Description: Focusing on Black Americans' participation in world's fairs, Emancipation expositions, and early Black grassroots museums, Negro Building traces 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 who conceived the curatorial content: Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, Ida B. Wells, A. Philip Randolph, Horace Cayton, and Margaret Burroughs. Originally published in 2012, the book reveals why the Black cities of Chicago and Detroit became the sites of major Black historical museums rather than the nation's capital, which would eventually become home for the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture, which opened in 2016.
Review Quotes: "Ambitious in its aim and far-reaching in its content, Wilson's Negro Buildings provides a much-needed primer for the study of black-organized exhibitions found at World's Fairs and Expositions from the late nineteenth century to the present. . . . With its interdisciplinary scope and nuanced analysis, scholars in a host of disciplines--African American studies, American Studies, Art History, History, and Museum Studies--will no doubt find the text useful."-- "caa.reviews"