“American Negro history,” Harold Cruse wrote in The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual (1967), “is basically a history of the conflict between integrationist and nationalist forces in politics, economics, and culture.” Cruse admonishes his readers to recognize the fundamental tensions between integrationist goals—“civil rights, racial equality, [and] freedom”—and the commitment to nationalist ideals, “separatism, accommodationist self-segregation, economic nationalism, group solidarity and self-help.”1 Cruse goes on to describe how the tensions between integrationist aims and the commitment to the African American community as a national group played out in Harlem in the middle of the twentieth century—between, for example, black artists in Harlem and the bohemian West Village, or between African American and West Indian leftist activists. While Harlem retained much of its economic, political, and cultural prominence for African Americans nationwide, there was another center of black life growing in importance. Beginning in the 1930s, African American Chicago experienced what cultural historians describe as a renaissance of black arts, intellectual production, and politics that arguably vaulted the city’s black population to the head of a national African American community.2 One event, the 1940 American Negro Exposition, announced Chicago’s ascendance and displayed in dramatic fashion the tensions running through black Chicago’s politics. Struggles for control of the planning and content of this celebration of the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Thirteenth Amendment revealed political divisions within Chicago’s black community and created a stage for diverse Black Chicago Renaissance figures and their views on African American history and the best paths for racial progress.3
Black Chicago was a very different place from Harlem—its population was from the Deep South rather than the East Coast and the West Indies; its black neighborhoods were even more starkly segregated than those in New York; black workers in Chicago more often found jobs in large steel, packing, and manufacturing plants; and Harlem was farther from Manhattan’s centers of white financial and cultural power. In 1940, both Harlem and black Chicago were, as Cruse puts it, “just beginning to emerge from the depths of the Great Depression,” and they both “seethed with the currents of many conflicting beliefs and ideologies.”4 However, Chicago’s population, economic and cultural opportunities, and mix of ideas were unique.
By 1940, most black middle-class “race leaders” and black working-class activists in Chicago were not sharply divided between those seeking integration and those pursuing separate economic, political, and cultural paths. Ultimately, both groups sought integration and racial equality. At times they even reached across class and ideological lines to try to combine the influence of middle-class racial leaders with the mass militancy of the 1930s. It was not a neat fit; the established black leaders and those active in the leftist political and cultural movements of the 1930s differed greatly in their political styles and immediate goals. It is significant, though, that both groups combined integrationist and nationalist rhetoric and tactics in movements for economic power and civil rights. African American labor activists, for example, used appeals to Marcus Garvey–like nationalism to build support within black communities but celebrated the larger industrial union movement’s commitment to interracialism.5 Similarly, African American business and media leaders dreamed of recreating the separate economy of the black metropolis of the 1920s but used their connections to white philanthropies, politicians, and businesses to improve the “Black Belt.”6 Black artists also took advantage of white-run philanthropies such as the Julius Rosenwald Foundation and the Harmon Foundation, as well as positions in the Federal Writers and Arts Projects to continue writing, painting, and sculpting through the Depression. Yet, they used their opportunities to articulate a class- and race-conscious critical perspective on racial inequality and oppression in the United States. Remarkably, all of these groups made their mark on the exposition.
The exhibits in the Chicago Coliseum—a large venue about ten blocks north of the city’s segregated South Side, African American neighborhoods—showcased both moderate and radical versions of African American history, and visions for racial progress.7 An interracial group of politicians, intellectuals, entrepreneurs, and religious leaders sold the show as “the history of the Negro in the United States; the present position of the Negro in American civilization; and trends which would indicate the further integration into the fabrics of American life and achievements which show a rise in his social, economic, and political status.”8 The organizers were determined to make the exposition a display of the achievements and potential of African Americans that would be suitable for an interracial audience. Many of the exhibits, therefore, consisted of dry descriptions of African American history and institutions working for racial uplift. The exposition’s organizers also needed to draw crowds, but instead of including the equivalent of a carnival-like midway, they turned to young black writers and artists both to show off African Americans’ cultural sophistication and to create a display that would appeal to a wider public. By including black writers and artists, most of whom were active in the leftist political and cultural movements of the 1930s, the exposition’s planners created a stage for the more militant, working-class-inspired versions of black history and racial politics. By bringing together racial moderates and radicals, the exposition opened a window onto the cultural politics and ideological tensions that shaped a broad revision of race relations and the development of civil rights unionism in the late 1930s and early 1940s.9
The exposition is most interesting because the event’s organizers attempted to reconcile competing liberal and radical perspectives on African American history and the best path for racial progress in the United States. There were, of course, important differences within the two groups, but the liberal organizers’ core messages emphasized an older model of racial uplift and gradual integration, while the exposition’s more radical contributors—black artists and writers—articulated a militant civil rights consciousness that combined a class-based critical perspective on racial oppression in the United States with demands for immediate integration and equality. The fair’s interracial group of liberal organizers shaped the exposition’s respectable tone and focused its messages on gradual racial progress. The exposition’s organizers also included some of the most radical contemporary voices on racial politics, but they pushed the more radical groups out of the event’s management and packaged the artists’ and writers’ radicalism in terms of African Americans’ ability to create sophisticated art works and historical narratives that captured the fundamental truths of American race relations.
Previous historical accounts of the exposition tend to underemphasize the significance of the reciprocal relationship between liberals and radicals in the exposition’s planning stages and in the content of the exhibits.10 On the contrary, historians Robert Rydell and Adam Green dismiss the more radical elements of the exposition. In World of Fairs: The Century-of-Progress Expositions (1993), Rydell argues that the federal government’s support differentiated the event from previous fairs, which excluded or segregated African Americans, while often including harsh racist portrayals of Africans and African Americans.11 Nonetheless, he writes, the exposition “failed to mount a radical critique of the dominant culture.”12 Green concurs, arguing in his PhD dissertation, “Selling the Race” (1998), that the exposition foreshadowed the postwar rise of Chicago’s African American community to the “leadership of [a] national racial community. [Yet,] viewed from a present vantage point as an attempt at resonant and expressive public culture, the event seems a profound failure.”13 On the other hand, literary scholar Bill V. Mullen emphasizes the radicalism of the exposition’s art exhibit and the role of the exhibit in the making of a local black art scene. In Popular Fronts: Chicago and African American Cultural Politics, 1935–46 (1999), Mullen highlights the “Popular Front-style cultural politics,” which in a “swirl of giddy entrepreneurialism and vanguard cultural production had made the exhibit . . . Chicago’s own Negro People’s Front avatar: a progressive cultural and political party drawing enormous mixed-class crowds from black Chicago eager to realize the city’s potential to supplant New York as the capital of Negro progressive culture.”14 The exposition certainly showed that the federal government’s relationship to racial politics was changing or merely foreshadowed black Chicago’s wartime and postwar political and cultural rise. Yet, it also revealed the tensions between and within integrationist and nationalist forces in Chicago in 1940, especially in struggles over whether the fair would be held in a venue inside the Black Metropolis. At the same time, the exposition’s exhibits highlighted the differences between liberal and radical integrationist perspectives on black history and racial progress.
The crucial questions for liberal and radical African American politicians, intellectuals, activists, and artists during the late 1930s, and at the exposition, revolved around what they saw as the challenges of African American modernization, especially the causes and effects of rural to urban migration. Were African Americans better off in rural or urban communities, and what were the best means to improve life in the country or the city? Five exhibits most directly addressed these questions. The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s exhibit, shaped by Secretary of Agriculture Henry A. Wallace and U.S. Representative from Chicago Arthur W. Mitchell, pushed an optimistic vision of black Americans’ rural future as a solution to persistent black unemployment and poverty in the nation’s cities. In contrast, the exhibits of African American–run urban businesses, media outlets, and religious institutions promoted what they saw as the opportunities for social mobility in urban political, economic, and social networks. Similarly, prominent black sociologists Horace Cayton, St. Clair Drake, and E. Franklin Frazier highlighted African Americans’ chances for economic and social progress in cities. Unlike their contemporary business, media, and religious leaders, however, the social science exhibit argued that black industrial workers needed to adjust to urban life for the race to progress. Finally, the exposition’s widely distributed pamphlet Cavalcade of the American Negro (1940), produced by the Illinois Writers’ Project (IWP), and the Henry Ossawa Tanner Art Exhibit articulated class-based, Marxist-inspired views on racial oppression in the south and inequality in the north, countered dominant gender stereotypes, and looked to movements led by African American farmers and industrial workers as the best hope for racial progress.
The ninety-five-page Cavalcade of the American Negro summarized the exposition’s major themes—the editor, Arna Bontemps, worked closely with members of the IWP to create a history of blacks’ achievements in education, religion, music, literature and art, theater, industrial labor, agriculture, business, sports, the media, and formal politics. Curtis D. MacDougall, state supervisor of the IWP, called it “the story of a brave people forced to become a part of the American scene.”15 This narrative, however, included references to the most militant aspects of African American history, from the work of radical black abolitionists like Martin Delaney to recent black labor movements for equal treatment for sharecroppers and industrial workers. Little has been written on the New Deal’s state writers’ projects, but as Adam Green points out, the IWP’s Negro Division was “the most prolific marriage of Black intellect and state patronage to come out of the New Deal.”16 Members found both an opportunity to support themselves with their writing during the Depression and found links to local political and artistic circles that included people such as Richard Wright, Katherine Dunham, Horace Cayton, St. Clair Drake, and Langston Hughes, among many others. The cultural radicalism IWP writers took from these experiences is evident in the Cavalcade of the American Negro, as is the tension between their perspectives and the exposition’s liberal emphasis on uncontroversial, evolutionary racial progress. This is perhaps most significant because the pamphlet was so widely distributed, with two original printings of more than fifty thousand each.17
More than any other display, the Tanner Art Exhibit blurred the lines between the exposition’s respectable tone and the more militant attitudes toward racial inequality and progress. Much like the exposition as a whole, organizers couched the art exhibit as a display of African American achievement. In the art exhibit, however, the organizers could not hide the more radical perspectives on black history and the paths for racial progress. Nonetheless, in large part, the organizers intended the art exhibit to be a stage for black artists whose works otherwise went unseen. Few major American museums displayed black artists’ work in their general collections in 1940, and during the American Negro Exposition there was an extended debate about whether to include black artists’ work in the 1940 World’s Fair in New York.18 Individual artists struggled against the art world’s color line. Charles White, for instance, twice won scholarships during the mid-1930s only to be denied the opportunities when the scholarship committees discovered he was black.19 Similarly, the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, denied Elizabeth Catlett’s application for admission, despite the fact that school officials praised her work during the entrance examinations.20 Overall, African Americans in the mid-twentieth century were “confined to exhibiting their works in ‘all Negro’ art exhibitions and left out of the national forums on American art,” writes art historian Richard J. Powell.21
The Tanner Art Exhibit was more than merely a display of marginalized art; it was also a chronicle of black artists’ developing politics. Art exhibit adviser Alain Locke, an eminent African American art critic and intellectual and editor of one of the cornerstones of the Harlem Renaissance, The New Negro (1925), introduced the exhibit as “the most comprehensive and representative collection of the Negro’s art that has ever been presented to public view.” To this extent, the assemblage of art itself was the main point. The exhibit also showed that black artists “were painting in colonial America, when American art itself was in its swaddling clothes” and that this emphatically American art continued to engage life with sophistication through the 1920s and 1930s. For Locke, the display of “American Negro art” was, in part, meant to open people’s eyes to black artistic talent and counter stereotypes about black cultural inferiority. “For many it will be a surprising revelation,” he wrote, implying that this realization itself was at least as important as the messages the works carried. In addition to the conventional recognition given to African Americans’ “achievements in music, dance and entertainment,” Locke wanted to show the world their “quieter and more technically difficult achievements in the fine arts.”22 In fact, however, the technically more subtle visual arts packed a more powerful political punch than the “louder” theatrical productions at the exposition.
