Invitation To Centennial Celebration Resolution Of The Carpenters Company Of Philadelphia Inviting The Members Of The Senate And House Of Representatives To Assemble In The Hall Of The Company On The 5th Day Of September Next 1874 That Being The One Hundredth Anniversary Of The Meeting In Said Hall Of The First American Congress January 28 1874 Referred To The Committee On The Centennial Celebration And The Proposed National Census Of 1875 And Ordered To Be Printed

Author : Ida B. Wells-Barnett
Publisher : University of Illinois Press
ISBN 13 : 9780252067846
Total Pages : 136 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (678 download)

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Download or read book The Reason why the Colored American is Not in the World's Columbian Exposition written by Ida B. Wells-Barnett and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 136 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Expressly intended to demonstrate America's national progress toward utopia, the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago pointedly excluded the contributions of African Americans. For them, being left outside the gates of the "White City" merely underscored a more general exclusion from America's bright future. Exhibits at the fair were controlled by all-white committees, and those that acknowledged African Americans at all, such as the famous Aunt Jemima pancake exhibit, ridiculed and denigrated them. Many African Americans saw the racist policies of the World's Columbian Exposition as mirroring, framing, and reinforcing the larger horrors confronting blacks throughout the United States, where white supremacy meant segregation, second-class citizenship, and sometimes mob violence and lynching. In response to the politics of exclusion that governed the fair, and of its larger implications, several prominent African Americans resolved to publish a pamphlet that would catalog the achievements of African Americans since the abolition of slavery while articulating the persistent political economy of apartheid in the American South. The authors of this remarkable document included the antilynching crusader Ida B. Wells, the former slave and abolitionist Frederick Douglass, the educator Irvine Garland Penn, and the lawyer and newspaper publisher Ferdinand L. Barnett. An eloquent statement of protest and pride, The Reason Why the Colored American Is Not in the World's Columbian Exposition reminds us that struggles over cultural representation are nothing new in American life. Robert Rydell's introduction provides insight into the sometimes conflicting strategies employed by African Americans as they strove to represent themselves at a cultural event that was widely regarded as a defining moment in American history.