD'S FAIRS

The Columbian Exposition in Chicago, 1893

Approaching the turn-of-the-century, there were many world's fairs taking place throughout Europe and the United States.  There were also fairs in the Pacific, Asia and even Africa.  Worlds fairs or expositions were a major form of popular culture dominated by the interests of the wealthy and the bourgeosie, and conceived as family entertainment.  

Much of these fairs were officially devoted to exhibitions of architecture, art, film and photography, as well as industrial and technological advances.  They included sometimes massive displays of commodities and/or raw materials gathered from successful often imperialist or colonialist military campaigns leading to the opening of new markets combined with various technological breakthroughs.  What makes these events difficult to imagine or recollect today is because we really don't have anything like them.  Probably the most similar would be the formation of a successful mall on the weekend or a car or technology fair.  

The issue of the fairs for our study relates to photography and visual art in which people of color often appeared.  Artists and photographers made images of peoples of color that was sometimes included in the exhibitions.  Frances Benjamin Johnston took pictures of black students and faculty at Hampton Institute, Tuskegee and public schools in Washington D.C. some of which were included in Du Bois's Negro Exhibit featured at the Paris Exposition.  Some of the photographers Du Bois included were black.  There was at least one black photo historian and photographer Deborah Willis has been able to identify in her book on the subject and in her remarks concerning the collection of the exhibited photographs and documents deposited at the Library of Congress.  

The fairs continue in interest throughout the turn-of-the-century beginning with the Columbian Exposition in 1893 where Frederick Douglass, who was then ambassador to Haiti was permanently stationed in the Haitian Pavillion.  Paul Lawrence Dunbar served as his young assistant.  George Walker and Bert Williams were among the American performers who substituted for the Africans who had not yet arrived to populate the Dahomey Village.  Once the members of this incorporated village had arrived, Walker and Williams stayed around to observe the music and the dance, prompting them to construct the highly successful show In Dahomey, which toured Europe and had a successful run on Broadway. 

Human exhibitions were also a major part of what took place at these fairs.  These were exhibitions in which people were presented engaged in typical activities usually from someplace recently the object of military conquest. For instance there were displays of Native American villages, Asian cities and a "Dahomey Village."  In St. Louis there was a display of a group of Pygmies.  Sometimes these displays were incorporated as regular traveling units and they would go from fair to fair for hire.  

Two years after the Columbian Exposition in 1895 at the much more racially segregated Atlanta Cotton Exposition, a "Negro Department" with its own building was featured. Booker T. Washington made his famous Address compromising the political and intellectual aspirations of African Americans at this very same fair. 

Du Bois's Negro Exhibition--1900 Paris Exposition

This link will take you to a selection of photographs from the Negro Exhibition as composed by W.E.B. Du Bois (the author of Souls of Black Folk) and installed at the Exposition Universelle in Paris of 1900. The entire collection of photographs are publicly available online at the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

These photographs are composed of a variety of image types. They include portraits of graduating classes at black colleges, individual three-quarter portraits, images of run-down black communities, successful black businesses, buildings of black colleges, black businesses and black churches. Not much is known about most of the photographers who took the pictures or the people in the photographs but Deborah Willis has related that which is known at the website at the Library of Congress. And I am sure there will be more information forthcoming as people learn of these images from 1900.  For instance, there is one photograph of the offices of Pauline Hopkin's The Colored American.

These photographs were composed and exhibited just three years before DuBois published Souls of Black Folk.  Part of the response of some of the leading citizens of the black community to Jim Crow segregation and genocide was to build a separate set of resources and communities in which every effort was made to provide equal facilities especially for the young people of these communities, particularly given the obvious implications of the Plessy v. Ferguson Supreme Court Decisions, known to many as "the separate but equal" decision. 

The photographs gathered by Du Bois and exhibited in Paris document that effort.   Nonetheless, the tragedy of this period is that the "separate but equal" approach only resulted in more inequality at every conceivable level.  Du Bois suggests in The Souls of Black Folk, citizens protect their rights through the use of the ballot. Without the ballot any minority population is defenseless and will incur outright hostility rather than support.  Or at least this seems to be the way it went. 

Another aspect of interest from a racial standpoint were the many entertainment features of the fairs, often located in their own section called the Midway at the Columbian Exposition and the Pike at the St. Louis Fair of 1904.  Also, President McKinley was murdered at the 1901 Buffalo Fair.

1904 St. Louis World's Fair.  Photographs by Frances Benjamin Johnston.  The Midway was called the Pike in St. Louis.

Native American Rider at Pan-American Exhibition, Buffalo 1901.  

The Crowd at the St. Louis Fair.  Photographs by Frances Benjamin Johnston.