In his introduction to the art exhibit, Locke recognized African American artists’ developing political attitudes, but he still emphasized the argument that even the more explicitly political art of the 1930s demonstrated black artists’ virtuosity. Much of the art at the exposition was political only in the sense that it was evidence of the larger uplift of African Americans in American society. For example, Robert S. Duncanson’s Blue Hole, Little Miami River (oil, 1851), the oldest painting in the exhibit, was politically significant more for its undeniably American style than for its subject matter. Like many of his contemporaries in the antebellum era, Duncanson portrayed American life in a romantic pastoral manner. Blue Hole and the other works in the exhibit’s “memorial” section—by artists such as the exhibit’s namesake Henry Ossawa Tanner and Edward Banister, William A. Harper, and Edwin Harleston—stood as proof that black artists had been connected to the major trends in American art since the middle of the nineteenth century. Even when discussing the exhibit’s more recent works, completed during the 1930s, Locke emphasized the parity of talent among white and black artists: “Both the Negro and the white artist stand on common ground in their aim to document every phase of American life and experience.”23 Locke considered this an important step forward from the art of the 1920s and what he called the “Ghetto tradition.”24 By this he meant both that black artists had begun to break down the Jim Crow barriers to blacks’ inclusion in white museums and galleries and that they were turning their eyes to subjects outside of the ghetto. For Locke, this was evidence that sophisticated black artists were doing their part to lead the way for the racial uplift.25 Others in the African American art world agreed with Locke. For example, after seeing the Tanner Art Exhibit, Holger Cahill, the director of the Works Progress Administration’s art program, wrote, “I think the art show of the American Negro Exposition is very good indeed and that it indicates that the Negro has definite contributions to make in the visual arts as he has already made in music, writing, the theatre and the dance.”26
The artists of the late 1930s were not satisfied with merely showing off their technical ability or being recognized as part of the larger art world. Unlike their predecessors in the nineteenth century and during the Harlem Renaissance, the painters of the late 1930s used their work to document explicitly the terrible realities of American race relations. Locke remarked on the trend:
More and more you will notice in their canvasses the sober realism which goes beneath the jazzy, superficial show of things or the more picturesqueness of the Negro to the deeper truths of life, even the social problems of religion, labor, housing, lynching, unemployment, and the likes. For today’s beauty must not be pretty with sentiment but solid and dignified with truth.27
The ways in which the exposition’s various exhibits defined and wrestled with the “truths” of the challenges African Americans faced in 1940 distinguished the participants’ wide-ranging political and ideological orientations.
With the artists at the vanguard, the exposition was a forum for what Harold Cruse called “cultural leadership and cultural democracy.” According to Cruse, “[i]n advanced societies it is not the race politicians or the ‘rights’ leaders who create the new ideas and the new images of life and man. That role belongs to the artists and the intellectuals of each generation. Let the race politicians, if they will, create political, economic or organizational forms of leadership; but it is the artists and the creative minds who will, and must furnish the all important content.”28 The IWP authors of the Cavalcade of the American Negro and the artists in the art exhibit indeed contributed the most forward-thinking content within the political space “race politicians” provided at the exposition.
Struggles for control of the fair between the local and national Republican and Democratic Parties and between the old guard of respectable racial uplift leaders and the vanguard of newer class-conscious organizations that flourished in Chicago during the 1930s determined the exposition’s planning, location, audience, and content. A group of prominent African Americans in politics, the media, and business emerged who used their connections to white politicians and philanthropists to fund the exposition.29 This meant that the exposition’s two leading groups emphasized racial uplift. The federal government promoted its role in improving African Americans’ lives, while the fair’s managers sought to demonstrate to a large interracial audience that African Americans had created their own viable urban institutions and sophisticated culture.
Chicago was a crucial battleground in the 1940 presidential campaign, and the exposition became an important stop on the campaign trail. In July, the Democratic Party held its national convention in Chicago, nominating President Franklin D. Roosevelt to run for a third term against Republican nominee Wendell Willkie. Chicago was a core city in the growing northern Democratic Party and a principal battleground for black votes. The Republican Party worked hard to take back the black vote, which from Reconstruction until the mid-1930s it had traditionally received.30 The American Negro Exposition promised to give the Democratic Party a conspicuous stage both in Chicago and in the national black press.
The exposition was also a key event in the developing struggle between traditional racial-uplift advocates and a newer, more militant attitude regarding the need to uncover the roots of racial and class inequality and to force change. Exposition leaders sought to show that African Americans were capable of creating vibrant political networks, businesses, religious institutions, and a sophisticated culture. In this way, the exposition echoed earlier efforts during the 1920s Harlem Renaissance, when black artists, intellectuals, and political activists, especially in New York City, sought to show that African Americans had emerged from the Great Migration and World War I to create their own refined urban communities. The more traditional racial-uplift advocates at the exposition wanted to demonstrate that African American progress had endured the Depression and to deny common racist assumptions that African Americans were both unsuited to urban life and incapable of creating organized communities. There was, however, a crucial difference between the political contexts of the Harlem Renaissance and the Chicago Renaissance, from which the exposition emerged. By the late 1930s, black artists, social scientists, intellectuals, and activists were generally less optimistic regarding the opportunities of urban life the Harlem Renaissance had celebrated. Disillusioned by the hardships of the Depression and emboldened by the grassroots activism of the 1930s, African Americans sought new ways to create racial progress.31 The exposition reflected both a traditional uplift ideology that promoted individual self-help, cultural assimilation, and respectable self-presentation and more recent movements that steadfastly criticized ongoing racial inequality in the United States and posited that the black working classes would lead the main struggles for racial progress.
Initially, the impetus for the fair grew out of a widely shared anger in Chicago’s African American community regarding the 1933–34 Century of Progress Exposition. That wildly successful Depression-era show virtually excluded African Americans from its exhibits, except in racist portrayals of African Americans, such as the Darkest Africa show, and except in a few exhibits that African American civic groups forced the exposition to accept.32 In 1935, Chicago real-estate entrepreneur James W. Washington acted on residual bitterness over the Century of Progress fair and began to organize support for a “Negro World’s Fair.” Washington, who was a Republican, saw the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Thirteenth Amendment as a fitting event to celebrate both African Americans’ achievements and the Grand Old Party’s contributions to racial progress.33
By July 1939, Washington had convinced the Illinois General Assembly to allocate $75,000 for the event, and he took charge of the Afra-Merican Emancipation Exposition, an incorporated body the assembly set up to oversee the funds.34 State Republicans dominated Illinois’s Exposition Corporation but soon lost much of their influence over the planning for the fair.
In December 1939, Associated Negro Press President Claude A. Barnett upbraided Washington for the slow pace of preparations for the event. “What on earth is the hold up in the matter of the Afra-Merican Emancipation Exposition?” Barnett asked, concluding, “We have gone along with your program supporting and seeking to aid you, but I confess we are beginning to be a bit dubious. . . . You are on trial in this matter and so is the whole race, as well as the state administration.”35 In January 1940, during meetings to determine the event’s location, the revitalized group created a new nonprofit corporation, the Diamond Jubilee Exposition Authority, which was officially bipartisan but quickly came under the control of Democrats and their allies—including Barnett, local attorney and real estate entrepreneur Truman K. Gibson, and Robert Bishop, administrative assistant to Democratic Illinois Governor Henry Horner.36 The key moment came in March 1940 when Barnett and Bishop convinced Secretary of Agriculture Henry A. Wallace to back the exposition.37 As the Exposition Authority wrote in its final report, “Mr. Wallace saw the proposed exhibit outline and then, with his characteristic foresight and energy, called a meeting of the Department of Agriculture. From this meeting really evolved the Exposition.”38 In the wake of that meeting, the exposition’s managers secured $75,000 from the federal government, a $15,000 loan from the Julius Rosenwald Fund (a principal interracial, liberal philanthropic organization), and a $10,000 loan from the managers of the Chicago Coliseum. With the federal government’s imprimatur, the authority also sold booths to dozens of private exhibitors, totaling $9,735.39
By the time the exposition opened, then, Democratic officials and their allies had prevailed in rancorous fights over who would run the fair. Republicans objected to the Democrats’ coup. Charles Jenkins, a black Republican state representative and disgruntled member of the Afra-Merican Emancipation Exposition Commission, wrote an angry letter to the black press. “Of course I was informed that . . . I was ‘persona non grata’ since I was a Republican,” Jenkins complained, claiming that the exposition had been “the brainchild of a Republican Representative of the General Assembly, Colonel William J. Warfield,” who had brought James Washington’s idea to the floor of the Illinois General Assembly. But, Jenkins bemoaned, the fair “had now become the tail-end of a kite of the New Deal and . . . active Republicans were being excluded as rapidly as possible.”40 On August 14, partisan bickering came to a head when Jenkins attempted to have “the Federal Government Exhibit removed and the picture of President Roosevelt taken down because . . . they ‘impressed the vicious New Deal on the minds of Negroes.’” At the same time, Republicans sent one thousand workers into Chicago communities actively seeking to keep people from the Chicago Coliseum.41 One Communist Party newspaper joined the Republicans in rejecting the exposition, denouncing the event as merely a Democratic Party attempt to convince African Americans to cooperate with the war machine.42
The Democratic Party gave their opposition reason to gripe; the exposition clearly had become a stop on the campaign trail.43 With Wallace’s support, Arthur W. Mitchell, U.S. Representative from Chicago and the first African American elected to the House as a Democrat, pushed a bill through Congress that allocated $75,000 in federal funds to the exposition. Wallace also ensured that each of the New Deal agencies would have an exhibit. New Deal exhibits overwhelmed the main hall. They included displays of the Department of Labor and its Women’s Bureau; the Social Security Administration; the Federal Works Agency; the Civil Conservation Corps; the National Youth Administration; the Department of Education; the Civil Aeronautics Authority; the Public Health Service; and the Post Office (which included its brand new Booker T. Washington stamp, the first ever to feature an African American).44 The Illinois branch of the Federal Writers Project produced both the historical dioramas and the pamphlet Cavalcade of the American Negro. President Roosevelt himself opened the exposition on the Fourth of July by pushing a ceremonial button in his home in Hyde Park, New York, and sending a greeting to be read during the opening festivities.45
Building on their success in winning the federal government’s support, the event’s supporters created a buzz in white and black media outlets. Prominent politicians, intellectuals, journalists, authors, and artists publicized the exposition. Langston Hughes and Arna Bontemps, for example, gave multiple interviews to newspapers and radio shows.46 Exposition Authority representative W. J. Alimono traveled to Cleveland, New York, Baltimore, Washington, Philadelphia, Richmond, and Jacksonville to promote the event.47 And from May 16 to June 21, 1940, James Washington, who remained part of the Exposition Authority, traveled through ten southern states, visiting historically black colleges, offices of the United States Extension Service, and local administrators of the Agricultural Adjustment Administration and the Farm Security Administration.48 Barnett used his position as the head of the most important African American newswire service to spread word of the exposition in 164 black newspapers with a combined readership of approximately 1,406,800.49 In addition, network radio broadcasts publicized the fair in June and brought the event to hundreds of thousands of Americans who did not make it to the Coliseum.50 Barnett also arranged for special fares with railroads originating in New Orleans, Phoenix, Los Angeles, New York City, and Buffalo.51 The white-run media also took notice. Newsweek mentioned opening day and in a September issue commented on the art exhibit’s success and printed a photograph of Elizabeth Catlett’s prize-winning sculpture, Mother and Child.52 Even the archconservative Chicago Daily Tribune covered the organization of the fair and its events throughout the summer.
