Negro Building Black Americans in the World of Fairs and Museums [Hardcover]

Focusing on black Americans participation in worlds fairs, Emancipation expositions, and early black grassroots museums,Negro Buildingtraces 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 that conceived the curatorial contentBooker T. Washington, W.E.B. Du Bois, Ida B. Wells, A. Philip Randolph, Horace Cayton and Margaret Burroughs. As the 2015 opening of the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C., approaches, the book reveals why the black cities of Chicago and Detroit became the sites of major black historical museums rather than the nations capitaluntil now.

Mabel O. Wilsonis Associate Professor of Architecture at Columbias Graduate School of Architecture Planning and Preservation where she directs the program for Advanced Architectural Research.

Negro Buildingis the most comprehensive study yet published about the long history of representations of, by, and for African Americans at worlds fairs and museums. Wilsons book underscores why cultural representations have mattered and continue to matter for African Americansand for everyone trying to understand what it means to be an American. Robert W. Rydell, author ofAll 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