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: "This is a fascinating, sharply analyzed, and well-writ ten account of the evolution of black leaders' efforts to use public forums to define and disseminate African American history and identity on their own terms, as well as to insert African Americans into broader narratives and ideologies of American and/or pan-African history. Of particular note is the value of Wilson's interdisciplinary approach, which brings together methods and insights from fields ranging from art history to architecture, visual culture, and urban studies. By conceptualizing these social spaces as an extension of a black counterpublic sphere, where African Americans could formulate, debate, and articulate ideologies of race and nation that ran counter to white discourse, Wilson helps to place these venues within the broader political context of their time."-- "American Historical Review"