ATDTDA (1): Midway Plaisance - part 2

[Ya Sam]

"As it turned out, the Chicago fair was a colossal freak show--a racist 
phantasmagoria, with commercial interests under the guise of "anthropology" 
catering to every cheap and lurid prejudice. Boas's Indians could hardly 
compete for attention with the Egyptian belly dancers and battling Bedouins 
of the thronging Midway. Native African villagers from 
Dahomey--bare-breasted and reportedly cannibalistic--were continually 
invoked in the press as evidence of the American Negro's savage nature, a 
judgment given credence by the Smithsonian Institution's display about 
racial evolution, which was mounted in the United States pavilion. Few 
African-Americans had been asked to take part in their country's exhibits, 
but on the fairgrounds two eloquent Negro voices were raised. The venerable 
Frederick Douglass, aged seventy-six, disputed the so-called "Negro Problem" 
from the Haitian pavilion, proclaiming that Americans' real problem was 
whether they could "live up to their own Constitution." And the crusader Ida 
B. Wells distributed ten thousand copies of a pamphlet about the 
increasingly common American ritual of lynching--there had been two hundred 
and forty-one victims in 1892--which included graphic accounts of horrors 
committed even while the nation was celebrating the peace and harmony of the 
White City. "

THE MEASURE OF AMERICA


http://www.accessmylibrary.com/coms2/summary_0286-20618187_ITM

_________________________________________________________________
Don't just search. Find. Check out the new MSN Search! 
http://search.msn.click-url.com/go/onm00200636ave/direct/01/