Mr. Daniel Murray, Assistant Librarian of Congress, who for more than thirty years has been connected with the Library of Congress, is preparing a bibliography of books by negro authors, together with a collection of the books themselves to send to the Paris Exposition. lt is expected that the collection will also be exhibited in Buffalo in 1901. Mr. Murray's researches have revealed the remarkable fact that 1,200 books and pamphlets have been written by American colored men and women. lt is perhaps not an exaggeration to say that no one would have believed that the colored race in this country was so prolific in the production of literature. When Mr. Murray began his task he felt incredulous as to his ability to obtain 300 titles. He has of course fully identified the authors of every one of the 1,200 items; often he has been at considerable trouble so to do. For example, it is perhaps not generally known that A. H. Grimke, author of "William Lloyd Garrison, the Abolltionist," and "Charles Sumner, the Scholar in Politics," in Funk & Wagnalls Company's American Reformer Series, is a colored writer.  [No page or column numbers were given in the page facsimile.]

     Negro Authorship.—Under the direction of the librarian of Congress, Mr. Daniel Murray, himself a Negro, and member of the Library Staff, has made a large collection of books and pamphlets by Negro authors for exhibition at Paris, and afterwards for permanent deposit in the Library of Congress. In connection with this Mr. Murray hopes to make a complete Negro bibliography. His efforts will give the most authentic evidence of the literary output of the race. It will doubtless be a matter of great astonishment that the preliminary list of titles covers six printed pages, or nearly three hundred in all, the most of the works having been published in this country, with a few in London.
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     The Negro in Literature.—One of the most unique exhibits in the American section of the Paris Exhibition will be a complete bibliography of the pamphlets and books written by negro authors. This work has been carried on with great thoroughness for the past two years by Mr. Daniel Murray, of the Congressional Library, under the direction of the librarian of Congress, Mr. Herbert Putnam. The following account of this work is given in the Chicago Times-Herald:
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    Here the speaker gave an extended account of his visit to England and the part he played in the Pan-American [sic; see RW's Note 3 below] Conference. Dr. Creighton, Lord Bishop of London, delivered the address of welcome at the Pan-American [sic] Conference. The colored delegates from all quarters of the globe, the Bishop said, were given a tea in the terrace of the House of Parliament. Speaking of the American negro exhibit at the Paris Exposition, Bishop Walters said, in part:
    "The exhibit is as unique as it is powerful, occupying about one-fourth of the entire United States space in the building. High up on the top in letters of gold is the sign 'American Negro Exhibit.'" The Bishop at this point described the various exhibits by negroes, mentioning the books by negro authors and many other interesting features.  [p.12]
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     The Negro Exhibit in the Palace of Social Economy on the banks of the Seine is one of particular interest, in that it shows to the world the progress made by a race of but thirty years' freedom. This exhibit is successfully installed in a corner of the United States section, and among other objects consists chiefly of photographs of the Negro educational institutions of the United States. Booker T. Washington's school at Tuskegee, Ala., has on exhibition a very fine collection of work turned out at the school, consisting of wood-turning, joining, painting, graining, forging, harness-making, etc. A large portrait of Booker T. Washington hangs above the exhibit. Large pictures of the late Hon. B. K. Bruce, and Hon. Judson W. Lyons, the present Register of the Treasury, are here exhibited, together with two five-thousand-dollar government bonds, bearing the respective signatures of these distinguished colored gentlemen. Many books are here by colored authors. A series of charts giving statistics with reference to the status of the Negro in the United States, and especially in the state of Georgia, are neatly arranged in wing frames. These were prepared at Atlanta University, Atlanta, Ga., under the direction of Prof. W. E. B. DuBois. A bronze statuette of the Hon. Frederick Douglass is on exhibition, this being a facsimile of the statue to Doug- lass in Rochester, N. Y. This collective exhibit has received a "grand prize."
     In the Palace of Beaux Arts is to be found H. O. Tanner's painting, "Daniel in the Lion's Den," while in the United States National Pavilion Mr. Tanner has two pictures, "The Lion Hunt" and "Hills near Jerusalem." Mr. Tanner receives a silver medal as an award from the Exposition.  [p.295]
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     An unusual exhibit in the United States section was the varied collection showing the progress of the Negro race in the United States. This exhibit embraced many specimens of work done in manual-training and trade schools, besides the usual educational exhibits; a collection of books by Negro authors and of newspapers and periodicals published by Negroes; photographs of the Hampton Institute, the Tuskegee School, and other colleges and training schools for the Negro; a collection of charts illustrating the condition of the American Negro, prepared by students of Atlanta University; a number of volumes, too formidable in size for consultation, compiled by Prof. W. E. Burghardt Du Bois, entitled The Georgia Negro, a Social Study; Types of American Negroes; The Black Code of Georgia; Negro Landholders of Georgia, and Negro Life in Georgia. One set of photographs showed the possibilities of the race, and was concerned with the Coleman Manufacturing Company's cotton mill, a plant owned, managed, and operated entirely by Negroes. Some of the more important statistics presented in the exhibit are here shown.
[. . . .]
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 Since the turn of the 20th century, photography has emerged as a tool to document the human existence and has become a powerful lens of a perceived truth. However, as a machine, the camera alone does not create our reality; those behind the camera determine the visual content and context of photographs and influence how the audience perceives a photographic subject. W.E.B. Du Bois understood the power of photography and like his contemporaries, who used photography to document scientific evidence, adopted the photographic image to combat racist imagery and negative perceptions of African-Americans at the turn of the 20th century.

