Negro Building

Focusing on black Americans' participation in world's fairs, Emancipation expositions, and early black grassroots museums, Progress and Prospectstraces the evolution of black public history from the Civil War through the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Mabel O. Wilson uses the visual culture and social spaces of expositions and museums as a unique lens through which to assess African Americans' narratives of collective uplift and self-determination. She explains how black Americans joined together to commemorate their hard fought freedom from enslavement, imagine their future roles as citizens in an industrializing modern society, and craft historical narratives that forged connections to Africa. Combining incisive scholarship with compelling narrative, Wilson gives voice to the figures that conceived the curatorial content--Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Du Bois, Ida B. Wells, A. Philip Randolph, Horace Cayton and Margaret Burroughs--and navigates the segregated neighborhoods and cities that hosted this fascinating world of fairs and museums. As the 2015 opening of the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C. approaches, the author reveals why the black cities of Chicago and Detroit became the sites of major black historical museums rather than the nation's capital--until now.