CHAPTER 6
World’s Fair
Just as St. Louis was glossing its image for the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition, muckraker Lincoln Steffens was branding its outrageously corrupt elected officials with the charge that they ran “the worst governed city in the land.” But by the Fair’s April opening, civic leaders were headlong into a crusade to create a “New St. Louis” with less graft, less bribery and better municipal services. The city’s boosters hoped to transform the town into a place worthy of its new international aspirations and pretensions.
Nudged in part by St. Louis Mirror publisher William Marion Reed, and swept up in the reform spirit of Mayor Rolla Wells, the nation’s fourth-largest city appropriated millions of dollars to install gas streetlights, construct sewers, and engineer a purification system to eliminate the notoriously cloudy drinking water. Because Sarah’s Market Street neighborhood happened to surround Union Station, the transportation hub for Fair visitors and dignitaries, its most visible streets received at least a superficial sprucing-up.
In addition to the evidence of the Fair’s impending arrival just beyond her doorstep, Sarah could easily have read about the preparations in the Palladium, the paper owned by fellow St. Paul member J. W. Wheeler. But nothing could have prepared her for the daily procession of Fair-goers who flowed from the train depot by the thousands en route to the fairgrounds in the city’s far western suburbs. By the close of the Louisiana Purchase centennial in December, nearly twenty million people had traveled by trolley, buggy, foot, horseback and the still rare automobile to enjoy the sights. Although no official attendance records were kept by race, an estimated 100,000 African Americans entered the gates of the largest exhibition the world had ever seen.
Electricity was still enough of a novelty in most American homes that Fair-goers were enraptured each night as the lightbulb-lined façades of the Beaux Arts exhibition halls flashed on to create an incandescent paradise. With the evening sky darkening from copper to charcoal, reflections glittered upon the terraced waterfall that tumbled from the steps of the domed Festival Hall into a lake filled with boaters.
The Fair was a magnet for highbrow and lowbrow alike, and an opportunity Sarah would not have missed. Not far from the plazas and expansive gardens of the Ivory City, families strolled along the mile-long cobblestone Pike, a carnival midway that was geared to less lofty tastes. Engulfed in the blended aroma of hot dogs, cotton candy and sawdust, children and adults savored the latest confection: a thin, baked waffle ingeniously funneled around a single scoop of ice cream. International in its reach, the Fair attracted both foreign and domestic visitors, from President Theodore Roosevelt to German sociologist Max Weber, from American “Wild West” cowboys to South African Boer War reenactors.
Unofficially and inadvertently the Fair also provided a parallel showcase for African Americans. During the on-site Third International Olympiad, George Coleman Poage won twin bronze medals for the 200-meter and 400-meter hurdle events, making him the first person of his race to be so honored. In the large Filipino village, Lieutenant Walter H. Loving directed the disciplined and precise Philippines Constabulary Band, a group Philippines Governor-General (and future United States President) William Howard Taft had commissioned him to organize in 1901.
The Fair also attracted black orators, authors and entertainers, who displayed their talents in halls, theaters and churches within easy walking distance of Sarah and C.J.’s Clark Avenue flat. A few blocks away pianist Joe Jordan bested other ragtime legends to win Tom Turpin’s national competition at Douglass Hall in late February. Three weeks later poet Paul Laurence Dunbar performed a grand recital at the Central Baptist Church. The Colored Knights of Pythias, arrayed in gold-roped regalia, proudly hosted brethren from other cities at their local headquarters. Small-time hustlers sported Stetsons and sparkling paste stickpins in pool halls along Market Street, an all-day, all-night amusement zone auxiliary to the Fair.
Scholar W.E.B. Du Bois and Tuskegee Institute founder Booker T. Washington, embroiled in an increasingly contentious public debate over Washington’s more conservative, more accommodating approach to civil rights, both drew large crowds in separate St. Louis appearances. Washington, speaking on the fairgrounds in late June, was a veteran of World’s Fair orations, having reassured whites at Atlanta’s 1895 Cotton States and International Exposition that “the wisest among my race understand that the agitation of questions of social equality is the extremest folly, and that progress in the enjoyment of all the privileges that will come to us must be the result of severe and constant struggle rather than of artificial forcing.”
Du Bois, who recently had helped launch the politically militant Niagara Movement that was to test Washington’s preeminence, filled Douglass Hall with “the most intelligent people of the community,” reported the Palladium in early October.
Much of St. Louis’s black community welcomed the exposition festivities with optimism. Like other visitors, they were awed by the young century’s newfangled inventions. Like other Americans, they wanted to see the 160 automobiles that were on display and to view the Missouri countryside from the magnificent Ferris wheel, whose trolley-sized cars comfortably seated more than four dozen passengers.