the way Du Bois presents the photograph[s] for the gaze of the white spectator. Du Bois's presentation of the archive [of assembled photos] was part and parcel of his strategy to achieve a representation of African Americans as intelligent and successful under the terms of Anglo-Saxon cultural capital. Indeed, a key holding of Smith's work is that Du Bois embraced certain aspects of white middle-class culture, including the belief that the black population housed a criminal class. Thus, Smith, as other recent scholars have done, is careful to avoid over-simplified panegyrics for Du Bois since his exhibition of photographs coincides with his worldview steeped in middle-class propriety. Hence, Smith's concern, here, is with the way Du Bois creates the archive through a specific set of cultural lenses.

    WASHINGTON, Nov. 2. — Ferdinand W. Peck, the Commissioner General of the United States to the Paris Exposition, has had under consideration for some time the question of a negro [sic] educational exhibit at the exposition, to be under the general supervision of the Commissioner in charge of the National educational exhibit of the United States.
    After consultation with the President today, Mr. Peck announced that he had decided to provide for the exhibit, and had appointed Thomas J. Calloway, a well-known colored educationalist now in the employ of the War Department, to have direction of it. The Hampton and Tuscogee [sic] Institute and the Fisk and Vanderbilt Universities will be represented in the exhibit, as well as prominent colored schools generally.
    In speaking of the exposition, Mr. Peck said that the twelve Commissioners of the United States whose appointments were provided for by an act passed at the last session of Congress, probably would be named by the President within the next week or ten days.
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  DuBois, W. E. B., Atlanta, Georgia.
     Collective exhibit, results of social study of the negro [sic] in Georgia.

  Atlanta University, Atlanta, Georgia.
     Statistical charts showing development of negroes [sic] in America.

 * It is interesting to note the following anonymously written passage in the prefatory section (p. 23):

