Introduction
By a sort of national common consent, she has had no place in the Republic of free and independent womanhood of America. Slavery left her in social darkness, and freedom has been slow in leading her into the daylight of the virtues.—Fannie Barrier Williams
“All through the darkest period o the colored women’s oppression in this country her yet unwritten history is ull o heroic struggle, a struggle against earul and overwhelming odds, that ofen ended in a horrible death, to main-tain and protect that which woman holds dearer than lie.”
Te words spo-ken by Washington, D.C.–based author, teacher, activist, and scholar Anna Julia Cooper on May , at the World’s Fair: Columbian Exposition in Chicago, Illinois, centered on the lives o black women. Her speech, as well as those o five other emergent and prominent Arican American women leaders, Fannie Barrier Williams, Frances E. W. Harper, Fanny Jackson Cop-pin, Sarah J. Early, and Hallie Q. Brown, orceully and powerully inserted the voices, standpoints, and experiences o Arican American women into a space committed to celebrating the triumphs o white men in the United States. From May to October , , the grand spectacle o the World’s Fair ormally commemorated the our-hundredth anniversary o Christo-pher Columbus’s arrival to the New World in . Although the dedication ceremonies took place on October , , the airgrounds did not open to the public until May o the ollowing year. Pivoting around and propelling the ideas o American industrial optimism and American exceptionalism, the unprecedented World’s Fair welcomed more than twenty-seven million people who would marvel at a wide range o exhibitions trumpeting innova-tion and progress. Te global scope o the air, which included representations o nearly fify peoples and cultures, however, did not overpower the broader message o white male supremacy in the United States.
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INTRODUCTION
Te air symbolized both the city’s ascendance rom the literal and figura-tive ashes o the Great Chicago Fire and the nation’s emergence as a “recon-structed” global power. Despite being only twenty-eight years past the Civil War and sixteen years past the ormal end o Reconstruction, the exposition anchored this new moment in U.S. history in the discovery o the New World by Europe, and indirectly, though perhaps intentionally, in the subsequent annihilation and marginalization o the First Nation and Indigenous peoples o the Americas and the enslavement o Arican people. Cooper, in speaking or “colored women rom the South,” commenced her address by highlight-ing that “millions o blacks in this country have watered the soil with blood and tears, and it is there too that the colored woman o America has made her characteristic history, and there her destiny is evolving.”
Her words pro- vided a black-women-centered counternarrative to the “discovery” narrative promoted by the air through Cooper’s centering the enslavement o black people as oundational to the nation’s history. Cooper also skillully wove in the brevity o thirty years in marking the progress o a ormerly enslaved people. More critical, however, was that Cooper pushed against a linear nar-rative o progress o Arican Americans by emphasizing that “since emancipa-tion the movement has been at times conused and stormy, so that we could not always tell whether we were going orward or groping in a circle.”
Te combination o an abrupt end to Reconstruction in , over a decade o post-Reconstruction efforts by Arican American communities to re-imagine their utures without concerted ederal investment, and the earliest iterations o Jim Crow in state constitutions in the s grounded Cooper’s statement about the uncertainty and precariousness o progress or Arican Americans thirty years post-Emancipation.
Te political fire and exigency o her words departed rom the air’s overarching, celebratory cultural tone. Only a year prior to the World’s Fair, Anna Julia Cooper published the germinal black protoeminist text,
A Voice from the South: From a Woman from the South
. Her book, which lauded sel-determination through social uplif and education or Arican American women, concretized in print a growing political sensibility among many black women. Cooper’s words at the Exposition naturally overlapped and connected with those o the other Arican American women speakers. Her speech echoed some o the core arguments o her book and urther heralded both the triumphs o and dy-namic possibilities or Arican American women. Cooper’s book and her speech at the air urther solidified her status as one o the most recognized and respected voices illuminating the lived experiences o Arican American women.
An educator and administrator at the prestigious Arican Ameri-
INTRODUCTION
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can M Street High School in Washington, D.C., and an author and speaker, Cooper had both local and national stature. By the time Cooper established hersel as a fixture in the Arican American public sphere in the nation’s capital, Washington thrived as an intellectual, cultural, and social center or black people in the United States. Black Washington cultivated Cooper’s growth as a thinker, educator, administrator, and activist. Her words at the World’s Fair and in her book built upon the unique cultivation as a black Washington woman and an emergent New Negro woman. At the core o New Negro womanhood was a undamental transormation in how Arican American women viewed themselves as participants and authorial figures in the modern world. Te activities o clubwomen, black suffragists, teachers in newly established “Colored”
schools, beauticians, and domestics, rom the late nineteenth century until the mid-twentieth century, composed the New Negro womanhood experience. Clubwomen advocated or the advancement o Arican American women in a post-Emancipation/Progressive Era context. Black suffragists demanded universal suffrage and emphasized the importance o the ranchise or Arican American women at the turn o the twentieth century. Arican American teachers educated a new generation o Arican Americans, and particularly Arican American women, in a range o proessions. Beauticians were among the most successul entrepreneurs and innovators during this era. Domestics and sharecroppers were the backbone o poor and working-class black communities. Although not enslaved, the conditions and hardships black domestics ofen endured in the homes o white amilies resembled those o the recent era o chattel slavery.
As Arican American women grappled with post-Reconstruction and Jim Crow realities, they began to articulate new ideas about race, class, gender, and sexuality. Tese evolving articulations, particularly in black urban centers like Washington, challenged the status o Arican American women in public lie. Te tensions surrounding black women’s participation in the World’s Fair paralleled local struggles o Arican American women in Washington to become uller participants in black public lie. Beore these six women were added to the program, black leaders throughout the United States protested their exclusion rom the air’s planning.
Ida B. Wells, Frederick Douglass, educator Irvine Garland Penn, and lawyer and newspaper publisher Ferdi-nand L. Barnett directly addressed the lack o a substantial Arican Ameri-can presence at the air in “Te Reason Why the Colored American Is Not at the Columbian Exposition.” Wells was the primary author o the scathing document. She eloquently and passionately states in the volume’s preace:
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