In frequent updates on fairgrounds construction, the Palladium encouraged readers like Sarah to visit early and often. Faithfully predicting that “no discrimination will be made,” the weekly was enthusiastic about the prospects for exhibiting African American contributions to the development of the Louisiana Territory. “The representation of the Negro race at the Fair will, it is anticipated, be a highly commendable one,” editor Wheeler assured.
For Wheeler and many other middle-class blacks, the Fair presented a forum in which to challenge Jim Crow segregation. Since 1896, when the Supreme Court of the United States had given its blessing to the disingenuous “separate but equal” doctrine in its Plessy v. Ferguson ruling, discrimination in public places had become entrenched. With global attention focused on St. Louis, the World’s Fair Committee on Negro Day hoped to present “the true status of the Negro Question” and believed that “the coming together of so many thoughtful men and women of the race can not fail to make a favorable impression on the assembled multitude.”
For hundreds of African Americans the Fair also meant jobs. While a few black musicians performed on the Pike, most black Fair workers were relegated to unskilled service jobs. Those with entrepreneurial instincts cashed in on off-site services to black visitors, providing lodging, food and drink in their own establishments. With the segregated white hotels filled to capacity for the run of the Fair, hundreds of black St. Louisans and job seekers from bordering states filled positions as maids, cooks, porters, janitors and butlers. More work meant unprecedented disposable income for a community that had always found itself at the mercy of a racially circumscribed job market. Some of those extra quarters and dollars found their way to hairdressers like Sarah, whose services appealed to women with rising personal expectations and a growing acceptance of cosmetics. Increased wages were also channeled into more substantive investments. According to the American Eagle, African Americans in St. Louis bought real estate valued at more than half a million dollars during 1903 and 1904. “Ragtime Millionaire,” a tune heard often during the Fair, characterized the mood:
I’m a ragtime millionaire,
I’ve got nothing but money to spend;
Automobiles floating in the breeze,
I’m afraid I may die of money disease.
Don’t bother a minute about what those white folks care:
I’m a ragtime millionaire.
At the time Sarah certainly was not prosperous enough to suffer from “money disease,” but she, like most of St. Louis, was engulfed by an overwhelming infusion of ideas, people and possibilities. From time to time, though, the African American enthusiasm for the Fair wavered, especially when rumors surfaced in April that the exposition was falling short on its promise to showcase their community. In response to an invitation from the chairman of the proposed August 1 Negro Day, Booker T. Washington suggested that his decision to speak would be influenced by the treatment blacks received on the fairgrounds in the coming weeks. “The impression is fast spreading through the country among the colored people that they are to receive nothing in the way of accommodations in restaurants, etc., on the Exposition grounds and this report is causing a rather bitter feeling among the race,” he informed William Farmer, chairman of the event.
In fact, Washington’s fears were confirmed: few eating establishments were willing to serve African Americans. “The black man who desires refreshment on the Exposition ground,” wrote one Fair-goer, “had better carry his knapsack and canteen with him.” When the freshwater concessionaire worried that whites would not patronize his fountain if blacks used the same glasses, he designated “distinctively marked goblets” and “special tanks of water . . . for colored people.”
Long gone were the early, official promises that blacks—“now an element of such great importance in the industrial, political and social life of the Union”—would be included in the exhibits just as they had been at the Atlanta and Nashville fairs in the 1890s. Instead of an opportunity to display their achievements since Emancipation, they were largely omitted from the fair’s exhibits. The Old Plantation, a Pike concession “showing Negro life before the War of the Rebellion,” lamented Emmett Scott, Booker T. Washington’s private secretary, “is all there is to let the world know we are in existence, aside from a small exhibit of a Mississippi College, and one or two other exhibits of no very particular moment.”
If Sarah and other local black visitors were proud to see themselves reflected at all in the Missouri State exhibit, it was small consolation that an area set aside for a lone photograph of Sumner High School’s faculty and the Palladium’s 1903 press run was all their presence in the state merited.
But a dismissal of African American contributions was only part of the Fair’s overarching racial and cultural agenda. In the quarter century between 1876 and 1901, civic leaders across America—from Charleston to New Orleans, Chicago to Nashville, Philadelphia to Atlanta—had competed for the honor to host world expositions. Designed above all to boost commerce and promote innovative technology, the financially lucrative events also reinforced Anglo-Saxon cultural supremacy and provided a justification for the racial discrimination that Sarah and other African Americans frequently faced. While comprehensive exhibits at the St. Louis World’s Fair traced a century’s evolution in the fields of electricity, machinery, transportation, agriculture and education, W. J. McGee, head of the Fair’s Department of Anthropology, aimed also “to represent human progress . . . from savagery to civic organization” in living “museums” throughout the fairgrounds. “It is a matter of common observation that the white man can do more than the yellow, the yellow man more and better than the red or black,” McGee had written five years earlier.
