Fixing race: Visual representations of African Americans at the World's Columbian Exposition, Chicago, 1893

Patterns of Prejudice

Volumn 41, Issue 5, 2007, Pages 435-465

  Cooks, Bridget R ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

African Americans; Behaviour; Blacks; Caricature; Cartoons; Expositions; Illustration; Labour; Race; Stereotypes; World's Columbian Exposition

Indexed keywords

EID: 35748966132     PISSN: 0031322X     EISSN: 14617331     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/00313220701657278     Document Type: Article

References (62)

1. In the fifteen issues of Harper's Weekly that published the Johnson family cartoons, no other caricatures of any ethnic or racial group were printed. Newell published three illustrations unrelated to the series in two of the same Harper's Weekly issues in which the Johnson family cartoons appear. The first was the cover image of the 23 September 1893 (no. 1918) issue illustrating the first instalment of the short story 'The Moonshiners at Hoho-Hebee Falls' by Charles Egbert Craddock (i.e. Mary N. Murfree). The second image, published in the same issue, accompanies the article 'Free Food for Chicago's Poor', and Newell's third, published in the 30 September 1893 (no. 1919) issue, illustrates the second instalment of the Craddock story. All three depict white people nataralistically and do not contain any of the elements of humour or debased exaggeration that define caricature.
2. Two recent publications address earlier Harper's Weekly cartoons that ridiculed Blacks. See Shawn Michelle Smith, Photography on the Color Line: W. E. B. DuBois, Race, and Visual Culture (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press 2004)
3. and Michael D. Harris, Colored Pictures: Race and Visual Representation (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press 2003) for discussions of racist cartoons published in the late 1870s to early 1880s. These earlier Thomas Nast and Sol Eytinge, Jr cartoons mocked the African-American elite during Reconstruction. Harris briefly refers to examples of Newell's 1893 series in the context of popular depictions of African Americans in the nineteenth century.
4. C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow [1955] (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2002), 18.
5. It must be noted that, in 1892, Homer Plessy challenged one such law, Act No. 111, the Separate Car Law of 1890 in Louisiana. The 1896 decision of Plessy v. Ferguson, handed down three years after the appearance of Newell's cartoons in Harper's Weekly, legalized the concept of separate but equal accommodation for Blacks and Whites.
6. Grace Elizabeth Hale, Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South 1890-1940 (New York: Pantheon Books 1998), 21.
7. Mark M. Smith, How Race Is Made: Slavery, Segregation, and the Senses (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press 2006), 7.
8. Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York and London: Oxford University Press 1995), 6.
9. Lisa Gitelman, Scripts, Grooves, and Writing Machines: Representing Technology in the Edison Era (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press 1999), 133.
10. These caricatures are evident in minstrel shows, popular art and fine art. See Guy C. McElroy, Facing History: The Black Image in American Art, 1710-1940 (San Francisco: Bedford Arts/ Washington, D.C.: Corcoran Gallery of Art 1990) for a sample of these depictions.
11. Gitelman, Scripts, Grooves, and Writing Machines, 133.
12. Ibid., 133-7.
13. Stereotypical African-American characters have been discussed by many notable scholars. For a discussion of these characters in art and popular culture, see the remarkable and ambitious documentary film Ethnic Notions (director/producer: Marlon Riggs, 1987);
14. the related exhibition catalogue, Robbin Henderson, Pamela Fabry and Adam David Miller (eds), Ethnic Notions: Black Images in the White Mind: An Exhibition of Afro-American Stereotype and Caricature from the Collection of Janette Faulkner (Berkeley, CA: Berkeley Art Museum 1982);
15. Patricia A. Turner, Ceramic Uncles and Celluloid Mammies: Black Images and Their Influence on Culture (New York: Anchor Books 1994);
16. Albert Boime, The Art of Exclusion: Representing Blacks in the Nineteenth Century (London: Thames and Hudson 1990);
17. McElroy, Facing History;
18. and Bridget R. Cooks, 'See me now', Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies, vol. 36, September 1995, 67-84.
19. For a discussion of these characters in performance and film, see Robert C. Toll, Blacking Up: The Minstrel Show in Nineteenth Century America (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press 1974);
20. William J. Mahar, Behind the Burnt Cork Mask: Early Blackface Minstrelsy and Antebellum American Popular Culture (Urbana: University of Illinois Press 1999);
21. W. T. Lhamon, Jr., Raising Cain: Blackface Performance from Jim Crow to Hip Hop (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1998);
22. and Donald Bogle, Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films, 4th edn (New York: Continuum 2001).
23. For a particular discussion of black style, see Shane White and Graham White, Stylin': African American Expressive Culture from Its Beginnings to the Zoot Suit (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press 1998).
