New York's Remarkable Women by Petrash Antonia;

Author:Petrash, Antonia;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781493015825
Publisher: Globe Pequot

MARY BURNETT TALBERT

1866–1923

Advocate of Equality

The Pan American Exposition opened to great fanfare in the city of Buffalo, New York, in May 1901. Planned as an exposition that would “highlight all the Americas—their people, their land, their technology,” it took four years to prepare and was visited by over eight million people.

Visitors were dazzled by the ornate, multicolored buildings; the gracious, parklike setting of the grounds; the elaborate Gothic statues. They were awed by exhibitions of the latest technological achievements of their time, especially the Electric Tower, illuminated nightly by thousands of colored bulbs. Fairgoers were also enthralled by the Midway attractions, where they could visit re-created Eskimo and Japanese villages and even float down a canal in a gondola in a replica of the beautiful Italian city of Venice.

The exposition was open from May until November 1901, and the millions of people who attended came away excited by the athletic events and impressed by the technological advances the future promised.

But one woman came away from the exposition neither impressed nor excited but instead saddened and dismayed by what she found there. When African-American activist Mary Burnett Talbert visited the Midway, instead of an exhibit spotlighting the achievements of her race since the Emancipation Proclamation, she saw an exhibit entitled “The Old Plantation Exhibition,” with log cabins said to be occupied by “genuine darkey families and their pickaninnies.”

Mary Burnett Talbert had campaigned long and hard to have a member of the African-American race appointed to the board of commissioners of the exposition to prevent such an indignity from occurring, but her efforts and those of others had failed. The black community in Buffalo was deeply offended by that exclusion and by what they considered to be a racist exhibit, an exhibit that totally ignored any of the social and educational advances their race had made since the end of the Civil War. Where did one find evidence of the black physicians, clergymen, writers, educators, or inventors? Were blacks always to be thought of as “darkies on the plantation?” Were they always to be judged as ex-slaves and treated with bigotry and disrespect? Even after a token exhibit showing some advances was allowed in another building, the Midway spectacle of blacks living in shanties far overshadowed it.

But if Mary Burnett Talbert was discouraged by the setback of the Pan American Exposition, she did not let it affect her for long. She was used to fighting for equality and freedom for her race, and she felt tremendous pride in the accomplishments of African Americans, especially since they had only recently thrown off the shackles of slavery. In a 1902 essay in Twentieth Century Negro Literature, she wrote:

As the hand upon the dial of the nineteenth-century clock pointed to its last figure it showed that the American Negro had ceased to be a thing, a commodity that could be bought and sold, a mere animal; but was indeed a human being possessing all the qualities of mind and heart that belong to the rest of mankind.

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