Booker Taliaferro Washington was an American educator, author, and orator. Between 1890 and 1915, Washington was the primary leader in the African-American community and of the contemporary Black elite.
The World's Columbian Exposition, also known as the Chicago World's Fair, was a world's fair held in Chicago from May 5 to October 31, 1893, to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus's arrival in the New World in 1492. The centerpiece of the Fair, held in Jackson Park, was a large water pool representing the voyage that Columbus took to the New World. Chicago won the right to host the fair over several competing cities, including New York City, Washington, D.C., and St. Louis. The exposition was an influential social and cultural event and had a profound effect on American architecture, the arts, American industrial optimism, and Chicago's image.
A Century of Progress International Exposition, also known as the Chicago World's Fair, was a world's fair held in the city of Chicago, Illinois, United States, from 1933 to 1934. The fair, registered under the Bureau International des Expositions (BIE), celebrated the city's centennial. Designed largely in Art Deco style, the theme of the fair was technological innovation, and its motto was "Science Finds, Industry Applies, Man Conforms", trumpeting the message that science and American life were wedded. Its architectural symbol was the Sky Ride, a transporter bridge perpendicular to the shore on which one could ride from one side of the fair to the other.
Robbins is a village southwest of Chicago in Cook County, Illinois, United States. The population was 4,629 at the 2020 census. It is the second oldest African-American incorporated town in the north following Brooklyn, Illinois and was home to the country’s first black-owned airport.
The Tennessee Centennial and International Exposition was an exposition held in Nashville from May 1 – October 31, 1897 in what is now Centennial Park. A year late, it celebrated the 100th anniversary of Tennessee's entry into the union in 1796. President William McKinley officially opened the event from the White House, where he pressed a button that started the machinery building at the fair; he would visit in person a month later.
The Texas Centennial Exposition was a world's fair presented from June 6 to November 29, 1936, at Fair Park, Dallas, Texas. A celebration of the 100th anniversary of Texas's independence from Mexico in 1836, it also celebrated Texas and Western American culture. More than 50 buildings were constructed for the exposition, and many remain today as notable examples of Art Deco architecture. Attracting more than six million people including US President Franklin Roosevelt, the exposition was credited with buffering Dallas from the Great Depression.
Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller was an African-American artist who celebrated Afrocentric themes. At the fore of the Harlem Renaissance, Warrick was known for being a poet, painter, theater designer, and sculptor of the black American experience. At the turn of the 20th century, she achieved a reputation as the first black woman sculptor and was a well-known sculptor in Paris before returning to the United States.
Elmer Simms Campbell was an American commercial artist best known as the cartoonist who signed his work, E. Simms Campbell. The first African-American cartoonist published in nationally distributed, slick magazines, he created Esky, the familiar pop-eyed mascot of Esquire.
William Robert Ming Jr. was an American lawyer, attorney with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and law professor at University of Chicago Law School and Howard University School of Law. He presided over the Freeman Field mutiny courts-martial involving the Tuskegee Airmen. He is best remembered for being a member of the Brown v. Board of Education litigation team and for working on a number of the important cases leading to Brown, the decision in which the United States Supreme Court ruled de jure racial segregation a violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution.
Walter Thomas Bailey was an American architect from Kewanee, Illinois. He was the first African American graduate with a bachelor of science degree in architectural engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the first licensed African-American architect in the state of Illinois. He worked at the Tuskegee Institute, and practiced in both Memphis and Chicago. Walter T. Bailey became the second African American that graduated from the University of Illinois.
The Exhibit of American Negroes was a sociological display within the Palace of Social Economy at the 1900 World's Fair in Paris. The exhibit was a joint effort between Daniel Murray, the Assistant Librarian of Congress, Thomas J. Calloway, a lawyer and the primary organizer of the exhibit, and W. E. B. Du Bois. The goal of the exhibition was to demonstrate progress and commemorate the lives of African Americans at the turn of the century.
Noel Francis Parrish was an American brigadier general in the United States Air Force who was the white commander of a group of black airmen known as the Tuskegee Airmen during World War II. He was a key factor in the program's success and in their units being assigned to combat duty. Parrish was born and raised in the south-east United States; he joined the U.S. Army in 1930. He served in the military from 1930 until 1964, and retired as a brigadier general in 1964.