Despite all the organizers’ efforts and the media attention they gained, the exposition drew just over one-tenth of the two million people they had expected. The Exposition Authority estimated an audience of 2,000,000, extrapolating from the 247,000 people who attended a similar celebration of the emancipation anniversary in 1925. Over a quarter million people attended what was a less-extensive fair only ten days long when Chicago’s African American population barely exceeded 50,000. So, in 1940, when the city’s black population had increased from about 50,000 to almost 300,000, the organizers suggested, it was reasonable to expect a greater audience.53 Arguably, 250,000 visitors could be seen as a “success,” but, in any case, that number seriously disappointed the organizers and made them targets of much criticism.
It is impossible to know why the Exposition Authority so dramatically overestimated its audience. Perhaps the organizers were overly optimistic or using the claim to create a buzz around the event. What is clear is that the organizers, and their critics, interpreted attendance figures as a failure. In its final report, the Exposition Authority defensively explained the relatively small crowds as a result of several factors, including the late start on publicity, and that the exposition competed for crowds with the New York World’s Fair and San Francisco World’s Fair, which were in their second year. More important, the authority claimed, “[T]hose who had been interested in having the celebration held elsewhere, together with those disgruntled individuals who felt they should have held key positions on the staff, worked hand in hand for the purpose of making the Exposition a failure.” Moreover, “[t]he Exposition Authority . . . realized that it would be far more difficult to get mass approval and support of a cultural and artistic celebration than of an Exposition put on like a circus.”54
The Exposition Authority focused on making the event, in Henry Wallace’s words, “100 percent Exposition instead of 50 percent Exposition and 50 percent hokum.”55 Upon entering the Coliseum, visitors encountered a large replica of the Lincoln Memorial, representing the origins of black freedom. Renowned African American painter William Eduoard Scott and Persian-born portrait artist Salvatore Salla, who immigrated to Chicago in 1927, contributed portraits of approximately twenty prominent African Americans, as well as murals of important scenes in African American history.56 The IWP’s dioramas detailed eighteen moments in African American history, including life in Africa; the slave trade in Africa and Virginia; the loyalty of African Americans during the American Revolution, the Civil War, and the Spanish-American War; the difficulties of Reconstruction; and African Americans’ “humble beginnings in business.”57 Each of the major New Deal agencies portrayed the federal government’s benefits for African Americans. And numerous displays marked the success of African American businesses, churches, newspapers, fraternities, and sororities.58 Prizes for the best poem, painting, drawing, song, and sculpture highlighted African American artistic achievement, while the “Miss Bronze America” pageant sought to display African American beauty. The exposition also included self-consciously respectable entertainments at the Tropical Gardens nightclub, constructed in the Coliseum specifically for the fair, which hosted a number of dance troupes, comedians, and nightly performances of a “swing version” of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Mikado, the Chimes of Normandy, a “jazzed up Negro version of the famous old French opera,” and a play by Langston Hughes and Arna Bontemps, “Tropics after Dark.”59
Whether or not the exposition’s “high” tone kept larger crowds away, it is clear that the organizers perceived the turnout in these terms. When Truman Gibson looked back on the exposition, he reported, “We have done what we set out to do and the result has been such that no one need be ashamed. We have attempted to bring the race up and have consequently avoided the types of appeal that would bring in masses.”60 Nonetheless, Gibson refused to listen when an outside publicity consultant encouraged him to include some flash with the exhibits’ educational materials.
I wish to repeat the fultility [sic] of attempting to secure a large volume attendance with a feature that is solely artistic and cultural. The mass of the public wants a ‘side show’; a spectacle with deft touches of showmanship. . . . The public will absorb the education offered by your exposition (this being the primary object of it) if they are first ‘lured’ to the building then exposed to the culture. . . . Art but LIFE!61
The Exposition Authority wanted more than anything else to show that African Americans had progressed to the point of deserving serious, high-minded consideration.
The exposition organizers’ efforts to impress white audiences drew fire from Chicago’s black community. In particular, arguments over where the exposition ought to be held reflected differences among African Americans regarding the event’s relationship to the white community. The organizers considered sites throughout the city, including some locations in black neighborhoods, such as the Savoy Ballroom at South Parkway and Forty-Seventh Street, and the Giles Armory, which was home to Chicago’s celebrated all-black Eighth Regiment and had hosted important gatherings such as the 1936 founding convention of the National Negro Congress.62 By holding the exposition outside the city’s South Side African American neighborhoods, the organizers not only made the event inconvenient for black audiences but they also reinforced the perception that the event was an accommodationist sell-out. Indeed, the Southside Merchants Association objected, “It is the consensus of opinion of many civic leaders of the community,” that the Coliseum location was “a grave mistake.”63 In addition, at least some black unions used their position to punish the Exposition Authority. Claude Barnett complained, “The unions have pummeled us terribly. They had us at their mercy since the Coliseum is a union house. . . . [T]he carpenters’ union took $35,000 from us in installation after we had most of our exhibits built; [and] the musicians made us pay $1,600 a week for a band we could have had for $600 ordinarily, by scaling the exposition as a class B house because it is downtown.”64 Consequently, the Exposition Authority could not afford to have black musicians—a great potential draw—play regularly at the fair.65 Other critics, including Roy Wilkins of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), wrote letters to the editors of black newspapers and to members of the Exposition Authority, bristling at the fact that the organizers hired a white-owned printing company to produce posters for the event and sold ice cream from a vendor that did not hire African American workers.66 A columnist from the city’s main black newspaper, the Chicago Defender, wrote, “The people who are running the exposition know what they want and whom they want to handle the various exhibits. . . . Let me make it plain! Have we become so educated that we CAN NOT see our own except through the white man’s eyes?”67
The charges that the exposition was a “sell-out” hit hard because, to an extent, they were true; the organizers included exhibits planned by whites and intended to accommodate white audiences. Yet, it is important to note that the critics who dwelled on the fair’s accommodationism often felt slighted by the event’s planning and did not comment on the array of perspectives in the exhibits. In fact, the exposition offered not just white-biased platitudes on race relations but also competing visions of African American rural and urban history and heated debates over the best paths to improve life for black Americans in the country and the city.
In 1940, almost one half of all African Americans lived in cities, and by 1945, for the first time, a majority lived in urban areas. At the same time, rural life still defined the vast majority of African American history. It should not be surprising, then, that a significant part of the exposition described African Americans’ rural experiences. What is more interesting is that the exhibits showcased a now largely forgotten debate over African Americans’ future in southern agriculture. The New Deal agriculture exhibit argued that African Americans in the city should move back to the farm, while those who had remained in the south should stay put. In retrospect, perhaps, this back-to-the-farm message is surprising. Yet, Henry Wallace and Arthur Mitchell shaped the agriculture display to promote an optimistic vision of rural life. Their anti-urban perspective, however, was out of step not only with the later course of history but also with at least two other views on display in the Coliseum. While Wallace and Mitchell celebrated the federal government as the best hope for black farmers, the Cavalcade of the American Negro and many artists in the art exhibit explicitly pointed to the failure of traditional attempts to overcome the hardships African Americans faced on the farm.
Described as “the most imposing exhibit in the exposition,” the Department of Agriculture’s display, “The Negro on the Land,” included its own auditorium for film screenings and demonstrations and cost the department $40,000.68 Visitors passed through three sections detailing “the story of how the obstacles to rural progress in the South are being met under a broad agricultural program.”69 The booths included descriptions of scientific progress in agriculture, a 4-H Club home demonstration, and explanations of the New Deal’s efforts to improve rural life.70 The exhibit celebrated black farmers’ steady improvement, telling with “photographic enlargements of heroic size the story . . . of seventy-five years of struggle of the Negro toward a better rural life.” The federal government starred in this story, helping black farmers to build new homes, improve soil conservation, and increase yields.71 Despite the fact that local New Deal administrators in the south were notoriously biased against African American farmers and the fact that black farmers arguably benefited less than anyone from the New Deal, the agricultural displays presented not only a glowing description of the benefits of federal programs but also an explicit argument for African Americans’ future on the farm.
Individually, Wallace and Mitchell had long celebrated the prospects for rural progress. Wallace, as President Roosevelt’s secretary of agriculture, was possibly the foremost proponent of the use of science and public policy to improve rural life.72 Mitchell, who had been Booker T. Washington’s assistant, held onto a Washington-style accommodationism, despite the fact that he was the most prominent black member of Roosevelt’s New Deal urban coalition. Mitchell actually deflected attention away from urban centers like Chicago. He did not pressure Congress or President Roosevelt to create better housing, ensure fair employment practices, or improve health facilities in Chicago. Instead, this native of rural Alabama, who retired at the end of his term in 1943 to a rural estate in Petersburg, Virginia, spent virtually all of his time in the House concentrating on the problems of the rural south.73 In 1937, Mitchell traveled throughout the region, visiting black farmers and the rural communities already receiving the most federal support. Also, Mitchell met regularly with Roosevelt, Wallace, and local agricultural extension agents throughout the south regarding potential federal programs that he hoped would improve conditions for black farmers.74
For Mitchell especially, the American Negro Exposition represented a grand opportunity to continue to promote African Americans’ rural prospects. Introducing the bill for a $75,000 appropriation to the exposition, Mitchell told the House of Representatives:
It is hoped that, showing the possibilities for advancement of the Negro in returning to the land, an interest in such may help relieve the unemployment situation, especially in the urban centers. It has become evident that there are at least 50,000 Negroes who are technologically unemployed in and near Chicago alone, who are dependent upon relief. They in all likelihood never will get jobs. . . . To show these Negroes, whom industry cannot absorb, what has been done on the land in raising the value of the holdings of Negro families, as well as the increase in the standard of living, may tend to attract them away from the city back to the rural life, to which they are best adapted.75
Mitchell repeated similar statements in many of his letters and speeches from the late 1930s and early 1940s. Again and again, he assured his counterparts in Washington, “I can see no hope for the Negro in America ultimately except through the extension of Agricultural opportunity and development,” and counseled his “superconstituency of 12,000,000” African Americans to look to the farm for their salvation.76
Mitchell’s and Wallace’s back-to-the-farm message took the notion that African Americans were culturally suited to rural life to its extreme.77 It was an argument that was anything but threatening to the dominant white political establishment. On the contrary, Mitchell reinforced the New Deal’s claims that it improved conditions for all Americans and at the same time appeased southern white Democrats who knew that black farmers posed no real threat to the status quo in the rural south. Wallace and Mitchell promoted a rural future for African Americans not only to appease southern white Democrats but also because they sincerely believed that African Americans were unsuited to life in the city. Despite the fact that a back-to-the-farm argument would be untenable just a few years later, they maintained faith in the potential for a rural future because they thought the obstacles blocking a mass return to agricultural life paled in comparison to the problems African Americans faced in urban areas. “I, having been directly connected with rural life,” Mitchell told Congress, “know the great evil that attends this migration.”78 Thus, they sought the prevention of “colored people from the Southern States rushing from the rural districts and crowding into the cities, both in the South and in the North” and sought mass resettlement of African Americans from cities to farms.79 What neither Wallace nor Mitchell acknowledged was that the oppressive sharecropping system, combined with prevalent extralegal violence and the legalized segregation of Jim Crow, ensured that millions of African Americans would continue to look to the city and industry for hope.
