Negro Building: Black Americans in the World of Fairs and Museums - Hardcover

Focusing on Black Americans' participation in world's fairs, Emancipation expositions, and early Black grassroots museums, Negro Building traces the evolution of Black public history from the Civil War through the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Mabel O. Wilson gives voice to the figures who conceived the curatorial content: Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, Ida B. Wells, A. Philip Randolph, Horace Cayton, and Margaret Burroughs. Originally published in 2012, the book reveals why the Black cities of Chicago and Detroit became the sites of major Black historical museums rather than the nation's capital, which would eventually become home for the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture, which opened in 2016.

Front Jacket

Negro Building is the most comprehensive study yet published about the long history of representations of, by, and for African Americans at world's fairs and museums. Wilson's book underscores why cultural representations have mattered and continue to matter for African Americans--and for everyone trying to understand what it means to be an American.--Robert W. Rydell, author of All the World's a Fair.

"With abundant archival insights, Mabel Wilson's highly original study of the role of world's fairs in the making of a black public sphere vividly illuminates the transition from Reconstruction to Afro-Modernity with page-turning brilliance. Making a unique contribution to the fields of art history, architecture, visual culture and museum studies, this book offers us a bold interdisciplinary model for first-rate scholarship in African American studies that profoundly enriches our understanding of the Black Atlantic world."--Kobena Mercer, Professor of African American Studies and History of Art, Yale University