If Sarah and C.J. ventured to McGee’s exhibits, they saw that he had stratified the world’s nationalities into re-created village “laboratories” where nearly 2,000 mostly people of color had been imported like curios from their native countries. The Japanese were considered the most highly evolved Asians, elevated not only by their exquisite art and architecture but by their recent victories in the Russo-Japanese War. Beneath them McGee placed groups of Patagonians from Argentina, Pygmies and Zulus from Africa and Native Americans from the Western U.S. territories. But the anthropologists’ most ambitious undertaking was a United States government-sponsored forty-seven-acre reservation of more than a thousand Filipinos, ranging from Manila-based paramilitary troops to tribes that Fair planners described as Babogo “savages” and “monkey-like” Negritos. Tourists who visited the Filipino reservation were left with a skewed view both of the Philippines and of world civilization, and with a clear sense that “white and strong,” in McGee’s words, were “synonymous.” It was the same message Sarah had heard all her life.
By the time the National Association of Colored Women—a group of the most prominent black women in the country—arrived at Sarah’s church for its fourth biennial convention in mid-July, the stage was set for a highly charged showdown over the Fair and the “race question.” Although Exposition president David R. Francis, a former Missouri governor and U.S. Secretary of the Interior, had issued a “general directive that discrimination had to cease,” the planned August 1 Negro Day was in jeopardy. Just a few days earlier, members of the 8th Illinois Regiment of Chicago had rejected an invitation to march at the Fair when they learned that white Georgia troops had objected to their presence among other American military men. Now the 200 NACW delegates also were debating whether to cancel their own daylong excursion to the fairgrounds.
Assembled in St. Paul’s sanctuary for their opening ceremony, the handsomely dressed women enjoyed a recital of classical and religious music performed by the L’Ouverture Elementary School children’s chorus and the St. Paul and Central Baptist Church choirs. “Future success commensurate with that of the past is ours, if we hew to the line in teaching our sons and daughters to love virtue,” NACW president Silone Yates of Kansas City advised the members in her convention charge. Yates and the others saw themselves as “progressive colored women,” whose motto—“Lifting As We Climb”—served as a promise to their “neglected and unprogressive sisters,” especially those in need of “uplifting influences of freedom and education.”
For Sarah and the other members of St. Paul, these well-educated, well-traveled visitors—representing 15,000 women from thirty-one states—created a vision of black elite propriety. The St. Louis delegation, whose members belonged to the community’s church circles, benevolent societies, literary clubs and the colored Women’s Christian Temperance Union chapter, included many women Sarah had come to know at St. Paul. Among them were Lavinia Carter, an early board member of the St. Louis Colored Orphans’ Home, and St. Louis Federation president Maria Harrison, Sarah’s former neighbor and president of the orphans’ home.
With the field of social work still in its infancy, these women had already founded orphanages and retirement homes for aging freedmen and freedwomen, opened kindergartens and tuberculosis recovery camps, and crusaded against alcoholism and prostitution. Fifteen years earlier Sarah and Lelia had been beneficiaries of their early initiatives. And while the women may have pointed during the conference to Sarah’s accomplishments with some sense of pride, most of them were not yet ready to bring a former washerwoman into their inner social circle. Eventually, however, she would become one of their most valued members.
In 1896, six years after the founding of the white General Federation of Women’s Clubs, the NACW held its first meeting, consolidating two smaller national black women’s organizations. The impetus to launch the group had arisen in part because of the GFWC’s refusal to grant their membership request, in part as a response to a slanderous insult regarding the morality of black women.
After Ida B. Wells-Barnett, the pioneering journalist and antilynching advocate, blasted America’s tolerance for lynching during a well-received speaking tour in Great Britain, James W. Jacks, president of the Missouri Press Association, fired off a letter to an officer of the newly formed British antilynching society. “The Negroes in this country [are] wholly devoid of morality,” he indicted. “The women [are] prostitutes and all [are] natural thieves and liars.” Unable to tolerate the affront, black Bostonian and suffragette Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin sent out the call that assembled the National Federation of Afro-American Women, the predecessor to the NACW.
With protest so much a part of the association’s short history, many of the St. Louis conventioneers vowed to voice their objections when they learned that Hallie Quinn Brown, a world-renowned elocutionist and NACW member in excellent standing, had been denied an opportunity to apply for a job on the fairgrounds. Led by a “vehement” Margaret Murray Washington, the wife of Booker T. Washington, the women passed a resolution “to withdraw the decision to hold a session at the World’s Fair grounds.” Although the local committee opposed the boycott, Margaret Washington charged the exposition directors with discrimination “against Colored women in the matter of securing employment on the grounds and against the race in general.”