At least two artists at the exposition contradicted Wallace and Mitchell’s idealistic, perhaps myopic, view of life for African Americans in the rural south. Hale Woodruff’s By Parties Unknown (block print, 1938) indicted the south for the moral depravity of lynching, and Charles White’s There Were No Crops This Year (crayon drawing, 1940) graphically portrayed the grinding oppression of the sharecropping system.80 In Woodruff’s dark scene, a lynching victim has been pulled down after his death and laid on the steps of a crumbling church, the central institution of respectable black and white societies. Here Woodruff not only decried the injustice of lynching; he implicitly reproached “respectable” society for failing to protect this victim while also warning the viewer that such acts were destructive for the society as a whole. While Woodruff portrays the acute physical violence that marked racial oppression in the south, White dramatized the effects of the chronic racial inequality in a sharecropper’s life. White’s There Were No Crops This Year was the most celebrated piece in the art exhibit. The drawing won first prize for the best black-and-white drawing at the fair and was on the cover of the art exhibit’s catalog. White portrays a despairing man and woman holding an empty grain bag. Their unimaginably strong figures break the drawing’s borders, and the close perspective draws the viewer intimately into a portrayal of African American farmers who were neither rising happily from the depths of slavery nor entirely broken by the oppression of the rural south.
It was not only in the art exhibit that the exposition’s audiences encountered critical appraisals of oppression in the rural south. The Cavalcade of the American Negro echoed Woodruff and White:
The destitution of most of the Negro tenants and owners [on southern farms] is incredible. The exhaustion of the soil through the one-crop system, the unequal fight against the boll weevil, illiteracy, the absences of money, lack of modern machinery and equipment, inability of the backward workers to apply scientific methods, difficulties of the individual farmer in getting credit, high prices and exorbitant interest rates paid for supplies, inadequate diet causing disease and abnormal death rates—these are the evils of the dispensation under which the Negro famer lives. The sum total of these circumstances has been to create a slave atmosphere in which reliance on the white landlords seems imperative.81
For this IWP author, the federal government was not the farmer’s best hope; rather, “the most promising move is the effort being made by the beleagured sharecroppers themselves to work out their own salvation,” through farmer-led organizations such as the Southern Tenant Farmers Union and the Delta Cooperative Farm.82
For those unsure that rural black folk could mount a successful movement against oppression, eminent African American painter Jacob Lawrence pointed to a historical example. Lawrence’s contribution to the exposition, The Life of Toussaint L’Ouverture (oil, 1938), a series of fifteen oil paintings on the history of the Haitian Revolution, celebrated a revolutionary past.83 Lawrence sought to portray something other than the mythologized, safe African American figures in the exposition’s murals of Crispus Attucks, Benjamin Banneker, and the Tenth Cavalry on San Juan Hill. Instead of historical characters already relatively widely accepted as important contributors to U.S. history, Lawrence chronicled one of the most radical challenges to white supremacy in the Americas.84 L’Ouverture led the only successful slave revolution in the Western Hemisphere, and his image haunted whites in the United States for years after the revolution. In 1940, L’Ouverture stood as a historical example for African Americans in the rural south fighting to improve their lives.85 Moreover, in the context of the exposition, the portrayals of oppression, violence, and potentially revolutionary struggles in the rural south effectively countered the New Dealers’ obtuse idealism and, not incidentally, more accurately foreshadowed the south’s postwar civil rights battles.
Alongside the debate about the prospects of a life for African Americans in the rural south, the exposition showcased a related and even more heated argument over the fate of African Americans in the city. By 1940, most interested observers—sociologists, politicians, activists, and much of the public—realized that African Americans as a whole could not escape an urban industrial future. They disagreed sharply, however, about the best ways to ameliorate economic hardship in the city. Three different perspectives stood out. There was a traditional middle-class uplift message that best complemented the exposition organizers’ emphasis on the gradual improvement of African American life. The social science exhibit presented an alternative view of adjustment to urban life, based on Frazier’s Negro Family in the United States (1939), which called on black men to forge a place for themselves in the urban industrial economy and save the African American family from its ostensibly pathological maternal structure. The young, militant artists and writers at the exposition also looked to the black working classes for leadership in the fight for racial progress. Individually, however, they also challenged the predominant depictions of black rural folk, African American motherhood, and African Americans’ relationship to American history as a whole. In these works, the black artists at the exposition reached the heights of their cultural leadership.
The first prominent theme in the debate about African Americans in the city was the potential for black middle-class race leaders to lift the race by creating jobs, entrepreneurial networks, and cultural outlets for the African American masses. Exhibits from African American–run urban institutions—such as insurance companies, newspapers, the Negro Chamber of Commerce, and churches—celebrated both the past and future of African Americans’ entrepreneurial achievements, claiming that the leaders of the Black Metropolis endured through the Depression, and were positioned to lead urban black communities toward renewed economic prosperity. Here was the core message of urban middle-class uplift ideology; by assimilating into the world of competitive capitalism, black entrepreneurs built the resources of public culture that allowed African Americans to articulate their views in the press, issue their own insurance, build their own homes, and buy goods at black-owned businesses.
The social science exhibits promoted racial uplift of a different kind, one that placed the burden not on the leadership of middle-class and elite African Americans but on black working men. Black sociologist Frazier suggested that African Americans’ best hope was neither a return to the rural south, as Wallace and Mitchell would have it, nor the entrepreneurial vision of an unproblematic assimilation into urban life. Rather, Frazier focused on what he portrayed as the long-term destruction of African American culture and family structure. He argued that working-class African Americans in the city needed to adapt to urban life; black men needed to find industrial jobs and use their newfound economic and political opportunity to reconstitute the patriarchal family and rise into solid working-class status. In order to take part in the prosperity cities offered, Frazier argued, African Americans first needed to resolve their own social problems. He described these problems as the unemployment, “broken” families, juvenile delinquency, and drunkenness caused in large part by matriarchal family structure. His arguments appeared in both the Cavalcade of the American Negro and the exposition’s social science exhibit. Frazier was acutely aware of the problems of rural life and sought a way for African Americans to rise above the hardships of southern oppression, migration, and urban life. His path out of rural “backwardness” and up from urban pathology comprised physical migration from the sharecropper’s plot and a social move to economic stability.
For Frazier, the family was the core institution on which all other social organization depended. Rural to urban migration, according to Frazier, exacerbated the problems of the already high number of “maternal households” in both the country and the city.86 Since Emancipation, Frazier asserted, “the Negro family” had evolved through four stages, and with the transformations in family structure also came broader social changes. Frazier’s “patterns of the Negro family” fell into four categories, portrayed in the Hall of Dioramas: In the House of the Mother, In the House of the Father, In the City of Destruction, and In the City of Rebirth.87 Frazier argued that slavery utterly destroyed the African American family, but during Reconstruction newly emancipated communities began to reconstitute a matriarchal family. As Frazier put it, the freed slave was a “refugee from a hostile world [and] was provided [for] in the family circle of kinsmen and orphans under the guardianship of mother or grandmother.” Without a patriarchal figure, Frazier warned, the family was inherently incomplete, and only when men began to return to their patriarchal responsibilities was it possible for former slaves to build the institutions of a successful community: “Upon the pioneer efforts of the freed men who first accepted the challenge of manhood responsibilities, were built the family, the church, the school, and industry.” This initial success, however, began to fray during the “flight from feudalism.” As the caption to the City of Destruction diorama put it, “To man the mills and factories of northern industry, a million black folk fled from feudal America to modern civilization. In the city many simple folkways of the South were lost.” Migration, in this argument, was an ambiguous process. Families headed by men who could not meet the economic challenges of the city and maternal migrant households brought a barrage of urban difficulties onto “disorganized” families, a phenomenon that, Frazier argued, caused high crime rates and the persistence of backward rural religious and medical superstitions. On the other hand, for those men who migrated with their families and found industrial jobs, the city offered opportunity for social mobility and a reconstruction of African American families and social institutions. Still, even those who took advantage of the opportunities in “the City of Rebirth” needed to fight “color caste” and endure “the travail of civilization.”88
Frazier was clear about the implications of African American families’ failure to adjust to urban life. One of the most important, he suggested, was the disproportionately high crime rate in urban black communities. Although he suggested that relatively high crime rates were caused, in part, by “unjust arrests” and “deplorable economic and housing conditions,” he also attributed crime to the “Negro’s racial background,” “slow adaptations to the white man’s rule of conduct,” “feeble-mindedness among the more backward,” and, finally, “too rapid migration from country to city.”89 The message seems clear: migrants who were slow to adapt (often the result of family disorganization) ostensibly suffered excessively from urban poverty and therefore turned to crime. At best, this explanation contradicted the “superficial . . . impression that Negroes are criminally inclined.” At worst, it still placed the blame for crime on the black population itself. In this version of migrant adjustment, the transition from rural to urban life engendered criminality in the black community. Crime could only be fought with “additional measures . . . to curb permanently both the irresponsible Negroes and the whites who exploit them.”90
However stridently Frazier criticized black workers and their families, his work was attractive to his antiracist contemporaries because it seemed to offer a hopeful path to rise above the poverty, crime, and poor healthcare that afflicted urban black ghettos. By creating two-parent families in which the husband worked and the wife managed the household, Frazier promised, African Americans could lift themselves up to the middle class and show their poorer neighbors the way to do the same. For Frazier, the exposition offered a popular venue in which to counter racist descriptions of African American culture and to promote his vision of middle-class uplift.
