ABSTRACT
Famous for the place devoted to women and for its majestic Woman’s Building, the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair was the scene of an unprecedented movement, led by anti-lynching activist Ida B. Wells, to ensure that African Americans represented themselves and were not misrepresented or/and underrepresented. The publication of a pamphlet in the summer of 1893, The Reason Why the Colored American is not in the World’s Columbian Exposition, and the appeal to boycott the Fair, sheds light on race and gender relations in the United States at the time of the exhibition, in the context of competing struggles for suffrage and citizenship and unprecedented racial violence in the South. The boycott led to the presence during the World’s Congress of Representative Women (15–21 May 1893) of six renowned African American women. This chapter first addresses issues of representation in the organization of the event; it retraces the difficulties faced by black men and women to be appointed to certain positions and to find a suitable forum for their intervention at the Fair. Eventually, a whole day was set aside: 25 August 1893, “Colored Americans’ Day” or “Tambo and Bones ‘Negro Day’,” as Wells, who did not attend, dubbed it. It then analyses the interventions of Fannie Barrier Williams, Anna Julia Cooper, Fannie Jackson Coppin, Hattie Quinn Brown, Sarah Jane Woodson Early and Frances Harper, to highlight the ways in which they addressed black women’s specific plight to a white female audience. Fractures appear along class lines and questions of morality overshadow other concerns, with the exception of education. The essay then turns to the issue of lynching decried in Wells’s pamphlet and mentioned in Cooper’s speech. The accusation of rape as the motivation for lynching placed sexuality at the center of these racist murders. Intersectionality then becomes a useful concept as it “offers a way of mediating the tension between assertions of multiple identity and the ongoing necessity of group politics” (Crenshaw). It helps us understand how these black women speakers, divided by class, religious sentiment, regional interests and political leanings, but necessarily remembering slavery, were heralding the black feminism of the twentieth century. They were no mere exotics.
