The American urge to grab a larger space on the world stage took an almost absurdly literal turn when U.S. representatives demanded, and eventually won, a bigger and more prominent site on the exhibition fairgrounds, alongside the major countries of Europe.
Many European nations eagerly showed off resources they had acquired through the often brutal exploitation of their African and Asian colonies, but the U.S. government’s image-making was different.
“There was this constant push to keep the United States from the mention of colonialization—even though they were at the time occupying the Philippines, Puerto Rico and Cuba,” Zimmerman says. It had been not much more than a century since the American colonies themselves broke free of Britain, and many well-known Americans, from Andrew Carnegie to Mark Twain, condemned the United States’ expansion as imperialism.
The Paris exposition was a “careful dance,” Zimmerman says, in which “the United States is trying to navigate itself as equal to but different from European powers.”
Against this backdrop, and held in an out-of-the-way pavilion, was a small but powerful display called the “Exhibit of American Negroes.”
Organized by a group of Black American scholars including W.E.B. Du Bois, Booker T. Washington, lawyer and journalist Thomas J. Calloway and Daniel A.P. Murray of the Library of Congress, it laid out in multimedia form the economic and social progress of Black Americans in the 30-plus years since the end of slavery.
That progress was under severe threat in 1900. Lynchings had reached a sickening peak in the previous decade, the Supreme Court in Plessy v. Ferguson had codified segregation as “separate but equal,” and Jim Crow laws were spreading widely throughout the South.
And in Europe, lurid press reports were painting an ugly portrait of Black Americans to white readers.
Calloway, as lead organizer of the “Exhibit of American Negroes,” had written to Booker T. Washington: “How shall we answer these slanders? Our newspapers they do not subscribe for, if we publish books they do not buy them, if we lecture they do not attend. To the Paris Exposition, however, thousands upon thousands of them will go.”
The organizers seized the chance to speak to the fair’s vast audiences, calling attention to the unrecognized contributions Black Americans were making. They gathered up hundreds of books and periodicals by Black writers, patents held by Black inventors, and examples of craftsmanship from the Tuskegee Institute. They displayed photographs of college students and war heroes, libraries and laboratories, dentists, government clerks, shopkeepers and nuns.