"The American Negro at Paris." 1900. Du Bois' article on the 1900 Paris Exposition (l'Exposition Universelle de 1900). (Citation: The American Monthly Review of Reviews, vol. XXII, no. 5 (November 1900): 575-577).

Exhibit of American Negroes - World's Fair, Paris 1900.

Paris Exposition of 1900: Photographs at the U.S. Library of Congress. Du Bois and Thomas J. Calloway compiled and organized photographs and other materials for The Paris Exposition of 1900 (Exposition universelle internationale de 1900). Many of these photos are located online at the "Collection and Subject Area Overviews, Prints and Photographs Reading Room, Library of Congress".

"Paris Exposition Universelle Collection". About 60 photographs from the U.S. Library of Congress' collection on the 1900 Exposition are presented in a series of web pages.

Reading Guide to "W.E.B. Du Bois, African American photographs assembled for the 1900 Paris Exposition" presented by the National Humanities Center as part of its "Toolbox Library: Primary Resources in U.S. History and Literature," specifically the Toolbox Library entitled: "The Making of African American Identity 1865-1917" [start page].

"The Paris Exposition of 1900 and W.E.B. Du Bois" by Ronald L. F. Davis. Davis writes:
 The exhibit clearly had a political intention in that it did not dwell directly upon any of the injustices suffered by American blacks at the hands of a racist, white society. Indeed, no images documenting such oppression would have been allowed by the American authorities. Instead, the exhibit was a visual appeal for world to recognize that talented African Americans were ready and prepared to take their place among the most civilized people of the coming modern age. Less than a summation of the past, Du Bois' exhibit portrayed a vision of the future.

"Finding One's Place: Creating a New Eden for the 'New Negro': An Analysis of the American Negro Exhibit’s Photography at the Paris Exposition of 1900" by Shannon Grevious. Grevious writes in the Abstract:
 Since the turn of the 20th century, photography has emerged as a tool to document the human existence and has become a powerful lens of a perceived truth. However, as a machine, the camera alone does not create our reality; those behind the camera determine the visual content and context of photographs and influence how the audience perceives a photographic subject. W.E.B. Du Bois understood the power of photography and like his contemporaries, who used photography to document scientific evidence, adopted the photographic image to combat racist imagery and negative perceptions of African-Americans at the turn of the 20th century.

Frances Benjamin Johnston Collection, Library of Congress. The LOC houses many of her photographs which span a long career. There are photographs of Hampton Institute, some of which may have been displayed as part the Exhibit of American Negroes.

Talks by David Levering Lewis and Deborah Willis, co-authors of A Small Nation of People: W.E.B. Du Bois & African American Portraits of Progress (NY: Amistad, 2003), about the 1900 Paris Exhibition.

"Pictures at an Exhibition - April in Paris: A startling image at the Exposition Universelle" by Jack Neely. 2003. Columnist Neely provides local -- specifically, Knoxville, Tennessee -- commmentary on one photograph at the 1900 Paris Exposition. He briefly discussed Charles C. Dodson (owner of the jewelry and watchmaker's shop, Dodson & Co.) within the overall context of Du Bois's "The Exhibit of American Negroes" at the Exposition.

"American Visions at the Paris Exposition, 1900: Another Look at Frances Benjamin Johnston's Hampton Photographs." Article by Jeannene M. Przyblyski (Art Journal, 57:3 (Fall 1998)).

"Their Own Progress and Prospect: African Americans and l'Exposition Universelle de 1900" by Wilfred D. Samuels (Heath Anthology of American Literature Newsletter, Spring 1999)

"'Looking at One's Self Through the Eyes of Others': W.E.B. Du Bois's Photographs for the 1900 Paris Exposition." Article by Shawn Michelle Smith [faculty page] (African American Review, 34:4 (Winter 2000): 581-599).

Mixed Messages: Thomas Calloway and the "American Negro Exhibit" of 1900 by Miles E. Travis. MA Thesis in History, Montana State University, April 2004.

"W.E.B. Du Bois and the 1900 Paris Exhibition." This is a short, three-page section of a larger site called "America's Story from America's Library." The section briefly describes the background and rationale of the "Negro Exhibition" at Paris Exposition in the context of African Americans and the struggle for civil rights. Also, a few photos from the exhibition are displayed.

"Small Nation, Large Lives" by John Vettese. This piece discusses Deborah Willis and her experiences while researching the essay she wrote for A Small Nation of People: W.E.B. Du Bois and African American Portraits of Progress (Amistad/HarperCollins, 2003) [the book also contained an essay by David Levering Lewis].

"W.E.B. Du Bois' African-American Portraits" (at the 1900 Paris Exposition). Radio interview with Deborah Willis, co-author of A Small Nation of People.

"A Small Nation of People" (Book on the "Exhibit of American Negroes" at the 1900 World's Fair in Paris). This is a radio interview with Deborah Willis, the book's co-author, as conducted by Gwen Ifill.

A listing of the various U.S. exhibitors represented at the Paris Exposition was published by the "1900 Commission to the Paris Exposition, United States" in the Catalogue of Exhibitors in the United States Sections of the International Universal Exposition, Paris, 1900 (Paris: Imprimeries Lemercier, 1900). Here is the complete entry on Du Bois (p. 468):
  Another entry pointing to DuBois's work at the Exposition is also on p. 468:  Other African American exhibitors can be found, for example, on pp. 43-44 and on pp. 468-470. Also, one can use the "Search-in-this-book" feature in Google Books for this particular work.