As powerful as Frazier’s argument might have been, it also explicitly blamed single parents, especially women, for the African American community’s “pathologies.” It placed the source of family disorganization in black sharecroppers’ post-emancipation rural environment. Migrants, Frazier suggested, could carry their “family disorganization” with them on their “flight from feudal America.”91 The city’s economic opportunities represented tenuous hope, according to Frazier, but only if the masses of African Americans reconstituted the patriarchal family and countered the pathologies of matriarchal social organization.
Frazier’s criticism of the African American family structure is not entirely shocking, of course; it represents just one instance of one of the most prominent, and problematic, themes in modern American racial discourse. More surprising are the efforts at the exposition to counter derogatory stereotypes of black mothers and families. The best example is Elizabeth Catlett’s sculpture Mother and Child (marble, 1940), which won the exposition’s sculpture prize and wide acclaim in the art world. James Porter, who could be an incisive critic, praised Catlett’s work for its sophisticated, realistic portrayal of a specifically African American mother and daughter in loving embrace.
The simple, rotund massiveness of the work exemplifies good taste and soberly thoughtful execution. It avoids those pitfalls of sentimentality and over-elaboration into which have fallen so many academic bores who pumice the marble until it resembles a pin cushion more than a work of art. The [N]egroid quality in “Mother and Child” is undeniable, and the work has poise and a profound structure.92
More to the point, Catlett’s Mother and Child depicts the mother-child relationship with an unmistakable sense of solidity and wholeness. As an alternative to the images of the black matriarchy as a source of pathology, Catlett’s sculpture shows a mother caring for her child with strength, not pathos.93
While Catlett implicitly countered Frazier’s depiction of African American mothers, the Cavalcade of the American Negro questioned Frazier’s emphasis on black workers’ failure to take advantage of economic opportunities in the city. By fighting for access to industrial unions, the Cavalcade argued, black workers had advanced the fight against “the combination of lower wages, industrial and union color bans, discrimination in lay-offs and re-employments, [and] displacement of Negro workers by white workers in the cheap labor market . . . [which] have been too much to lick.”94 Yet, the Cavalcade did not end on this depressing note. Instead, it pointed out, “[t]oday, due to the increased political powers of labor unions and the hard lessons of the depression, Negro union membership is well beyond the 300,000 mark,” a fact that augured progress. “It is reasonable to suppose,” the Cavalcade concluded, “that the Negro will be more than a spectator in the significant economic and social surges of the next generation.”95
Representatives of the more militant, class-based perspectives on racial politics—such as the IWP writers and the Marxist-influenced artists—took full advantage of the space opened by white racial liberals and black racial-uplift leaders. In some cases, however, they were pushed to the margins of the event. Renowned poet and novelist Margaret Walker, for example, captured the exposition’s most militant spirit, but visitors to the exposition did not hear her voice.96 Walker, who was a member of the Illinois Writers’ Project in Chicago and Elizabeth Catlett’s contemporary at the University of Iowa, wrote a 375-line poem specifically for the exposition, “Epic for the Jubilee Year of the Negro.” Her “Epic,” however, did not win the contest and was not, therefore, presented at the exposition. In fact, “Epic” has never been published. Yet, the poem presents a powerful summary of a radical version of the exposition’s messages. Walker articulates pride in African Americans’ achievements, along the lines of the main exhibits’ messages of uplift and progress, but she goes beyond that story to call on America to remember the sins of slavery and racial oppression and to demand the fulfillment of freedom’s promises. After recalling African Americans’ forced removal from Africa—“from a free country that was our country /. . . . have we come wailing in your wilderness”—she spends much of the poem describing African Americans’ contributions to the making of America: as farmers, workers, soldiers, preachers, teachers, and artists. This is, however, no safe version of African American history. For those who still demanded segregation, Walker admitted no separation between African Americans and America as a whole: “We have made you what you are, America, / we have made you what we are.” For those who would elide the sins of the past, she wrote, “I will make you know the meaning / of my working and my living / and my dying on your shores.”97
For Walker, white Americans’ approval was not necessary for integration and assimilation. Black Americans had created America and needed only to claim what was already theirs. The key notion in Walker’s poem is that African Americans were inseparable from America—“I tell you America, you too are a Negro”—and that African Americans were specially positioned to cut to the core of the false premises upon which American racial segregation depended.
Come now my brothers and citizens of America
and hear the strange singing of me, your brother,
and see the strange dancing of me, your daughter,
and know that I am you and you are me
and the two are as one in danger and in peace,
in plenty and in poverty,
in freedom forever,
in power, and glory, and triumph.
I ask you, America,
is this not a singing witness in your soul?
Walker’s poem reflects the urgency for racial change—the demands of African American workers, farmers, soldiers, mothers, and fathers—that characterized the politics and culture of the Black Chicago Renaissance.
Who are you to deny me the right
to cast my vote in the streets of America;
in the Senate halls of America?
Who are you to deny me the right to speak?
I who am myself also America.
I who cleared your forests
and laid your thoroughfares.
Who are you to be presumptuous
to tell me where to ride,
and where to stand,
and where to sit?
Who are you to lynch the flesh of your flesh?
Who are you to say who shall live
and who shall die?
Who are you to tell me where to eat
and where to sleep?
Who are you America but Me?
The exposition’s organizers sought to bring recognition to the race as a whole, and the art exhibit attempted to bring attention to black artists, but at the same time they created a place to debate the many different perspectives on racial politics in 1940.98 The exposition presented a stage not only for New Deal politicians and leaders of urban black-run institutions but also for the African American sociologists, artists, and writers who emerged from the thriving Marxist-inspired intellectual world in black Chicago in the 1930s. Together, they presented competing perspectives on race relations, migration, and the prospects for African American farmers and industrial workers.
The exhibits might best be seen as attempts to describe African Americans’ history and the prospects for life in a modern America divided along lines of race, region, gender, and class. Democratic Party politicians sought to assume the mantle the Republican Party had long held as the party of liberation and progress, while appeasing their conservative southern counterparts and promoting their own (soon-to-be-outmoded) optimistic vision of rural life. Leaders of African American business, media, and religious organizations in the city took their own successful adjustment to urban life as evidence of black progress and celebrated the social mobility promised by entrepreneurialism and national networks of respectable society. The other main group of black professionals at the exposition, the social scientists, bemoaned the destructive effects of slavery and Jim Crow and staked the future of the race on the ability of the masses of African Americans to revive the patriarchal family by adjusting to urban industrial life. Most striking were the black writers’ and artists’ efforts to capture the working-class-inspired view of black history and visions for the future. Individually, they indicted middle-class society (as represented in the church) for its failure to face up to racial oppression in the south; recaptured examples in black history of revolutionary leaders who arose from the ranks of the black folk; denied the ubiquitous demeaning portrayals of black maternal relationships; and insisted on the need for black workers and farmers to lead movements for racial progress.
Most important was the fact that the exposition’s liberal organizers did not attempt to exclude the black writers’ and artists’ versions of African American history and visions of black progress. Instead, the organizers wrapped all the exhibits, no matter their political messages, in an appeal for a white audience’s respect for African Americans’ entrepreneurial achievements, religious institutions, active and loyal citizenship, and cultural sophistication. However galling this attention to white opinions may have been to more race- and class-conscious black Chicagoans, there was an important similarity between the liberal and radical images of black history and the goals of racial politics. In different ways, all of the exhibits described African Americans’ past and future as a story of progress toward full inclusion in American political, economic, and social structures. In this sense, the exposition truly was a grand display of progress and integration. The IWP writers and young black artists, however, articulated a new kind of radical integrationism that focused on the struggles of the rural and urban working classes and demanded that whites and middle-class blacks recognize the contributions of all African Americans—rural folk, proletariat, soldiers, and artists—to the spread of freedom and the creation of America.
1. Harold Cruse, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual: A Historical Analysis of the Failure of Black Leadership (1967; repr., New York: Quill, 1984), 564.
2. Robert Bone, The Negro Novel in America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1958), and “Richard Wright and the Chicago Renaissance,” Callaloo 9, no. 3 (1986): 446–68; Carla Cappetti, Writing Chicago: Modernism, Ethnography, and the Novel (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993); Bill V. Mullen, Popular Fronts: Chicago and African-American Cultural Politics, 1935–46 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 75, 80; Craig Hansen Werner, Playing the Changes: From Afro-Modernism to the Jazz Impulse (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994); Adam Paul Green, “Selling the Race: Cultural Production and Notions of Community in Black Chicago, 1940–1955” (PhD dissertation, Northwestern University, 1998).
3. The current chapter builds on the work of literary scholar Bill V. Mullen, who identified the exposition as a central Chicago renaissance event, and of Adam Green, who sees in the exposition an early example of the “cultural apparatus” black Chicagoans developed in the postwar period.
4. Cruse, Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, 3.
5. Beth Tompkins Bates, Pullman Porters and the Rise of Protest Politics in Black America, 1925–1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001); Beth Tompkins Bates, “A New Crowd Challenges the Old Guard in the NAACP, 1933–1941,” American Historical Review 102, no. 2. (April 1997): 340–77; Erik S. Gellman, “‘Carthage Must Be Destroyed’: Race, City Politics, and the Campaign to Integrate Chicago Transportation Work, 1929–1943,” Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas 2, no. 2 (2005): 81–114; Lizabeth Cohen, Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919–1939 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), esp. 323–60.
6. Adam Green traces the development of the media, political, and economic institutions within Chicago’s black neighborhoods between 1940 and 1955. See also St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton, Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1945).
7. The Coliseum at Fifteenth Street and Wabash Avenue no longer stands. Although just a few blocks from the edge of Chicago’s black neighborhoods, the distance was significant. As discussed later, the location in a majority white neighborhood was symbolically important.
8. Horace R. Cayton to Claude A. Barnett, memo, March 9, 1940, frame 418, reel 1, series 1, part 3, microfilm, Claude A. Barnett Papers, Chicago History Museum (hereafter cited as Barnett Papers). In this memo, Cayton informed Barnett what the Exposition Authority had decided would be the language to describe the event’s aims in letters to solicit support for the event.
9. The literature on labor civil rights movements and civil rights unionism is large and growing. For examples centered on the labor civil rights movements in Chicago during the 1930s and 1940s, see the works by Bates and Cohen, and Eric Arnesen, Brotherhoods of Color: Black Railroad Workers and the Struggle for Equality (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001). For an example that traces a similar narrative in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, see Robert Rodgers Korstad, Civil Rights Unionism: Tobacco Workers and the Struggle for Democracy in the Mid-Twentieth-Century South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003). For a comprehensive overview of the civil rights idealism that grew out of the war and developed into the twentieth century’s grand “rights revolution,” see James T. Patterson, Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945–1974 (1997; repr.; New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). For a dramatic example of the radicalizing effects of military service, see Timothy B. Tyson’s Radio Free Dixie: Robert F. Williams and the Roots of Black Power (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001). For a broad description of the ways World War II changed American liberalism, see Alan Brinkley, The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War (1995; repr., New York: Vintage Books, 1996).
