Negro Day
December 26, 1895 was Negro Day at the Expo. Famed African American quilter Harriet Powers also attended this day and met with Irvine Garland Penn, the chief of the Negro Building at the Expo.
The great American band master John Phillip Sousa composed his famous march, King Cotton, for the exposition, and dedicated it to the people of the state of Georgia.
Future politician and historian, Walter McElreath, described it in his memoirs:
The railroad yards were jammed every morning with trains that brought enormous crowds. The streets were crowded all day long. Every conceivable kind of fakir bartered his wares. Dime museums flourished on every street.... Vast stucco hotels stood on Fourteenth Street.... I spent a great deal of time on the streets looking at the strange crowds -- American Indians, Circassians, Hindus, Japanese, and people from every corner of the globe -- who had come as professional midway entertainers or fakirs.
Read more about this topic: Cotton States And International Exposition
Famous quotes containing the words negro and/or day:
“I do not think white America is committed to granting equality to the American Negro ... this is a passionately racist country; it will continue to be so in the foreseeable future.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)
“Every time I embrace a black woman I’m embracing slavery, and when I put my arms around a white woman, well, I’m hugging freedom. The white man forbade me to have the white woman on pain of death.... I will not be free until the day I can have a white woman in my bed.”
—Eldridge Cleaver (b. 1935)