Negro Building

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.
""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
"A valuable new study . . . a substantive and thoroughly researched monograph."-- "Reviews in American History"
"This is a fascinating, sharply analyzed, and well-writ ten account of the evolution of black leaders' efforts to use public forums to define and disseminate African American history and identity on their own terms, as well as to insert African Americans into broader narratives and ideologies of American and/or pan-African history. Of particular note is the value of Wilson's interdisciplinary approach, which brings together methods and insights from fields ranging from art history to architecture, visual culture, and urban studies. By conceptualizing these social spaces as an extension of a black counterpublic sphere, where African Americans could formulate, debate, and articulate ideologies of race and nation that ran counter to white discourse, Wilson helps to place these venues within the broader political context of their time."-- "American Historical Review"
"Well-researched, thoughtful, bold, and direct."-- "Journal of American History"
"Ambitious in its aim and far-reaching in its content, Wilson's Negro Buildings provides a much-needed primer for the study of black-organized exhibitions found at World's Fairs and Expositions from the late nineteenth century to the present. . . . With its interdisciplinary scope and nuanced analysis, scholars in a host of disciplines--African American studies, American Studies, Art History, History, and Museum Studies--will no doubt find the text useful."-- "caa.reviews"
"Wilson's thoroughly researched and well-written narrative meticulously reconstructs the planning, execution, and impact of numerous expositions and fairs, drawing lines of continuity among them. In addition, ample illustrations provide readers with photographic images of the fairs, exhibition maps, and the artists' prints and sculptures displayed in the exhibits. Wilson's interdisciplinary study should be valuable to scholars of world's fairs, visual culture and architecture, and African American public history."-- "Journal of African American History"