24. Patricia Turner explains that, like any other slave, the head female house slave was unlikely to be well fed. It was more likely that the mammy would be a thin, malnourished woman who was not given the privilege of eating enough food. 'Their foodstuffs were severely rationed. They were more likely to be light rather than darker skinned because household jobs were frequently assigned mixed race women. They were unlikely to be old because nineteenth century black women just did not live very long; fewer than 10 percent lived beyond their fiftieth birthday during the antebellum south' (Turner, Ceramic Uncles and Celluloid Mammies, 44).
25. For a discussion of the representation of black children in popular culture for adults and children, see Jan Nederveen Pieterse, White on Black: Images of Africa and Blacks in Western Popular Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press 1992), ch. 11, 'Kidstuff'.
26. Michael Patrick Hearn, 'Peter Newell (1862-1924)', in Lewis Carroll, More Annotated Alice: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There (New York: Random House 1990), xxiv and xxi.
27. The first artist to illustrate Carroll's Alice books was Sir John Tenniel, but Harper and Brothers commissioned Newell to create new compositions for their upcoming editions (Hearn, 'Peter Newell (1862-1924)', xxx). Newell is also recognized for creative innovations in children's books, evident in his publications Topsys & Turvys (1893 and 1894), The Hole Book (1908) and The Slant Book (1910), among others.
28. A body of work that includes racist cartoons by popular illustrators is not uncommon. Like Newell, Dr Seuss (i.e. Theodor Geisel) is one of America's most beloved children's authors. In addition to his children's books, Geisel created racist depictions in editorial cartoons of racial Others in the service of American nationalism. This other body of work did not hamper Geisel's career as a successful illustrator in the mainstream press. See Richard H. Minear, Dr Seuss Goes to War: The World War II Editorial Cartoons of Theodor Seuss Geisel (New York: New Press 1999), for a discussion of Geisel's anti-Japanese and anti-Japanese American cartoons published in PM newspaper in 1941-3.18
29. Newell's racist caricatures are mentioned but not criticized by Hearn in his 1990 introduction and by Gay Walker in the catalogue to the exhibition, 'Peter Newell: American Original: Artist, Illustrator, Humorist', Sterling Memorial Library, Yale University, February-May 1989. Criticism of Newell's caricatures has been addressed in the first chapter, 'The struggle for Negro self-representation in the Chicago Columbian Exposition, 1893', of my dissertation, 'Seen and Not Seen: A History of Black Representation and Self-Representation in Art Exhibitions in the United States, 1893-1998', Ph.D. thesis, University of Rochester, 2001, and by Michael D. Harris, who characterizes the cartoons as part of an offensive tradition that 'graphically articulated the inappropriateness of full black participation in American society' (Harris, Colored Pictures, 76). Although images of 'darkies' were most prevalent in Newell's racist work, he also produced racist images of Irish and Chinese immigrants. However, the scope of this article allows only for a focus on the specific series he produced of Blacks at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition.
30. Reid Badger argues that, physically, the exhibition was 'a magnificent stage prop' that created a fantasy setting of white buildings in which visitors could forget the reality of their conditions. The function of the architecture of the fair was 'to serve as an ideal counterweight on the cultural scale to the confusing diversity of physical and material change'; Reid Badger, The Great American Fair: The World's Columbian Exposition and American Culture (Chicago: Nelson Hall 1979), 127. The World's Columbian Exposition was nicknamed White City because the architectural plan by Burnham and Root consisted of all-white structures built in a neo-classical style. The nickname took on a double meaning, referring also to the exclusionary racial policies of the exposition.
31. Nina Silber, The Romance of Reunion: Northerners and the South 1865-1900 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press 1993), 137.
32. The discourse of African-American exclusion from the 1893 exposition has been addressed by several authors. The most comprehensive discussion is Christopher Robert Reed, 'All the World Is Here!': The Black Presence at White City (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press 2000), 58.
33. For a specific focus on exclusion by race and gender, see Ann Massa, 'Black women in the "White City'", Journal of American Studies, vol. 8, 1974, 319-37.
34. Robert Rydell's introduction to a recently reprinted 1893 pamphlet also puts the issue of African-American exclusion in perspective; Ida B. Wells, Frederick Douglass, Irvine Garland Penn and Ferdinand L. Barnett, The Reason Why the Colored American Is Not in the World's Columbian Exposition: The Afro-American's Contribution to Columbian Literature [1893], ed. Robert W. Rydell (Urbana: University of Illinois Press 1999). Blacks were excluded both as potential organizers and as visitors; Reed discusses the presence of Blacks as visitors to the fair in 'All the World Is Here!'.
35. August Meier and Elliot M. Rudwick, 'Come to the fair?', The Crisis: A Record of the Darker Races, vol. 72, March 1965, 146-50, 194-8 (194).
36. Ibid.
37. Elliott M. Rudwick and August Meier, 'Black man in the "White City": Negroes and the Columbian Exposition, 1893', Phylon: The Atlanta University Review of Race and Culture, vol. 26, 1965, 354-61.
38. Ibid.
