Frederick Douglass’s Defiant Stand at Chicago’s World’s Fair
Subject
Frederick Douglass; Chicago; World’s Fair
Description
rederick Douglass never knew the date of his own birth, or even how old he was. “I have no accurate knowledge of my age, never having seen any authentic record containing it,” he wrote. “I do not remember to have ever met a slave who could tell of his birthday,” he continued in his 1845 autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. But the famous abolitionist and orator eventually chose to celebrate his birthday on February 14, determining that he was probably born in 1818, 200 years ago.
So when Douglass served as the most prominent representative of African Americans at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, from which his race had largely been excluded despite earnest protestation and petition, he was roughly 75 years old.
While excluded from leadership or administrative roles at the Fair, African Americans did find work in the service sectorsThe organization of the Exposition was in the hands of a Board of Commissioners appointed by President Benjamin Harrison. With seven and a half million people, African Americans made up more than an eighth of the population of the United States, yet Harrison did not appoint a single black commissioner or alternate (eventually one black alternate was chosen, from Missouri). Only one state, New York, appointed a black representative to the Fair; only three of the hundreds of clerical positions associated with the Fair were filled by African Americans; and all black applicants, no matter how qualified, were rejected to serve in the Exposition’s police force, the Columbian Guard.
To publicize this discrimination, Douglass joined forces with the young activist Ida B. Wells, her future husband Ferdinand Lee Barnett, and the journalist Irvine Garland Penn to write and distribute a pamphlet titled The Reason Why the Colored American Is Not in the World’s Columbian Exposition at the Fair. “Theoretically open to all Americans, the Exposition practically is, literally and figuratively, a ‘White City,’ in the building of which the Colored American was allowed no helping hand, and in its glorious success he has no share,” wrote Barnett, who was a founder of Chicago’s first black newspaper, The Conservator, and later became Illinois’s first black assistant state’s attorney. “It remained for the Republic of Hayti [sic] to give the only acceptable representation enjoyed by us in the Fair.”
Creator
Source
https://interactive.wttw.com/playlist/2018/02/14/frederick-douglass-chicago-worlds-fair
Publisher
wttw.com
File