10. The majority of the work on the exposition consists of art historians’ descriptions of the art exhibit, but these are generally cursory and often inaccurate accounts. Most descriptions of the Henry Ossawa Tanner art exhibit appear in biographies of major African American artists or in broad histories of African American arts in the 1930s and 1940s. For example, in a biography of Arna Bontemps, Kirkland C. Jones writes that the exposition took place in 1938, not 1940, and claims that “Langston [Hughes] and Arna, chaired the Exposition, with one of its stars, Etta Moten, assisting with music.” Jones seems unaware of the fact that the “Cavalcade of the Negro Theatre,” in which Hughes, Bontemps, and Moten did collaborate, was just part of Bontemps’s contribution to the exposition and was never actually staged at the exposition. Kirkland C. Jones, Renaissance Man from Louisiana: A Biography of Arna Wendell Bontemps (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1992), 90. In another example, a biographical sketch of Elizabeth Catlett, art historian Lowery Stokes Sims confuses the American Negro Exposition with another famous fair held in Chicago in 1893: “Catlett sent Mother and Child to Chicago to be exhibited at the 1940 Columbian Exposition, a national exhibition of African-American artists, where it won first prize in sculpture.” Although mistaken nomenclature might be a minor point, Sims’s essay points to the real problem that arises when art history is done without a close attention to context. Sims writes, “The context for Catlett’s work at this time has been described in Charles S. Johnson’s 1925 essay, ‘Black Workers and the City,’” a landmark sociological description of black workers’ struggle against the color line in northern industries. Without denying the significance of Johnson’s essay, it seems more relevant to place Catlett’s work in 1939 and 1940 in conversation with the sociological and artistic work of the late 1930s. The current chapter, for instance, argues that Catlett responded to the widespread denigration of the “pathology” of African American matriarchal family structure—most famously in black sociologist E. Franklin Frazier’s work. Lowery Stokes Sims, “Elizabeth Catlett: A Life in Art and Politics,” in Elizabeth Catlett Sculpture: A Fifty-Year Retrospective, ed. Lucinda H. Gedeon (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1998), 13.
11. Rydell’s book, World of Fairs: The Century-of-Progress Expositions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), is one of a large literature on the racist portrayals of African Americans, Africans, Native Americans, Asians, and South Americans in expositions during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. See also Rydell, All the World’s a Fair: Visions of Empire at America’s International Expositions, 1876–1916 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), and Christopher Robert Reed, “All the World Is Here!”: The Black Presence at the White City (2000; repr., Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002).
12. Rydell, World of Fairs, 191.
13. Green, “Selling the Race,” 13–14. Green makes much of the concept of a “cultural apparatus,” by which he means the media, entrepreneurial, and expressive culture resources a given community has at its disposal to debate ideas and project its ideas and values.
14. Mullen, Popular Fronts, 80. Mullen focuses on the art exhibit and on the exposition’s radicalism because he is reacting against what he sees as an overly conservative historiography on Chicago’s black cultural politics that, he suggests, overemphasizes the roles of Richard Wright and his break with communism. He contends, “[T]he critical gaps and historical inconsistencies in accounts of Chicago’s South Side cultural and political scene of the late 1930s and 1940s are largely attributable to the successful erasure of the nature, influence, and practice of racial political thought and culture there.” 24.
15. Curtis McDougal, preface, The Cavalcade of the American Negro, comp. Illinois Writers’ Program (Chicago: Diamond Jubilee Exposition Authority, 1940; New York: AMS, 1975), 9. IWP members who wrote essays for the exposition include Henry Bacon, Alvin Cannon, Herman Clayton, Fenton Johnson, Edward Joseph, and George Lewis. Cavalcade of the American Negro, 7. Drafts of many of these writers’ works are in the Illinois Writers’ Project Collection in the Vivian G. Harsh Collection, Carter G. Woodson Public Library, Chicago.
16. Green, “Selling the Race,” 4.
17. Cavalcade of the American Negro, 95.
18. Alain Locke, “Advance on the Art Front,” Opportunity: Journal of Negro Life 17, no. 5 (May 1939): 132.
19. Andrea D. Barnwell, Charles White (San Francisco: Pomegranate Communications, 2002), 17–18.
20. Melanie Anne Herzog, Elizabeth Catlett: An Artist in Mexico (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2000), 16.
21. Richard J. Powell, Black Art and Culture in the 20th Century (World of Art) (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1997), 102.
22. Alain Locke, “Introducing the American Negro Exposition’s Showing of the Works of Negro Artists,” Barnett Papers, 3:1:4:002–3; Alain Locke, ed., The New Negro: Voices of the Harlem Renaissance (repr., New York: Touchstone, 1992).
23. Locke, “Introducing the American Negro Exposition’s Showing,” Barnett Papers, 3:1:4:002–3.
24. Alain Locke, The Negro in Art (1940; repr., New York: Hacker Art Books, 1968), 3.
25. Locke’s perspective on the role of “high art” in racial uplift was especially significant given the influence he had over how black art in general appeared in the popular black press. Locke’s annual reviews of African American art and literature in the National Urban League’s Opportunity: Journal of Negro Life were widely read, influential assessments of the most important trends in black culture during the late 1930s and early 1940s. In 1939, Locke wrote, “[W]e may justifiably say that Negro art has inaugurated a new phase of public influence and service.” This new influence, according to Locke, could best be promoted by supporting the education and exhibition of a wide range of black artists because “our art . . . is, after all, the most persuasive and incontrovertible type of group propaganda, our best cultural line of defense.” Locke, “Advance on the Art Front,” 136, 132.
26. Holger Cahill to Claude A. Barnett, July 11, 1940, Barnett Papers, 3:1:3:002.
27. Locke, “Introducing the American Negro Exposition’s Showing,” Barnett Papers, 3:1:4:002–3.
28. Harold Cruse, “Cultural Leadership and Cultural Democracy,” in The Essential Harold Cruse, ed. William Jelani Cobb (New York: Palgrave, 2002), 57.
29. Those directly involved in financing, planning, and carrying out the event included political and media figures like U.S. Representative from Chicago Arthur W. Mitchell and Associated Negro Press President Claude A. Barnett; dozens of black artists, such as Elizabeth Catlett, Jacob Lawrence, Charles White, Margaret Walker, Arna Bontemps, and Langston Hughes; sociologists and intellectuals, including Horace Cayton, E. Franklin Frazier, Alain Locke, and Tuskegee President F. D. Patterson; as well as religious leaders from every major Christian denomination. Members of the white political establishment supporting the exposition included Illinois Governor Henry Horner, Chicago Mayor Edward J. Kelly, U.S. Senators James M. Slattery and Scott W. Lucas, Secretary of Agriculture Henry A. Wallace, and Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins.
30. William J. Grimshaw, Bitter Fruit: Black Politics and the Chicago Machine, 1931–1991 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); Drake and Cayton, Black Metropolis, esp. 342–77; and Elmer W. Henderson, “Political Changes among Negroes in Chicago during the Depression,” Social Forces 19 (October—May, 1941), 538–46.
31. As historians such as Kevin Gaines and Victoria Wolcott have shown, racial-uplift ideology changed over time. In general, its advocates began with the notion that an individual who improved his or her life had a responsibility to further collective racial uplift. Individuals who acquired middle-class status were responsible for helping others lift themselves and for convincing whites that blacks deserved equal opportunity. Gaines, Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997). Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham in Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church 1880–1920 (1993) discusses the connections between racial uplift ideology and church-centered reform movements before 1920. Stephanie J. Shaw in What a Woman Ought to Be and Do: Black Professional Women Workers during the Jim Crow Era (1996) examines the lives of black professional women between the 1870s and 1950s and how they carved out models of womanhood that valued community-minded individual progress. Victoria Wolcott in Remaking Respectability: African American Women in Interwar Detroit (2001) explores the influence of uplift ideology on black social movements in Detroit between the world wars.
32. For a description of the community’s anger regarding the Century of Progress Exposition, see Rydell, World of Fairs. For a description of the events at the 1933–34 fair, see Rydell, “Century of Progress Exposition,” in The Encyclopedia of Chicago, ed. James R. Grossman, Ann Durkin Keating, and Janice L. Reiff (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 124–26. For descriptions of African Americans’ movement for inclusion at the Progress Exposition, see Rydell, “Century of Progress Exposition,” 126, and Cheryl Ganz, “A New Deal for Progress: The 1933 Chicago World’s Fair” (PhD dissertation, University of Illinois at Chicago, 2005).
33. Rydell emphasizes the fact that Washington reacted against the racist depictions of Africans and the almost complete exclusion of African Americans from the 1933 Century of Progress Exposition in Chicago. Rydell, World of Fairs, 187–88. During the second half of the 1930s, the shift in electoral allegiances by African Americans who began to vote en masse further politicized the long-standing connection between black voters and the Republican Party.
34. Diamond Jubilee Exposition Authority, “American Negro Exposition: Report by Diamond Jubilee Exposition Authority to Afra-Merican Emancipation Exposition Commissions of the State of Illinois and of the Federal Government” (Chicago: Diamond Jubilee Exposition Authority, 1940), 6.
35. Claude A. Barnett to James W. Washington, December 27, 1939, Barnett Papers, 3:1:1:391.
36. The Exposition Authority consisted of A. W. Williams as secretary treasurer; Truman K. Gibson Jr., chair of the board of directors; and Claude A. Barnett, L. L. Ferguson, and Robert Bishop. Williams was president-treasurer of Unity Mutual Life Insurance Company in Chicago, and Ferguson was the general manager of Chicago’s Jackson Funeral System. Diamond Jubilee Exposition Authority, “American Negro Exposition,” 7–8.
37. Ibid., 4.
38. Ibid., 9–10.
39. Diamond Jubilee Exposition Authority, “Statement of Receipts, February 23 through November 30, 1940,” folder 65, box 164, Julius Rosenwald Fund Collection, Fisk University Archives.
40. A description of Jenkins’s letter is included in George W. Lawrence, chairman, Citizens Committee, Afra-Merican Emancipation Exposition Inc., to the members of the committee, June 12, 1940, Barnett Papers, 3:1:2:556–57.
41. Truman K. Gibson Jr. to Arthur W. Mitchell, August 14, 1940, folder 6, box 54, Arthur W. Mitchell Papers, Chicago History Museum (hereafter Mitchell Papers). The Democrats’ dominance at the exposition apparently came back to haunt the Exposition Authority, however, when the exposition ended in the red. When Barnett attempted to secure additional funds from the Illinois General Assembly to help pay off the debt, he was rebuffed by Republicans, who made significant gains in Illinois during the 1940 elections. Incidentally, this added to Bontemps’s and Hughes’s disappointment regarding their part in the fair, as they were counting on the allocation of additional funds in order to be paid for their part in the theater productions. Bontemps wrote Hughes that a friend of his “saw in the paper that the state legislature, now strongly [R]epublican, was kicking about footing the EXPO shortage which they said was entered into by a [D]emocratic majority and used for the advantage of that party.” Arna Bontemps to Langston Hughes, March 28, 1941, in Arna Bontemps–Langston Hughes Letters, 1925–1967, ed. Charles H. Nichols (1980; repr., New York: Dodd, Mead, 1990), 79.