Negro Exhibition at the Paris Exposition 1900

Photograph taken by Frances Benjamin Johnston of a class in telephone electronics at Hampton Institute, including in the Negro Exhibition in Paris.

The Print & Photo Online Catalogue--African American Photos for Paris Exposition 1900

Frances Benjamin Johnston--Sheridan's Ride

Frances Benjamin Johnston, Children in Kernstown. 1900, Library of Congress.

comparison w/James Bland, Carry Me Back to Old Virginny--Sheet Music Cover 1906.

A few years back at the annual meeting of the College Art Association at the Hilton Hotel in New York City, I came across a little lady whom as I recall was distributing from a table a set of illustrations related to the photography of Frances Benjamin Johnston.  As it turned out this was Geraldine Wojno Kiefer, Ph.D., and Assistant Professor of Art History and Art at Shenandoah University.  Perhaps the year was 2004.  I had just moved back to the New York area, was just beginning to probe the mysteries of the powerpoint application.  I was in the process of teaching then my Talking in Pictures course looking at the intersections of race, gender and American photography.  It was already clear that Johnston was a major figure in that world for a number of reasons.  First because of her historical pictures of students and faculty at historically black colleges, including Tuskegee and Hampton, as well as her major input as a woman photographer at the turn-of-the-century and her participation in photography exhibits at various world's fairs.

I have been browsing the PowerPoint's she gave me that day on and off since then, and picked them up again as the Hampton Album came up in its rightful place alongside Du Bois's Negro Exhibition at the Paris Exposition of 1900.  Using Johnston's work has been difficult for me for the simple reason that she was white, and African American photography is by definition something that only an African American can do.  Yet here was Johnston right in the middle of photography of historical black schools at the turn-of-the-century.  Obviously she was a racial voice (or as some prefer to say for some reason, "racialized"), but was she perhaps on the wrong side of things?  Most scholars I have read have concluded as much but I still am not sure whether the subjectivity of the photographer is among the most important things we can say about a photograph.  A photograph can be a work of original art but it isn't necessarily.  Even if and when it is a work of art, it is also a technological intervention.  And, significantly, it is a form of evidence.  

Especially Johnston's photographs were decidedly evidential in their conception and execution.  In order words, they were deliberately designed to function as evidence.  Helping to convince me of this is the study of Kiefer's PowerPoint presentations on Johnston's contribution to a photo-essay called "The Country of Sheridan's Ride" published in The Ladies Home Journal

It is composed of a centerfold layout of a series of pictures houses and landscapes along the route of General Philip Sheridan's 1864 ride to Winchester, along the Valley Turnpike between Winchester and Middletown in Virginia as part of a successful Union campaign in the Civil War.  

Johnston's photographs of the roads, lakes, toll bridges, landscapes, houses and children (many of them black) as they were in 1901, participating in a national campaign of memorializing the landscape of the Civil War, honoring the history and commodifying its recovery.  Kiefer worries that Johnston was helping to further mystify the racial significance of the Civil War in favor of a racist romanticism emphasizing the healing of relations between white Northerners and Southerners.  But the thing I notice about it, as well as much of the celebration of the conclusion of the war prior to 1910, was the focus was on Union victories and a Northern interpretation of events.  It seems to me that the David Blight reading of the cult of the Lost Cause is actually something that emerges as a distinct problem subsequent to the successes of Thomas Dixon's plays "The Leopard's Spots" and "The Klansman," and it really explodes with the hit of D.W. Griffith's collaboration with Dixon on The Birth of a Nation.

Left: Log House in Giles County, Photographs, Virginia Historical Society, Richmond, Va.

Right: Frances Benjamin Johnston, Photographs.  In The Ladies Home Journal, Vol. 18, No. 8 (July 1901), 17.

Left: Henry Fenn, Richmond. Wood Engraving.  Picturesque America in The Land We Live In, ed. William Cullen Bryant, Vol. I, New York: D. Appleton Company, 1872, 80.

Center: Harry Fenn, A Glimpse of Charlestown and Boy from the Town of St. Michael's Church. Wood engraving. Picturesque America. Vol I., 201.

Right: Frances Benjamin Johnston, The Children 1901.

Frances Benjamin Johnston Photos of Children, 1900.  Library of Congress.

Left: Frances Benjamin Johnston, 1st Toll Gate out of Winchester.

Center: Frances Benjamin Johnston, Snicker's Gap, Tollgate.  Along the Road.  At Stop at a Tollgate. Right: Town, Now Steven's City.  Tollgate Road. 1900.

Double Spread Layout in Ladies Home Journal, 1901.  Nostalgia for Sheridan's Ride in the Civil War, romanticizing the victory of the Union over the Confederacy in the Old South.  