39. Because of the difficulties in securing funding and African-American support for the pamphlet, only 10,000 copies were printed and distributed during the last three months of the fair. The pamphlet was opposed by some African Americans, specifically by editors of the black press, most of whom refused to print the announcement. Rudwick and Meier, 'Black man in the "White City", 356.
40. President Harrison appointed Douglass to serve as Minister Resident and Consul General to Haiti from September 1889 to July 1891. Never before had an African American been appointed to the position of foreign minister. Whites had always played that role, and the appointment was greatly contested. Although Douglass was not Haitian, he was a man of African descent, representing other people of African descent.
41. Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells, ed. Alfreda M. Duster (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1970), 116-18.
42. Two groups of African-American women formed the World's Columbian Association and the Women's Columbian Auxiliary Association to express their desire for exhibits featuring the work of African-American women in the Woman's Building. See Jeanne M. Weimann, The Fair Women (Chicago: Academy Chicago 1981), 79, and Massa, 'Black women in the "White City'", 322.
43. This struggle included a series of short-lived clerical appointments to the board of two African-American women, Mrs A. M. Curtis and Fannie Barrier Williams. These appointments placed African-American women in token positions without decision-making powers, and further exacerbated the issue of African-American women's representation. See Massa, 'Black women in the "White City'", 335.
44. Julie K. Brown, Contesting Images: Photography and the World's Columbian Exposition (Tucson: University of Arizona Press 1994), xiii.
45. Michael O'Malley, 'Specie and species: race and the money question in nineteenth-century America', American Historical Review, vol. 99, April 1994, 369-95 (381, 373).
46. For discussions of the role of nineteenth-century expositions and exhibitions, see Susan Porter Benson, Steven Brier and Roy Rosenzweig (eds), Presenting the Past: Essays on History and the Public (Philadelphia: Temple University Press 1986);
47. Robert W. Rydell and Nancy E. Gwinn (eds), Fair Representations: World's Fairs and the Modern World (Amsterdam: VU University Press 1994);
48. and Paul Greenhalgh, Ephemeral Vistas: The Expositions Universelles, Great Exhibitions and World's Fairs, 1851-1939 (Manchester: Manchester University Press 1988).
49. Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics (London and New York: Routledge 1995), 24 (emphasis added).
50. Robert W. Rydell, All the World's a Fair: Visions of Empire at American International Expositions, 1876-1916 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1984), 40-1.
51. See Reed, 'All the World Is Here!', ch. 1, 'Expectations', 3-20.
52. See Chicago Times Portfolio of the Midway Types (Chicago: The American Engraving Company 1893), Part 2, no. 34 and Part 9, no. 163.
53. Indianapolis Freeman, 12 August 1893,
54. and Chicago Tribune, 26 August 1893.
55. African-American poet, songwriter, novelist and critic James Weldon Johnson writes about his experience as an employee (a 'roller chair boy') of the exposition in 'At the World's Fair', Bulletin of Atlanta University, May 1893. The roller chair was a wheelchair available for those who were too weary or unable to walk around the fairgrounds. Young men, usually college students, would push patrons around the exposition in the chairs. Johnson discusses some of the racial and class tensions between these young white and black men and their patrons. Johnson's writings provide more evidence of invisible black labour at the exposition.
56. See also Reed, 'All the World Is Here!', 76-7.
57. Reed, 'All the World Is Here!', 73.
58. Ida B. Wells, Preface, in Wells, Douglass, Penn and Barnett, The Reason Why the Colored American Is Not in the World's Columbian Exposition.
59. Reed, 'All the World Is Here!', 58.
60. 'In the House restaurant', Harper's Weekly, 12 August 1893, 771.
61. Reed discusses the growing diversity of African Americans in Chicago in both economic and social status. 'The refined', 'the respectables' and 'the riff-raff were three strata of African Americans, corresponding to the small group of elite, highly educated professionals, the upstanding citizens involved in religious activities and the underclass that constituted the economically and socially disenfranchised who struggled for daily survival. See Reed, 'All the World Is Here!', ch. 5, "The social order'.
62. In his humorous short story, 'A matter of principle', Charles W. Chesnutt addresses the anxiety of the light-skinned African-American elite about being defined as 'Negro' or 'black' and their fear of associating or being associated with black people. This elite group rejects their black ancestry and instead chooses to claim their white ancestry as the defining element of their identity. I would argue that the Johnson family cartoons would have been more humorous than offensive to this group, and would have provided them with more reasons to distance themselves from other black people. See Charles W. Chesnutt, 'A matter of principle', in Selected Writings (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin 2001), 237-53. Chesnutt, a black man who could physically pass for white, addressed the social contradictions of the United States along racial lines throughout his work. 'A matter of principle' is particularly relevant here as a work that calls into question colourism and prejudice among Blacks.