In Part 3 we mapped the architecture—where the controlling images came from, what they were built to do, and where they went when the minstrel stage went dark. This episode goes back to the place where the pancake brand was launched, and to the three people standing in three different positions relative to the same gate. In the spring of 1893, Chicago built a city out of plaster and painted it white. Twenty-seven million people came to see it over six months. It was America announcing itself as a modern civilization that had arrived, and like every vision, it was a set of decisions about what to include and what to leave out. Black leaders had been lobbying for years for a place in it—a commissioner, a department, some way to show what Black Americans had built in the not-quite-thirty years since emancipation. They were refused. Not carelessly, and not once. Three Black Americans were at that fair anyway, and they gave three completely different answers to the same impossible question. Ida B. Wells stood outside the gates handing out a pamphlet about why they weren't inside. Frederick Douglass was inside at seventy-five, representing Haiti, because his own country wouldn't have him. And Nancy Green was inside too, in an apron, making pancakes and telling stories about how much she had loved the plantation. Do you take the platform you're offered and try to work from within it, or do you refuse it and fight for a different one? There is no correct answer. There is only what each of them did with what was available to them. This one is heavy. In this episode we: Walk the World's Columbian Exposition. 690 acres of marshland turned into a city in under two years, electric light most visitors had never seen, the first Ferris wheel, and the hamburger, Cracker Jack, and Aunt Jemima pancake mix all launched in the same six months Trace the multi-year campaign by Black leaders for representation at the fair, the specific refusals that met it, and the incoherent reasoning offered for each one Cover Jubilee Day—the single day set aside for Black visitors—and the watermelons someone arranged to distribute at the gate, including where that particular piece of racist iconography actually came from, which is the opposite of what you'd assume Read from Frederick Douglass's speech that day, which began as prepared remarks and became something else entirely after a white man in the crowd heckled him about "the Negro problem" Meet Ida B. Wells properly: the train, the bite, the lawsuit, the lynching of her three friends in Memphis, the destruction of her newspaper office, and the pamphlet she wrote, funded, translated, and handed out at the fair's gates Look at the Dahomey Village, one of the fair's most popular attractions, and what it was built to prove about the distance between "there" and "here" The White City burned in 1894. The structure it was built to display did not. Next time, we close the arc: the rest of Nancy Green's life, the women who played the role after her, the labor the whole apparatus was designed to conceal, and what the company did with the brand after it announced it was done with it. Content note: This episode discusses slavery, racial caricature, lynching and the systematic terror of the post-Reconstruction era, racist iconography, and the public display of human beings as ethnographic exhibition. We have approached this material with care and encourage listeners to do the same. Connect with Us! Patreon: patreon.com/TheBitchionary Instagram @theb.chionary Substack: https://thebitchionary.substack.com/ Apple Podcasts: The Bitchionary Email: admin@thebitchionary.com for general inquiries. Email Becca at becca@thebitchionary.com or Lily at lily@thebitchionary.com. Sources listed in the show notes for Parts 1-3.
