The Exhibit of American Negroes

Washington appealed personally to President William McKinley and just four months before the opening of the Paris Exposition, Congress allocated $15,000 to fund the exhibit.

Calloway enlisted Du Bois, with whom he had formerly been classmates at Fisk, and Daniel Murray, Assistant to the Librarian of Congress, to assemble materials.

[1] Du Bois included photographs that he called "typical Negro faces," exemplifying the accomplishment and progress of African Americans.

[4] The exhibit was separate from United States national building, within the shared space of the Palace of Social Economy and Congresses with maps detailing U.S. resources, New York City tenement models, and information on labor unions, railroad pensions and libraries.

"[7] This was because, as the Senegalese jeweler named Samba Lawbé Thiam phrased it after having been in the exhibition himself, "in Sénégal... the Bureau of Hygiene does not tolerate the construction of this type of hovel.

A range of Black Americans, from James Baldwin to Angela Davis to the Harlem Hellfighters, have spoken about their relatively positive experience in France as a sort of "reprieve from the racial discrimination.