"The Country and the People of the United States" by Edward David Jones, a member of the United States Commission to the Paris Exposition of 1900. This 25-page document is part of the series, Monographs on American Social Economics, Vol. 2 (Department of Social Economy for the U.S. Commission to the Paris Exposition, 1900).
    In a two-paragraph section, Jones presented a brief glimpse of African American progress on literacy, while repeating a common view about the declining percentage of Blacks in the population as a whole (perhaps based on Frederick Hoffman's book; see Note 1 below). In the second paragraph, arguably Jones can be read as indirectly providing an excuse for the electoral disfranchisement of African Americans. The following quotation from p. 24 constitutes the entirety of the information on African Americans conveyed by Jones. (Note that various spellings, such as the non-capitalized "Negro", are found in the original text).

 NEGRO POPULATION        

    In 1890 the negro population was 7,470,040, or 11.93% of the whole population. [Map no. omitted] The negro has constituted a decreasing proportion of the total population for many years. Though the importation of slaves was suspended for many years prior to the civil war, the negro was given but meagre opportunities to advance in the culture scale under the influence of slavery. Since his emancipation his advancement has been marvellous. Of the illiteracy of the race 40% has been removed.

    The present serious turning of the negro race from political ambitions to industrial education is most promising for the future. An acquaintance with those arts and trades and handicrafts which have made other races great and influential is necessary as a foundation for permanent race advancement.  [Note 1: The comment on "decreasing proportion" in the first paragraph is perhaps a reference to Frederick L. Hoffman, "The Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro" (Publications of the American Economic Association, Vol.11, No.1/3.(Jan.-Mar.-May 1896): pp.1-329).]

 [Note 2: The view of the second paragraph also can be found in an Emmett J. Scott article of 1901 describing the Tenth Annual Tuskegee Negro Conference. In his words: "We would urge our people not to become discouraged while the race is passing from what was largely a political basis to an economic one, as a foundation for citizenship." [p. 317] (Source: Scott, Emmett J. "Tenth Annual Tuskegee Negro Conference". African Methodist Episcopal Church Review, Vol. 17, Num. 4 (April 1901): pp. 314-320. Available online from the Ohio Historical Society: citation page).]

"Meta Warrick's 1907 'Negro Tableaux' and (Re)Presenting African American Historical Memory" by W. Fitzhugh Brundage and published in the Journal of American History, 89:4 (March 2003). Brundage briefly mentions DuBois in this article whose central focus is on the African American artist Meta Vaux Warrick (1877-1968). Via studying Warrick we can comprehend more fully the U.S. intellectual context that both she and Du Bois were addressing through their particular works. Brundage writes (in paragraphs 1 and 7, respectively):
     Confronting visitors who meandered through the Negro Building at the 1907 Jamestown Tercentennial Exposition, held in Norfolk, Virginia, was a tableau entitled Landing of First Twenty Slaves at Jamestown. Meta Warrick (Fuller), a sculptor, had created and arranged twenty-four two-foot-high plaster figures that re-imagined the shackled, nearly nude, and traumatized Africans who had landed in Jamestown in 1619. In Landing and thirteen other dioramas, she used more than 130 painted plaster figures, model landscapes, and backgrounds to give viewers a chronological survey of the African American experience. Scenes ranged from a tableau of a fugitive slave to a depiction of the home life of "the modern, successfully educated, and progressive Negro."[1] Drawing upon but moving beyond her classical training in Philadelphia and Paris, Warrick applied new capacities for simulation and illusion to the depiction of African American themes. By doing so, she expanded the repertoire of representation of the African American past. Incorporating the lives and concerns of African Americans into the saga of civilization, she turned the historical African American into the centerpiece of the saga, claiming a position the dominant white narrative denied. Her dioramas, which suggested the expansiveness of black abilities, aspirations, and experiences, presented a cogent alternative to white representations of history -- by an African American.   [Note 1 omitted.]

 [ .... Paragraphs 2 through 6 omitted .... ]

     Yet, as Warrick's dioramas underscore, the participation of colonized and "primitive" peoples in expositions created opportunities for African Americans to destabilize the binary classification of civilization and "the other," of modernity and primitiveness. African Americans well understood the importance of how they were represented at world's fairs. When Du Bois surveyed with satisfaction the 1900 Paris exposition, he stressed with special emphasis that the "honest, straightforward exhibit" in the Negro Section was "above all" made by blacks. As the cultural theorist Walter Benjamin observed about film, new modes of representation "in the age of mechanical reproduction" empowered the masses to comprehend themselves for the first time.[6] Warrick's dioramas, similarly, enabled blacks to see themselves as the main actors in their own defined world. Whereas "Old South" concessions and anthropological exhibits organized by whites exhibited blacks, Warrick's dioramas represented them. The distinction between exhibiting and representing blacks was not just authorship but also agency. The Jamestown tableaux highlighted blacks' creative capacity, manifest in the very form of Warrick's creation, as well as black agency depicted in the narrative itself. By assuming responsibility for their own representation at expositions, African Americans grappled with the ideological schemata that undergirded fairs. Certainly Warrick contested in both subtle and obvious ways the overarching ambitions and assumptions about race, civilization, and progress that found expression at other parts of the Jamestown exposition. Thus, Warrick's dioramas illustrate how the new technologies and discourses of racial and imperial "truth" could be contested even in the setting where they were most powerfully articulated.

 [Footnote 6]
Du Bois, "American Negro at Paris," 577; Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York, 1985), 251.

 [Webdubois.org Note: Du Bois' "American Negro at Paris" is available on this web site.]

"Black Faces at the Pan American Exposition of 1901, Buffalo, New York"

Other web sites on the Pan American Exposition of 1901 (Buffalo, NY)