The Chicago Black Renaissance was a creative movement that blossomed out of the Chicago Black Belt on the city's South Side and spanned the 1930s and 1940s before a transformation in art and culture took place in the mid-1950s through the turn of the century. The movement included such famous African-American writers as Richard Wright, Margaret Walker, Gwendolyn Brooks, Arna Bontemps, and Lorraine Hansberry, as well as musicians Thomas A. Dorsey, Louis Armstrong, Earl Hines and Mahalia Jackson and artists William Edouard Scott, Elizabeth Catlett, Katherine Dunham, Charles Wilbert White, Margaret Burroughs, Charles C. Dawson, Archibald John Motley, Jr., Walter Sanford, and Eldzier Cortor. During the Great Migration, which brought tens of thousands of African-Americans to Chicago's South Side, African-American writers, artists, and community leaders began promoting racial pride and a new black consciousness, similar to that of the Harlem Renaissance. Unlike the Harlem Renaissance, the Chicago Black Renaissance did not receive the same amount of publicity on a national scale. Among the reasons for this are that the Chicago group participants presented no singularly prominent "face", wealthy patrons were less involved, and New York City—home of Harlem—was the higher profile national publishing center.
Claude Albert Barnett was an American journalist, publisher, entrepreneur, philanthropist, civic activist, Pan-Africanist, and founder of the Associated Negro Press (ANP). He started the first international news agency for black newspapers. He was an advocate against segregation in the military and blood supply. He was an activist force in journalism. He promoted Pan-Africanism. The (ANP) documented the Civil Rights Movement in the United States of America, and struggles for independence in Africa. Associated Negro Press was a Pan-African news service. Claude Barnett, Robert S. Abbott, and John H. Johnson were three of the most influential African-American media entrepreneurs in the 20th century. They were based in Chicago, Illinois. Barnett is said to have advanced the role of the Black Press in press coverage, news sharing, advertising, public relations, and professionalism.
Charles C. Dawson was an American painter, printmaker, illustrator, and graphic designer.
Wilmer Angier Jennings (1910–1990) was an African-American printmaker, painter, and jeweler. He was hired by the Rhode Island WPA to create wood-engraved prints that explored themes of economic and social hardships experienced by African-Americans. Jennings' work also included Southern themes inspired by oral folklore traditions. During his later years, Jennings studied jewelry design, which prompted him to develop new methods of jewelry manufacturing.
The first Africans in Virginia were a group of "twenty and odd" captive persons originally from modern-day Angola who landed at Old Point Comfort in Hampton, Virginia in late August 1619. Their arrival is seen as a beginning of the history of slavery in Virginia and British colonies in North America, although they were not in chattel slavery as it would develop in the United States, but were sold as indentured servants and had mostly worked off their indentures and were free by 1630. These colonies would go on to secede and become the United States in 1776. The landing of these captive Africans is also seen as a starting point for African American history, given that they were the first such group in mainland British America.
The National Half Century Exposition and Lincoln Jubilee, was a festival from August 22 to September 16, 1915 held in Chicago, Illinois, United States. It celebrated the 50th anniversary of the emancipation of enslaved African Americans. Held at the Chicago Coliseum near Bronzeville the exhibition was also known as the National Half Century Anniversary Exposition and The Lincoln Jubilee: 50th Anniversary Celebration.
Cavalcade of the American Negro is a grouping of related artworks collaboratively created by employees of the WPA-funded Illinois Writers' Project and the Federal Art Project for the 1940 American Negro Exposition, a world's fair-style event celebrating the 75th anniversary of the Emancipation of enslaved people in the United States.
Alonzo J. Aden was an art historian and gallerist. He served as curator of “Hall of Negro Life” at the Texas Centennial Exposition, the first major Black arts and culture exhibit at a world's fair, and the American Negro Exposition in Chicago. Aden co-founded with James V. Herring the Barnett-Aden Gallery, one of the first Black-owned art galleries in the United States.