    In 1890 the negro population was 7,470,040, or 11.93% of the whole population. [Map number omitted.--RWW] The negro has constituted a decreasing proportion of the total population for many years. Though the importation of slaves was suspended for many years prior to the civil war, the negro was given but meagre opportunities to advance in the culture scale under the influence of slavery. Since his emancipation his advancement has been marvellous. Of the illiteracy of the race 40% has been removed.     The present serious turning of the negro race from political ambitions to industrial education is most promising for the future. An acquaintance with those arts and trades and handicrafts which have made other races great and influential is necessary as a foundation for permanent race advancement.
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     Confronting visitors who meandered through the Negro Building at the 1907 Jamestown Tercentennial Exposition, held in Norfolk, Virginia, was a tableau entitled Landing of First Twenty Slaves at Jamestown. Meta Warrick (Fuller), a sculptor, had created and arranged twenty-four two-foot-high plaster figures that re-imagined the shackled, nearly nude, and traumatized Africans who had landed in Jamestown in 1619. In Landing and thirteen other dioramas, she used more than 130 painted plaster figures, model landscapes, and backgrounds to give viewers a chronological survey of the African American experience. Scenes ranged from a tableau of a fugitive slave to a depiction of the home life of "the modern, successfully educated, and progressive Negro."[1] Drawing upon but moving beyond her classical training in Philadelphia and Paris, Warrick applied new capacities for simulation and illusion to the depiction of African American themes. By doing so, she expanded the repertoire of representation of the African American past. Incorporating the lives and concerns of African Americans into the saga of civilization, she turned the historical African American into the centerpiece of the saga, claiming a position the dominant white narrative denied. Her dioramas, which suggested the expansiveness of black abilities, aspirations, and experiences, presented a cogent alternative to white representations of history -- by an African American.   [Note 1 omitted.]
     Yet, as Warrick's dioramas underscore, the participation of colonized and "primitive" peoples in expositions created opportunities for African Americans to destabilize the binary classification of civilization and "the other," of modernity and primitiveness. African Americans well understood the importance of how they were represented at world's fairs. When Du Bois surveyed with satisfaction the 1900 Paris exposition, he stressed with special emphasis that the "honest, straightforward exhibit" in the Negro Section was "above all" made by blacks. As the cultural theorist Walter Benjamin observed about film, new modes of representation "in the age of mechanical reproduction" empowered the masses to comprehend themselves for the first time.[6] Warrick's dioramas, similarly, enabled blacks to see themselves as the main actors in their own defined world. Whereas "Old South" concessions and anthropological exhibits organized by whites exhibited blacks, Warrick's dioramas represented them. The distinction between exhibiting and representing blacks was not just authorship but also agency. The Jamestown tableaux highlighted blacks' creative capacity, manifest in the very form of Warrick's creation, as well as black agency depicted in the narrative itself. By assuming responsibility for their own representation at expositions, African Americans grappled with the ideological schemata that undergirded fairs. Certainly Warrick contested in both subtle and obvious ways the overarching ambitions and assumptions about race, civilization, and progress that found expression at other parts of the Jamestown exposition. Thus, Warrick's dioramas illustrate how the new technologies and discourses of racial and imperial "truth" could be contested even in the setting where they were most powerfully articulated.
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[Footnote 6]
Du Bois, "American Negro at Paris," 577; Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York, 1985), 251.
[Webdubois.org Note: Du Bois' "American Negro at Paris" is available on this web site.]

    That overworked phrase, "one of the most interesting," may be applied with propriety to a collection of some 300 works of negro authorship in the negro exhibit. This collection was originally made for the Paris Exposition. Viewed here, in connection with other things showing the rise of the American negro, it is a wonderfully significant array of volumes. "A Dialogue Between a Virginian and an American Minister," published by the Rev. Daniel Croker at Baltimore, in 1810, is believed to be the first literary production of an American negro. Since that date, some 2,000 volumes have been written by Afro-Americans, not counting magazine articles. The exposition collection ranges from the Rev. John Jasper's "The Sun Do Move," to the works of Du Bois, Chesnutt, Dunbar, and Booker T. Washington.
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 As the U.S. ushered in the dawn of the 20th century, World Fairs became the altar on which blacks could showcase their progress since Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. From the 1889 fair in Paris to Buffalo’s Pan American Exposition of 1901 African Americans fought for a ‘Negro Exhibit’ to factually portray their race. If it were not for the diligent efforts of the staff at the Buffalo and Erie County Public Library, the existence of the ‘Negro Exhibit’ at Buffalo’s fair could have been lost to history. The library staff’s work has given African Americans a voice in Buffalo’s 1901 Pan American Exposition as well as an opportunity for future historians to glimpse into the culture of early 20th century America.
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