The Hampton Album

I would like to dedicate this post to former student and colleague Stacy Williams who first introduced me to the Hampton Album and Frances Benjamin Johnston's photographs.  Also, I would like to thank student Fabienne Snowden for drawing my attention to articles on Hampton photographs by Jeannene M. Przyblyski and Ramona Austin.

When I first saw these and other pictures of blacks and Native Americans sharing classrooms at Hampton Institute at the turn of the 20th century, I knew nothing whatsoever about the photographer or where or how they were taken. Nonetheless I was immediately struck by the realization as a cultural historian that the presence of photographs as a form of historical evidence completely changed one's perspective on both literature and events.

This particular set of photographs was first widely seen as a result of an exhibition curated by John Szarkowski, Curatorial Director of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1966.  The source of the 60 or so featured photographs was a much larger scrapbook of 150 photographs purchased by Lincoln Kirsten in a secondhand bookstore in Washington, D.C. some time before.  It seemed very much as though the scrapbook, one of the three which were known to still exist--the other two at the Library of Congress in the Frances Benjamin Johnston Collection of Photographs and as part of the photographic collection of Hampton University--had come into being as a form of illustrating to perspective sponsors the range of programs at the institution.  Johnston charged $1000 for the services of herself and her assistant, who was apparently her mother.  She spent the month of December 1899 as well as some of January carefully executing the job, during which she extensively photographed both African American and Native American students and white instructors at Hampton.

In one photograph, which helps to give you a true sense of the scope of the project, Johnston photographs the entire student body and faculty assembled in a major hall at Hampton.  All the photographs were no doubt taken with available light and with long exposures which would have required that subjects maintain their pose for a period of time, thus accounting for the precise almost clinical angularity of many of the images.  The people in the pictures figure little as emotional individuals (causing some to read the photographs only in terms of the racism of the conditions that produced them).  Yet the youthful vigor, beauty and intelligence of the people in the pictures is superbly illustrated.  The human face and body is, itself, a form of expression virtually impossible to suppress or denature.

The exhibition catalogue was named The Hampton Album, now out-of-print but widely available in the second-hand book market online (http://www.abe.com).  These photographs we learned were taken by Frances Benjamin Johnston, a white female photographer who took many pictures of Native American and African American institutions of learning around the turn-of-the-century, as well as photographs of the Washington elite including the family of then president Theodore Roosevelt.  Later she would become better known as a photographer of architecture but around the turn of the century, her photography frequently implies particular associations with the racial politics of the period, as one can gather from the writings of a range cultural history scholars about her.

But my immediate interest is in her photographs of educational practices at the turn-of-the-century, and in particular her photographs of the Hampton Institute (the school that Booker T. Washington attended), Tuskegee (the school Washington created), and the Carlisle Indian School.  To see these photographs, to observe their quiet beauty and discipline is to partake something of the difficulties encountered by attempts to educated the children of the  former slaves.  Not only did Johnston document the programs of these institutions for all time but further, apparently her work as a photographer inspired programs in photography at both Hampton and Tuskegee.  At Hampton Johnston's presence coincided with the early activity of a group of faculty who called themselves the Hampton Camera Club, and who subsequently illustrated many issues of The Southern Workman (the house publication of Hampton) as well as several books by Paul Lawrence Dunbar, a famous African American poet at the turn-of-the-century.  At Tuskegee, Johnston no doubt helped to inspire the founding of a photography program at Tuskegee.  Washington seems to have been acutely aware of the potential educational and propaganda value of photography and of black photographers.  

When we turn to the pivotal figure of WEB Du Bois, we find someone who organized a major exhibition of photography known as the "Negro Exhibition" to represent the advances and conditions of African Americans at the Paris Exposition in 1900.  He would also use photography extensively in his campaign for the dignity of African Americans as editor of The Crisis, the publication of the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People).

"About 400 Students in Memorial Chapel" in 1900.



"John Wizi, Sioux. Son of Chief Wizi of Crow Creek, S.D." as cited in The Hampton Album.

Young Native American student (in traditional dress in other photograph) with conventional haircut and dress at Hampton 1900, Library of Congress.  

See source at: http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/cph.3b41032.

"Geography. Studying the Seasons." Hampton 1900.

REFERENCES:

Bettina Berch, The Woman behind the Lens: The Life and Work of Frances Benjamin Johnston, 1864-1952. Charlottesville and London: The University Press of Virginia, 2000.

Max Bennett Thrasher, Tuskegee: Its Story and Its Work (1900), North Stratford, NH: Ayer Company Publishers, Inc. Reprint Edition 2000.

James Anderson, The Education of Blacks in the South, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1988.