42. Rydell records the contention of the Fighting Worker that “[t]he Exposition was arranged and financed by the New Deal and its Negro henchmen precisely in order to make palatable the War.” Rydell, World of Fairs, 190–91.
43. Whether or not the New Deal actually benefited African Americans equally was not, of course, the point. Indeed, the critical point is that the exposition showed how many different ways political calculations entered into the Democrats’ messages about racial progress. African American voters were especially important to both the Republicans and Democrats in 1940. Roosevelt attempted to reinvigorate the African American labor urban coalition that had begun to fray in the late 1930s largely because the problems of the Depression were far from resolved, especially for African Americans. Bitter battles with Republicans over the New Deal and Roosevelt’s hesitating support for the anti-Nazi war effort also chipped away at his electoral base.
44. Cavalcade of the American Negro, 92–94. The Federal Works Agency included exhibits from the Works Progress Administration, the Public Works Administration, the Public Roads Administration, and the Public Buildings Administration. Memo, unsigned, n.d., with descriptions of murals, dioramas, and exhibits, Barnett Papers, 3:1:1:715–28.
45. Stephen Early, secretary to the president, to Claude A. Barnett, telegram, 1:05 A.M., July 2, 1940, Barnett Papers, 3:1:2:982. Roosevelt’s telegram was a rather bland blessing for the exposition. Most interesting is that Roosevelt subtly invoked the pressing war in Europe. He wrote, “The steady progress of our Negro citizens during the three quarters of a century that have elapsed since their emancipation emphasize what can be accomplished by free men in a free country. Moreover, their achievements in art, letters, science and public service possible during a brief seventy-five years of freedom should give all Americans renewed determination to marshal all of our strength to maintain and defend and perpetuate our priceless heritage of free institution[s].” Although Roosevelt was likely using this event to build support for potential military actions, he inadvertently points to the most substantive legacy of the war as a racial uplift event. Namely, African Americans’ actions in the war itself became the basis for increasingly insistent demands for legal and social equality after the war.
46. Langston Hughes and Arna Bontemps to Claude A. Barnett, July 22, 1940, Barnett Papers, 3:1:3:146.
47. W. J. Alimono to Truman K. Gibson Jr., [n.d.], Barnett Papers, 3:1:3:969–71.
48. For Washington’s itinerary, see Barnett Papers, 3:1:1:1061. Regarding cooperation among federal administrators in the south, see J. B. Pierce, field agent, Hampton Institute, to T. M. Campbell, field agent, Tuskegee Institute, May 13, 1940, Barnett Papers, 3:1:2:045.
49. “Circulation of Negro Papers,” Barnett Papers, 3:1:3:1023–25.
50. “All three of Chicago’s network stations, WBBM, CBS; WGN, MBS; and WENR, NBC, have been generous in allotting time for broadcasts commemorating the exposition,” and broadcasts included descriptions of the exposition and the “Chimes of Normandy.” “Exposition Airs Various Groups,” Baltimore Afro-American, August 27, 1940, 8.
51. Exposition organizers arranged for special fares with the Illinois Central Railroad, the Southern Pacific Lines, the Missouri Pacific Lines, and the Lackawanna and Nickel Plate Lines out of upstate New York. Walter Lee and W. J. Alimono to Truman K. Gibson Jr., memo, April 26, 1940 Barnett Papers, 3:1:1:934; Southern Pacific Lines Passenger Traffic Manager J. T. Monroe to Texas & Louisiana Representatives, May 13, 1940, Barnett Papers, 3:1:2:047; and W. J. Alimono, Harlem Branch of the Negro Business Council, to Claude A. Barnett, July 11, 1940, Barnett Papers, 3:1:3:011–12.
52. “Negro World’s Fair,” Newsweek 16, no. 3, July 15, 1940, 19. “Negro World’s Fair,” Newsweek 16, no. 11, September 9, 1940, 20.
53. As Truman Gibson wrote to Claude Barnett, “On the basis of the 247,000 admission at the similar occasion held in Chicago 25 years ago to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Emancipation, when there were about 50,000 Negroes in Chicago and this year’s far greater show with 300,000 Negro population and the entire country to draw from, it seems apparent that our goal of 2,000,000 visitors is not much overdrawn.” Truman K. Gibson Jr. to Claude A. Barnett, memo, [n.d.], Barnett Papers, 3:1:1:562–69. “More than 2,000,000 persons are expected to see the exposition. . . . It will be similar in purpose but larger in scope to the fair held in Chicago 25 years ago celebrating 50 years of emancipation. At that time there were 247,000 admission to the smaller 15 day show.” Associated Negro Press, National News Service, deadline release, attached to Claude A. Barnett to Arthur W. Mitchell, March 11, 1940, folder 4, box 51, Mitchell Papers.
54. Diamond Jubilee Exposition Authority, “American Negro Exposition,” 37.
55. Ibid., 15.
56. Salvatore Salla was born in Kosrowa, Persia, and before World War I painted portraits for the Turkish sultan. In 1927, Salla came to Chicago and settled in Oak Park. He exhibited at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1929 and 1933 and was the official portrait artist for the Chicago Grand Opera during the 1930s. In 1935, Salla completed portraits of Illinois Governor Edward F. Dunne and Attorney General Otto Kerner. He remained a celebrated portraitist in Chicago into the 1960s. See Chicago Daily Tribune, September 27, 1931, E4; Eleanor Jewett, “Wealth of Exhibits for the Art Lover: Town and Suburbs Are Blossoming Forth with Paintings by Salla, Stacey, Grigware, and Others,” Chicago Daily Tribune, April 17, 1932, G4; and Chicago Daily Tribune, December 29, 1935, E4. Murals included “The Debate” between Frederick Douglass and Stephen A. Douglas; “Entertaining Royalty,” which showed the Fisk Jubilee Singers performing for Queen Victoria; “Music at Lincoln Shrine,” showing Marian Anderson’s controversial performance; “Interruption,” depicting African Americans attempting to educate themselves despite the harassment of Ku Klux Klansmen; “One Way Out,” showing Booker T. Washington, George Washington Carver, and Julius Rosenwald; “Athletics”; “Haiti”; “Negro Congressmen”; “Aid to Ethiopia”; “DuSable Trading with the Indians”; “Thanks for Freedom,” with ex-slaves thanking Lincoln; “The Sharecropper”; “New Church”; “Old Church”; and “War Scenes.” Diamond Jubilee Exposition Authority, “American Negro Exposition,” 17–18.
57. Diamond Jubilee Exposition Authority, “American Negro Exposition,” 17.
58. Among the many exposition organizers, Associated Negro Press President Claude A. Barnett and Secretary of Agriculture Henry A. Wallace likely held the most sway over who would participate in the fair. Wallace led the federal government’s participation, while Barnett spearheaded the letter-writing campaign to secure the participation of the governors of all forty-eight states (not all responded positively), the leaders of each of each Christian denomination, black sororities and fraternities, the leaders of numerous African nations, historically black colleges, and black businesses throughout the country. In addition, his connections with the many black newspapers across the nation placed him at the head of the publicity effort. The list of organizations Barnett contacted is much too long to detail here, but it is clear that he was biased in favor of liberals as opposed to radicals. In some instances, these choices were overtly political. Margaret Sanger’s Birth Control Federation of America, for example, initially purchased space for an exhibit, but the Exposition Authority ultimately barred it largely because representatives from the Catholic Church objected to its pro-choice message. Barnett and others at first expressed great interest in Sanger’s participation but abruptly canceled the exhibit in “an abiding spirit to create good-will toward all people.” Margaret Sanger herself responded, “If . . . the action taken by representatives of the Roman Catholic Church is considered by you and your Commission an act of ‘good-will,’ there is little hope of unity and cooperation among the great majority of the citizens of this country toward those few in the Catholic Church who seek to impose their views upon the non-Catholic majority of our population.” Margaret Sanger to Wendell E. Green, vice chairman, Afra-Merican Emancipation Exposition Commission, July 23, 1940, Barnett Papers, 3:1:3:157.
59. On the “Chimes of Normandy,” see Diamond Jubilee Exposition Authority, “American Negro Exposition,” 28; “Race Achievements,” Cleveland Gazette, July 13, 1940, 1; “Jam Opening of ‘Tropics after Dark’ at Exposition,” Chicago Defender, July 20, 1940, 3; and “Theater: North Hall,” official program, “Diamond Jubilee of Negro Progress: 75 Years of Negro Achievement,” (Chicago: Exposition Authority, 1940), 28. Arna Bontemps and Langston Hughes wrote “Jubilee: A Cavalcade of the Negro Theatre,” a history of African Americans on the stage, that they meant to be staged at the Tropical Gardens, but it was never staged. This became a sore point for Hughes and Bontemps, who were not paid for writing “Jubilee.” The Exposition Authority claimed, “Chimes became such a hit it was thought inadvisable to go to the expense of producing the other show.” Diamond Jubilee Exposition Authority, “American Negro Exposition,” 28. For a copy of “Jubilee: A Cavalcade of the Negro Theater,” see folder 6, box 164, Julius Rosen-wald Fund Collection, Fisk University Archives.
60. Truman K. Gibson Jr. to Arthur W. Mitchell, 14 August 1940, folder 6, box 54, Mitchell Papers.
61. Arthur M. Holland to Truman K. Gibson Jr., July 23, 1940, Barnett Papers, 3:1:3:155–56.
62. Union Amusement Company President Robert W. Mackie to the Afra-Merican Emancipation Commission, January 26, 1940, folder 1, box 164, Julius Rosenwald Fund Collection, Fisk University Archives. The organizers rejected these sites only “after heated and prolonged discussions,” which opened wounds that almost certainly played a part in the antagonism some displayed toward the fair. Diamond Jubilee Exposition Authority, “American Negro Exposition,” 7.
63. A. Lincoln Wisler to Dr. Midian O. Bousfield, telegram, January 24, 1940, folder 1, box 164, Julius Rosenwald Fund Collection, Fisk University Archives.
64. Claude A. Barnett to Mary Beattie Brady, July 31, 1940, Barnett Papers, 3:1:3:215.
65. Duke Ellington did play the exposition but only as a special appearance during the finals of the “Miss Bronze America” contest. Until the 1960s, the Chicago Musicians’ Federation was segregated, with the African Americans in Local 208. Local 208 pulled its musicians out of the “Chimes of Normandy” show because the exposition had allowed the non-union Catholic Youth Organization band to play at the fair. Unidentified document, possibly a press release, [n.d.], Barnett Papers, 3:1:3:239–40. Truman Gibson wrote disappointed to Ellington, “Sincerely regret inability to advise you sooner. Musicians union has held us up at every turn, defeating efforts to get show or Tropics Room going due to their demands.” Truman K. Gibson Jr. to Duke Ellington, telegram, July 10, 1940, Barnett Papers, 3:1:2:1090. In another instance, WPA Community Service Chief Robert I. McKeague wrote Barnett, “The following telegram was received. . . . ‘Due to gross irregularities existing at the American Negro Exposition permission to use WPA musicians has been withdrawn. Likewise members of Local 208 will not render their services. This action takes effect immediately. Signed H. W. Gray, President Local 208, AFM.” Robert I. McKeague to Claude A. Barnett, telegram, July 30, 1940, Barnett Papers, 3:1:3:207. Barnett commented to Mitchell, “The unions, even though they are part and parcel of our racial group, have treated us even more shamefully in proportion than the labor unions did the Chicago, New York and San Francisco fairs.” Claude A. Barnett to Arthur W. Mitchell, August 7, 1940, folder 5, box 54, Mitchell Papers.
