Review

In the summer of 1893, the young anti-lynching crusader Ida Wells teamed up with the aging former abolitionist Frederick Douglass to edit a pamphlet, The Reason Why the Colored American is Not in the Columbian Exposition. Rushed into print to capitalize on African Americans' anger over being awarded a "Colored People's Day" at the fair instead of full representation on fair boards and in the exhibit palaces that comprised the fair's White City, the pamphlet denounced the lynching of African Americans in the American South, and decried the hypocrisy of exposition organizers for their treatment of African American exhibitors. Wells and Douglass were powerful and respected individuals, but according to Christopher Robert Reid, their pamphlet was "misleading" (p. xi) about the absence of African American participation in the fair. Furthermore, according to the author, "Colored People's Day" has received "unwarranted recognition" (p. 31) from historians in their treatment of the fair. From Reed's perspective, "no definitive commentary on racism or racial intolerance is possible, and that, in and of itself, produced hope in the hearts of many African Americans." (p. xxx) Where many historians (myself included) have stressed the fair's racism and exploitation of people of color, Reed finds in the fair evidence of an emerging pan-Africanism. While I doubt Reed's book will displace Wells and Douglass's pamphlet as an authoritative source about African American involvement in the fair, this book adds to our knowledge of the complex ways African Americans engaged the representational challenges afforded by the exposition.	1
Reed does a good job organizing his book. He opens his analysis with three chapters that focus on the layers of contestation underlying the fair, focusing on the controversies among African Americans and the growing animosity between exposition directors and divergent voices in African American communities across the nation. Reed then proceeds to examine the development of African American communities in Chicago, concentrating on patterns of African American employment and social stratification among blacks in Chicago. Reed next sets the stage for his argument about Pan-Africanism by calling attention to the breadth of African and African-American participation in the fair and underscoring his point that contemporary controversy over "Colored People's Day" was "much ado about nothing." (p. 139) The final part of "All the World is Here" delves into the African village representation on the Midway, the Haitian Pavilion that served as Frederick Douglass's headquarters, and the International Congress on Africa that was held as part of the series of international congresses that met in conjunction with the fair and explored a host of contemporary topics ranging from women's rights to the conditions of laborers. Reed concludes his book with several important appendices, including Douglass's speech at "Colored American Day" and various commentaries about Africans from one of the illustrated souvenir books generated about the Midway.	2
The greatest strength of this book is the author's discussion of controversies surrounding African American representations at the fair in the context of the rapid growth of their political and social institutions in Chicago. For anyone interested in documenting the range of African American participants in debates about the fair, Reed's book is a useful starting point. The same can be said for his account of the Congress on Africa which, Reed argues, "stimulated both an increased interest in returning to Africa and a growing scholarship on African American and continental African thought and life." (p. 189)	3
For teachers of history, Reed's book will be interesting as a case study in how and why historians disagree about the interpretation of the past. The starting points, I would think, would be with the pamphlet co-edited by Wells and Douglass and the importance attached to "Colored People's Day" by the African American press. It would then be useful to examine the representations of Africa at the fair and ask students to determine the degree to which these representations were the product of African initiatives or the products of European imperialists and African collaborators with designs on exploiting the human and natural resources of Africa. In terms of Reed's claims about the ameliorative effects of the fair (in contrast, say, to the work of Curtis M. Hinsley), it would interesting to ask students to focus their attention on a couple of Reed's assertions. First, Reed claims that "[i]n regard to Jim Crow, African Americans prepared for the worst, but more often than not they encountered the best in American society." (p. 100). Second, Reed asserts with respect to Africans and African Americans: "They met at the fair, or if they did not actually meet, they—a simple, functional, but powerful pronoun conveying the variety inherent in animate and inanimate influences—surely could have." (p. 100) The extent to which they actually did meet at the fair, of course, remains largely a matter of conjecture especially in light of evidence that suggests not a few African Americans boycotted the exposition.	4
To be sure, Reed has challenged the arguments of a generation of historians, claiming that they, like Wells and Douglass, have been captivated by ideologies that have privileged categories of race and class. Whether his challenge holds up is one teachers and their students might take up. One question to put to students might be this: "What might Ida Wells and Frederick Douglass think of Reed's assessment of the black presence at the White City?	5
Montana State University–Bozeman Robert W. Rydell

Content in the History Cooperative database is intended for personal, noncommercial use only. You may not reproduce, publish, distribute, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, modify, create derivative works from, display, or in any way exploit the History Cooperative database in whole or in part without the written permission of the copyright holder.