The Missourians were sorely disappointed because they had planned a festive day, including a motorcade along the boulevards of the Ivory City with hopes of making a conspicuous and symbolic statement. Their planned spectacle of several hundred well-dressed and dignified Negro women, they believed, would counter the Pike’s portrayal of the world’s people of color as primitive and savage. Instead, the group canceled its outing and reconvened at St. Paul to continue the assembly’s more substantive business proceedings.
Lynching, a topic that would concern Sarah in the years to come, was high on their agenda. Troubled by the escalation of racially motivated murders since the Civil War—nearly 700 blacks had been killed by whites in the South just in the decade leading to the World’s Fair—the women approved a resolution condemning mob violence. “We the representatives of Negro womanhood do heartily deplore and condemn this barbarous taking of human life,” they asserted, aware of the irony that their race had been labeled “barbaric” by the Fair organizers. Mindful that many of them would soon be returning home on filthy, poorly ventilated Jim Crow train cars, they also urged a boycott of segregated transportation systems in “Southern cities, states and towns that discriminated against blacks.”
Two other contentious issues—more cultural and moral than legal—had surfaced during the convention. Ida Joyce Jackson, president of the Colorado State Federation, urged the delegates to support her condemnation of ragtime music. With equal fervor, Cornelia Bowen, founder of Alabama’s Mt. Meigs School, denounced “hair-wrapping” because she considered the practice imitative of whites. Jackson, a classically trained musician, viewed the increasingly popular “rag time, coon songs, and cake walks as disgraceful, vulgar and destructive of good taste and self respect [for] all Colored people, who indulged in or tolerated them.” In language reminiscent of the late-twentieth-century furor over gangster rap, temperance activist and future NACW president Lucy Thurman bemoaned the fact “that the musical taste and talent of the race is being destroyed by this so-called ‘music.’”
This collision of art and ethnicity, of cultural expression and morals, created tension among African Americans, especially across class lines. Sarah’s thoughts on the debate are not known, though years later she enjoyed ragtime and jazz, unlike Du Bois, who considered ragtime and cakewalk dances “the chief amusements of ‘fourth and third grade Negroes.’” Yet Du Bois sensitively articulated the “double-consciousness” and “sense of always looking at oneself through the eyes of others” that were reflected in ragtime and accounted for much of the emotional and psychological conflict African Americans experienced. “One ever feels his two-ness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body.”
The dichotomy he described was never more apt than in the conundrum of Negro hair, a subject about which Sarah had given a great deal of thought. And just as race, morality and music had collided at the NACW convention, so too did racial identity, class and hair.
Cornelia Bowen, a former slave and member of Tuskegee’s first graduating class in 1885, told her NACW sisters about Mt. Meigs’s Anti-Hair-Wrapping Clubs, whose members had vowed “not to wrap their hair in an effort to straighten it.” A Booker T. Washington protégée, Bowen likely was aware of her mentor’s disdain for such practices. “It is foolish to try [to] make hair straight,” she scolded, “when God saw fit to make it kinky.”
Baptist organizer and NACW member Nannie Helen Burroughs agreed wholeheartedly with Bowen. “What every woman who bleaches and straightens out needs, is not her appearance changed, but her mind changed,” she wrote in “Not Color but Character,” a Voice of the Negro article published that very month. “If Negro women would use half the time they spend on trying to get white, to get better, the race would move forward apace,” she admonished. Burroughs had a point. And such strong emotions confronted Sarah as she continued her work as a sales agent for Annie Pope-Turnbo. But her customers’ happiness, once their hair began to grow, was all the proof she needed that she was performing a useful service. She was convinced that she was helping her clients feel more attractive and confident.
Just as Sarah’s scalp treatment skills had boosted both her income and her personal vision of herself, the World’s Fair activities around her painted unexplored vistas. In the most American of impulses, she sensed opportunity and the chance to reinvent herself. Not yet divorced from John Davis, but living with C. J. Walker, she had grown increasingly anxious about remaining in St. Louis. In plotting her next move, she chose Denver, where her sister-in-law, Lucy Breedlove Crockett, still lived with her four daughters. Three states and nearly a thousand miles west of St. Louis, the Colorado capital was a place where Sarah believed she could make an unfettered start. And with twenty-year-old Lelia not yet willing to relocate, her nieces—Anjetta, Thirsapen, Mattie and Gladis—would provide a ready-made workforce.
On Wednesday, July 19, 1905, with the temperature passing ninety degrees, Sarah boarded a hot, sooty westbound train, her bag filled with Pope-Turnbo’s Wonderful Hair Grower, her mind racing with anticipation.