Negro Building: Black Americans in the World of Fairs and Museums comprehensively explores the movement among African Americans to define themselves and control their racial image at world's fairs, local expositions, and, finally, the permanency of museums. While white Americans sought to portray through these venues a national identity, commitment to civilization, and sense of modernization that were equal to Western Europe's, black Americans “used the fairs to vigorously respond to how they were being portrayed and positioned” as the victims of past slavery. Mabel O. Wilson adeptly describes and analyzes the myriad efforts by African Americans that took place over the course of a century and that were aimed at assuring the proper representation of their group to both the white and black worlds, especially with regard to the extent of black advancement in the aftermath of slavery.

The book addresses the set of ideologies that were aimed at controlling space and influencing racial perceptions and that were focussed on the age-old struggle within African American ranks between accommodation and integration, and relates to voluntary separation and its complementary belief system, nationalism/pan-Africanism. For example, the first schism manifested at the Chicago World's Fair of 1893 pitted advocates of a separate Negro exhibit against another which planned for and won scattered representations throughout the fairgrounds via an integrated arrangement. At Atlanta in 1895, supporters of a separate Negro structure exhibited the progress that American blacks had achieved, but at the same time betrayed a particularistic southern American focus on racial accommodation and rural progress. This set a precedent and pattern for a preference for separate Negro buildings to illustrate black advancement that appeared in Paris (1900), then Buffalo (1901), and later Charleston and Jamestown. Unfortunately, the discrimination and racism of the South always undermined black efforts, as was the case in Atlanta where spatial isolation and the possible use of black convict labor were problematic factors. More particularly, as regards the exhibitions held at Charleston, transportation was a problem, while in Jamestown, Virginia's new segregation laws proved an insurmountable barrier to African American audiences. At the beginning of the new century in Paris, Du Bois's influence introduced a new ideological slant in promoting pan-Africanism, and thereby expanding the scope of representation in order to encompass more modern, integrationist and international dimensions, including the positive features of life and history from within the entirety of the black diasporic world.

If ideology played a major role at these events, so did the role of dominant personalities. W. E. B. Du Bois seemed omnipresent as he appeared at the Paris World's Fair, in southern efforts, in New York City and elsewhere. Booker T. Washington exerted his influence early over southern endeavors until his death in 1915. Over the next few decades, in Chicago Claude A. Barnett of the Associated Negro Press and John Sengstacke of the Defender joined the ranks of Major Richard R. Wright Sr. of (Georgia and) Philadelphia and Dr. Charles A. Wright of Detroit in turning to modern and global emphases. Chicago's Margaret Burroughs emerged as a modern heroine in the struggle as she created the Ebony Museum which transformed into the Du Sable Museum of African American History.

Despite enlightened and more efficient efforts at representation at world's fairs, localized expositions and museums, major deficiencies always lay in securing adequate financing, control over facilities, and neutralizing contradictory white influences and outlooks. The last phase at attempting to provide accurate representations of African American life and history occurred with the attempts at constructing museums under black direction. By the end of the twentieth century, after four decades of exertion, the museum evolved as the ultimate expression of the Negro building.

Exemplary in its scope, there still are several clarifications needed: black women did participate fully in the World's Parliament of Representative Women in 1893, with six speaking (76). Additionally, both Booker T. Washington's role and his intentions with regard to racial representation are inaccurately portrayed. He is shown as an enemy of black progress despite the exemplary work in biography and in collecting the Washington Papers twenty years ago by Professor Louis R. Harlan, who explored the life of a man of Machiavellian complexity in race matters and not of “patient servitude” (73, 88, 89, 168).

Overall, in presenting the story of how the anticipated National Museum of African American History and Culture has come into being, Professor Wilson's work is invaluable.