66. In a letter to Roy Wilkins of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, African American journalist Frank Marshall Davis, member of the exposition’s publicity team, defended the Exposition Authority’s hiring decisions. He wrote, “The Exposition had more trouble with and threats from the Negro Musicians Unions than from any white union. . . . [A]round 30,000 posters were printed at a commercial firm. . . . This commercial firm was white as were the printers of the ‘direct mail publicity folders’ because, frankly, no Negro firm was capable of doing the job. . . . As a matter of fact, the Crisis is also printed in a white shop. Why?” And, finally, “Speaking of ‘the ice cream and hot dogs being made in white plants,’ it should be remembered that this concession was sold to the Young Drug Stores, largest Negro chain drug store in existence, and this firm knows precisely whose products it cares to handle.” Frank Marshall Davis to Roy Wilkins, in Crisis Magazine, January 7, 1941, Barnett Papers, 3:1:3:793.
67. Fay Young, “The Stuff Is Here. Past-Present-Future,” Chicago Defender, July 13, 1940, 24. Making matters worse, the Exposition Authority fired 141 workers in response to low attendance figures and drew a great deal of criticism when the Exposition ended in the red. ”President Roosevelt Opens Exposition,” Chicago Defender, July 13, 1940, 1.
68. “Exposition at Chicago Opens on July 4th,” Chicago Defender, June 29, 1940, 2. Regarding final costs, see Diamond Jubilee Exposition Authority, “American Negro Exposition,” 16.
69. Memo, unsigned, n.d., Description of the Department of Agriculture Exhibit, Barnett Papers, 3:1:3:1011–14.
70. Cavalcade of the American Negro, 92.
71. Joseph W. Hiscox, chief of agricultural exhibits, Department of Agriculture, to Claude A. Barnett, May 21, 1940, Barnett Papers, 3:1:2:153–6.
72. John C. Culver and John Hyde, American Dreamer: The Life and Times of Henry A. Wallace (New York: Norton, 2000), 19.
73. For a friendly retrospective on Mitchell’s career, see “Ex-Congressman Still Active after 20 Years Retirement,” Ebony 18, no. 10, August 1963, 40–46. The author thanks Dr. Perry Duis for providing this reference and for allowing him to use his MA thesis, Arthur W. Mitchell: New Deal Negro in Congress (University of Chicago, 1966).
74. When Mitchell argued that “Negro families” were “best adapted” to rural life, he echoed an old theme in racial thought according to which the rural south was “the Negro’s natural home.” As James Grossman argues in his classic history of the World War I–era Great Migration, this idea, which grew out of slave owners’ justifications for slavery, eventually was part of Booker T. Washington’s rural accommodationist ideology and served government officials’ consistent interests in stabilizing the black labor force. Mitchell’s commitment to African Americans’ rural future was strikingly similar to Emmett J. Scott’s efforts to convince blacks to stay in the south during World War I. Scott, special adjutant to the Secretary of War, was “Woodrow Wilson’s wartime ambassador to black Americans and former secretary to Booker T. Washington.” He attempted to help the Wilson administration diminish the migration’s “unsettling effects on both northern cities and the southern labor market.” James R. Grossman, Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners, and the Great Migration (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 15. Like Scott, Mitchell employed a romantic notion of African Americans as peasants tied naturally to the land. In his youth, Mitchell was also Washington’s personal secretary, and Roosevelt viewed Mitchell as “his best known African American defender.” Dennis Nordin, The New Deal’s Black Congressman: A Life of Arthur Wergs Mitchell (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1997), 140.
75. Arthur W. Mitchell, speech to the Committee on the Library, quoted in Printed Report No. 1979, Committee on the Library, submitted to the Committee of the Whole House by Mr. Keller, to accompany HR8826, April 18, 1940, folder 4, box 52, Mitchell Papers.
76. Arthur W. Mitchell to Henry Wallace, February 27, 1940, folder 11, box 50, Mitchell Papers; “The Cause of Negro Migration from the South—The Effect and Remedy,” speech of Hon. Arthur W. Mitchell, 76th Cong., 1st sess., Cong. Rec., February 9, 1939; Dr. Kelly Miller to Arthur W. Mitchell, copy, January 25, 1939; Arthur W. Mitchell to Dr. Kelly Miller, Howard University, copy February 7, 1939, folder 7, box 42, Mitchell Papers.
77. It should be noted that Wallace and Mitchell did not hold that African Americans ought to remain on the farm because biological differences made them unsuited to city life and industrial progress. Instead, the argument here is that biological explanations of race difference remained politically potent enough in 1940 to give a political imperative to a newer cultural explanation of race difference and African Americans’ connection to rural life. Kelly Miller to Arthur W. Mitchell, January 25, 1939, quoted in “Cause of Negro Migration from the South.”
78. Arthur W. Mitchell to Kelly Miller, February 7, 1939, quoted in “Cause of Negro Migration from the South.”
79. “Cause of Negro Migration from the South.”
80. Hale Woodruff began his explicitly political work as a cartoonist for the Indianapolis Ledger and continued to hone his political artistic vision while working among the many black American artists in Paris in the late 1920s and early 1930s and while studying with Diego Rivera in Mexico City in the mid-1930s. Woodruff took up a teaching position in Atlanta University’s art department after four years in Paris and became one of the key figures in the growing national community of black artists in the 1930s and 1940s. Woodruff drew on his background in the synthesis of art and politics as an artist and teacher until his death in 1980. Al Murray, Oral History Interview with Hale Woodruff, November 18, 1968, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-hale-woodruff-11463 (accessed December 13, 2011). The exposition marked a significant professional turning point for White, who was only twenty-one years old in 1940. A native of Chicago, White had worked for the WPA and became part of the burgeoning local black arts scene, but he did not jump to the national stage until the years immediately after the Exposition. Barnwell, Charles White, 6–11.
81. Cavalcade of the American Negro, 63.
82. Ibid.
83. Lawrence’s work at the exposition was part of a prolific period in his career between 1938 and 1941, when he completed two hundred paintings on African American history. During this time, he became the first black artist to be represented by a major commercial gallery. Lawrence painted “poignant social commentary on the effects of racism and bigotry in American culture.” Peter T. Nesbett and Michelle DuBois, Over the Line: The Art and Life of Jacob Lawrence (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2000), 11. The Life of Toussaint L’Ouverture anticipated Lawrence’s 1941 series, The Migration of the Negro, in its pedagogical purpose, its dramatic portrayals of black history, and in the liberating potential Lawrence saw in the actions of black southerners. Lawrence’s work exemplified the way in which the exposition marked a transition in the role of black history. Before the late 1930s and early 1940s, black history, as practiced by Carter G. Woodson, Charles Wesley, and others, documented African Americans’ past achievements in order to contradict the argument—dominant in white intellectual circles and popular understanding—that African Americans were somehow strangers within the nation. Lawrence’s paintings represent the move to do more with black history than to just demonstrate African Americans’ contributions to world history by highlighting liberation history.
84. Cavalcade of the American Negro, 91. Artist William Edouard Scott directed the painting of these murals. There were eighteen murals of African American achievement, including “Building of the Sphinx,” “Discovery of Iron in Africa,” as well as contributions to farming and science, thirty-two portraits of famous African Americans and depictions of dramatic moments in African American history, such as ex-slaves thanking Abraham Lincoln for their freedom. The murals also portrayed the evils of slavery, the slave trade, and the Ku Klux Klan. For a description of their themes, see Diamond Jubilee Exposition Authority, “American Negro Exposition,” 17–18.
85. Significantly, Arna Bontemps’s Drums at Dusk (1939) also took up the implications of the Haitian Revolution.
86. In a version of the book updated in 1948, Frazier argued, “The 1940 census showed a larger proportion of families with women heads among Negroes than among whites in both rural and urban areas of the South. Moreover, it also appeared that in the Southern cities a larger proportion of families were under the authority of a woman than in the rural areas. In the urban areas of southern states 31.1 per cent of the Negro families were without male heads while the proportion for rural-nonfarm areas was 22.5 per cent and for rural-farm areas 11.7 per cent.” E. Franklin Frazier, The Negro Family in the United States: Revised and Abridged Edition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), 103.
87. The following description of Frazier’s contribution to the social science exhibit derives from the program distributed to the exposition’s audience. Diamond Jubilee Exposition Authority, “American Negro Exposition,” 12. This is, of course, just a summary of Frazier’s arguments that does not capture the complexity of his thesis in The Negro Family in the United States. This version, however, suits the purposes of this paper because it is a close approximation of the message the exposition’s visitors saw.
88. Diamond Jubilee Exposition Authority, “American Negro Exposition,” 12.
89. Cavalcade of the American Negro, 17.
90. Diamond Jubilee Exposition Authority, “American Negro Exposition,” 12. It is impossible to discuss fully the implications and history of Frazier’s arguments in the space allotted here. The literature on the causes of social disorganization, “broken” families, and poverty is immense. A good starting place is Anthony M. Platt, E. Franklin Frazier Reconsidered (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1991).
91. Frazier, Negro Family in the United States, 225–44.
92. James A. Porter, Modern Negro Art (1943; repr., Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1992), 132.
93. This sculpture was just a hint of the monumental work Catlett continued to produce. After moving to Mexico in 1946, Catlett took advantage of the freedom of expression available there relative to the constrictions radical artists in the United States faced during the McCarthy years.
94. The Cavalcade reflected the hope in the late 1930s and 1940 that the Congress of Industrial Organizations, which was then creating interracial unions, would provide a new source of economic and political power, one not provided by the exclusionary American Federation of Labor. “The outlook for the Negro laborer depends mainly on the future attitude of the American Federation of Labor, the Congress of Industrial Organizations, and fair administration of the Wagner Labor Relations Act. John L. Lewis has not been blind to the rights and welfare of black workers. . . . On the other hand, William Green and the American Federation of Labor evade the real issue of discrimination” with empty rhetoric. Cavalcade of the American Negro, 58.
95. Cavalcade of the American Negro, 59.
96. Walker’s later works, including the collection of poems For My People (1942) and the novel Jubilee (1966), explore African Americans’ history and revolutionary potential in the United States.
97. Margaret Walker, “Epic for the Jubilee Year of Negro Freedom,” Barnett Papers, 3:1:2:523–32.
98. Arthur Mitchell wrote Chicago Mayor Edward Kelley, “The exhibits which you are showing the American public will do much in bringing about this recognition which up to this time has been so unjustly withheld from him.” Arthur W. Mitchell to Mayor Edward J. Kelly and the Members of the Commission of the American Negro Exposition, telegram, July 3, 1940, ‚folder 8, box 53, Mitchell Papers.