Frederick Douglass -- At the Fair

 

Douglass would not be rewarded for his work in Haiti by his own government; ironically, by the Haitian government he was.  In February 1892 President Hyppolite appointed Douglass his country’s commissioner at the World’s Columbian Exposition (the first World’s Fair) in Chicago, and in April of the following year Douglass and his wife took up their residence there.  Douglass’s duties were minimal.  His function would be advisory, he had been assured.  Someone else would deal with clerical duties.  Douglass hoped that the fair would express something positive about the accomplishments of black people both in Haiti and in the United States.  At the dedication of the Haitian Pavilion, Douglass spoke dutifully about the beauty of the setting of the fair, at the shoreline of Lake Michigan, and invited visitors to enjoy “a generous taste of our Haitian coffee, made in the best manner by Haitian hands” (Bontemps 296).  He was there to draw visitors and publicize Haitian commerce and culture; but, because he was there and because of who he still was, he was drawn into the strong discontent that young black leaders felt about the Fair’s exclusion of Negro American achievements.

 

All classes and conditions of the world’s people were represented, blacks stated, except that of the American Negro.  They petitioned Congress to rectify their lack of representation, and their petition was essentially ignored.  Subsequently, Ida B. Wells, Douglass’s young black associate, wrote an eighty-one page pamphlet entitled “The Reason Why the Colored Man Is Not Represented in the World’s Columbian Exposition.”  To defuse the growing discontent fostered by the pamphlet and the fact that few blacks had been employed at the Fair and none had been included in its planning, managers of the Fair designated August 25, 1893, as “Colored American Day.”  Black contributions to American life and culture would be displayed on this day, they promised.  Most black Americans suspected that the day would be used by whites instead for ridicule.  Ida Wells wanted Douglass not to participate.

 

Douglass first became aware of the thirty-year-old Miss Wells from a newspaper article she wrote about a triple lynching that had occurred in Memphis, Tennessee.

 

This daughter of slaves, who had been an eager student at Rust University, wrote fearlessly of the killing of three male friends; they had been lynched, she asserted categorically, not for raping white women, as alleged, but for competing with white storekeepers.  While she was in Philadelphia in May, speaking at protest meetings, her neighbors destroyed the office and plant of the newspaper [the Memphis Free Speech], in which she owned a one-third interest.

 

Even before the Memphis paper was silenced, the editor of the North American Review asked Douglass to write on the subject, and “Lynch Law in the South” appeared in the July 1892 issue.  …

 

“… there is good reason to question these lynch-law reports.  … The crime imputed to the negro is one most easily imputed and most difficult to disprove, and yet it is the one the negro is least likely to commit.”  There had been, he pointed out, not rapes reported during the Civil War, when white women were often alone with their slaves.  Turning to the case about which Wells had written, he noted that just as the “Jew is hated in Russia, because he is thrifty,” so the “negro meets no resistance when on a downward course.  It is only when he rises in wealth, intelligence, and manly character that he brings upon himself the heavy hand of persecution.  The men lynched at Memphis were murdered because they were prosperous.”  Inquiring into what lay behind the summary killings, Douglass shrewdly observed that “responsibility for the lynch law … is not entirely with the ignorant mob … they simply obey … sentiment created by wealth and respectability.”

 

…

 

While Douglass was writing, Wells had a fiery piece in the June press, a seven-column article in the New York Age “giving names, dates, and places.”  Douglass, in New York, came to call on the brash new editor and writer to tell her “what a revelation of existing conditions” her writing had been for him.  Distanced as he was, he “had begun to believe it true that there was increased lasciviousness on the part of Negroes.”  Now he wrote her a letter-which appeared as a preface to her 1892 pamphlet Southern Horrors. “Brave Woman!  You have done your people and mine a service which can neither be weighed nor measured.  If the American conscience were only half alive … a scream of horror, shame and indignation would rise to Heaven. …” (McFeely 360-362)

 

Shortly afterward, Wells visited Cedar Hill.  By the time she and Douglass settled down to work together in Chicago, he was ready spiritually and emotionally to speak out again in behalf of his people.

 

Wells and Douglass both wanted the world to know how black people were fairing in American.  With his help, she wrote a pamphlet that described both the accomplishments of their race and their condition, plagued by lynchings.

 

As August 25^th neared, comments from whites that there might not be enough watermelons available to feed the duskies that would pass through the Fair’s gates foretold how the white press viewed the significance of black culture.  Despite Wells’s objections, Douglass eventually agreed to be the concluding speaker of the day’s celebration, but only after several black musicians pleaded with him to help dignify the proceedings.  They, and Douglass’s own grandson, James Douglass, a concert violinist, wished to display their accomplished skills.

 

When Douglass arrived on the grounds August 25, he saw immediately that the day was indeed intended to be a joke.  Watermelon vendors were in abundance. Puck Magazine’s cartoon entitled “Darkies’ Day at the Fair” had “fat-bellied, barefoot spear carriers in grass skirts and thick-lipped, ornately uniformed soldiers lined up to buy their watermelon from a checked-pants sharpster with his top hat atilt” (McFeely 370).

 

At two-thirty at Festival Hall, before a throng of respectable black citizens, Frederick Douglass rose to speak.  He held before him a paper, “The Race Problem in America,” which he intended to read.  The black poet, Paul Laurence Dunbar, later described what happened.

 

 

Works cited:

 

Bontemps, Arna, Free at Last, the Life of Frederick Douglass, New York, Dodd, Mead & Company, 1971.  Print

 

McFeely, William S.  Frederick Douglass.  New York, W. W. Norton & Company, 1991.  Print.