The Hampton Album, 44 Photographs by Frances B. Johnston from an album of Hampton Institute with an introduction and a note on the photographer by Lincoln Kirstein, The Museum of Modern Art, New York 1966.

Jeannene M. Przyblyski, "American Visions at the Paris Exposition, 1900: Another Look at Frances Benjamin Johnston's Hampton Photographs," Art Journal, Vol. 57, No. 3 (Autumn 1998), pp. 61-68. College Art Association.  http://www.jstor.org/stable/777972

Ramona Austin, "An Extraordinary Generation; The Legacy of William Henry Sheppard, The 'Black Livingstone' of Africa," Afrique & Histoire 2000 no. 4, 74-101.

CHRONOLOGY CONTINUED

This photograph by Frances Benjamin Johnston taken in 1899 of a class of African American and Native American students at Hampton Institute engaged in the study of the traditional costume of a fellow classmate I have chosen to spearhead the Blues People Curriculum for this semester. It was this very photograph, which has been widely reproduced and misinterpreted by American Studies scholars, that has played a key role in the formation of my current conception of the role played by historically Black Colleges, the Blues, and the lives of such extraordinary figures as WEB Du Bois, Booker T. Washington and Ida B. Wells in creating the cultural signature of a people who had once been slaves, whose image was once reviled, but whose legacy has inspired struggles for freedom and democracy all over the world. 

Just by way of explanation of what is going on in this picture.  Hampton University had a Museum, to which were donated artifacts of African and Native American tribes, often as gifts from the students or their parents.  

In this picture I would propose that the young man in Native American costume is actually John Wizi, son of Chief Wizi of Cross Creek, South Dakota.  His presentation in the album elsewhere in Western dress and haircut suggests perhaps that he was an influential person among the students.  As is often the case, the commentary included with the pictures is unreliable and impressionistic.  In another photograph of Native American students, of which there were a great many in the original scrapbook but very few of which were used in the Album, there is a shot of the "Indian Orchestra," one of whom might also be John Wizi, in the center in the back on a large drum. 

Also, Hampton held pageants in which the native dress of Africans and Native Americans were a key aspect of the program, as described in the chapter on the Hampton Museum in ART/Artifact: African Art in Anthropology Collections, The Center for African Art & Prestel Verlag, 1989.  William Sheppard, a Hampton graduate visited the "Belgian" Congo as a missionary and ultimately devoted his important collection of Kuba art to the Hampton Museum, as well as also becoming one of the leading voices condemning King Leopold's persecution of the people of the Congo.  This is just part of the story of the connection between historically black colleges and the Congo as described by Professor Ira Dworkin in his dissertation in the English Ph.D. Program at the CUNY Graduate Center, 1999.  

1909--NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People ) is founded in order to attack segregation, lynching and race riots.  Du Bois hired as Director of publications and research.  Moves to New York to found, edit and write The Crisis, the monthly magazine of the NAACP.

1910--National Urban League founded to direct migrants from the South to jobs, housing and education.

1912--Jelly Roll Morton publishes his first song, "The Jelly Roll Blues."

1913--Du Bois writes and stages The Star of Ethiopia, a pageant celebrating black history to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the emanicipation.
[Photo]

1914--Du Bois supports women's suffrage in CRISIS editorial.

1915--NAACP Campaigns actively against the public exhibition of THE BIRTH OF A NATION

1917--Marcus Garvey founded the UNIA (Universal Negro Improvement Association)

1918--Du Bois writes "Close Ranks" editorial in THE CRISIS urging black men to enlist to fight in WWI in exchange for their liberty at home.

"Let Us while this war last, forget our special grievances and close our ranks shoulder to shoulder with our whhite fellow citizens and the alllied nations that are fighting for democracy."

WEB Du Bois, 1917

COURSE READINGS--SECTION II

II. Jean Toomer, Cane (1923)
The Jean Toomer Pages, University of Buffalo 1996

Visuals: James VanDerZee, Aaron Douglas, Aspects of Negro Life (1934)
Music:St. Louis Blues, dir. Dudley Murphy with Bessie Smith (1929)Louis Armstrong Collection: Dinah, On the Waterfront, Black and Blues, A Sleepy Time Down South III.

III. Langston Hughes, The Weary Blues (1926)

http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poetsg_l/hughes/weary.htm

SUPPLEMENTARY READING:"

Yale University Beinecke Library: "Langston Hughes at 100 http:/highway49.library.yale.edu/langstonhughes/web.html

IV. Vernacular Culture Section--African American Literature/Norton Anthology, 2nd Edition

Mahalia Jackson, "Soon I Will Be Gone," on The Norton Anthology Audiotape

VI. Richard Wright, "The Man Who Lived Underground" (1941) in Eight Men