A Black Poet at the 1893 World’s Fair: Dreams of Equality Through Infrastructure

By Walter Gordon

One way of understanding the Climate Museum’s mission of “creating a culture for action on climate” is to regard the museum as a space for learning more about the culture of climate. Thinking about the culture of climate, in turn, means paying attention to things like how novelists imagine the environment, how photographers see oil, or how poets read vast, seemingly impersonal systems like energy infrastructure. Creating a culture of action on climate, in other words, means writing the climate’s cultural history, drawing insights into the possibilities for our planet in the future from the creative visions of the past.

Akua Banful read Whitman’s poem to open our “Talking Climate: Infrastructure” live stream on March 12th, listen from 11:55 - 14:33

Near the end of the 19th century, an African American poet named Albery Allson Whitman turned to poetry to reflect on the relationship between Black people and American infrastructure, in a poem entitled “The Freedman’s Triumphant Song.” Born to enslaved parents in Kentucky in 1851—and living as an enslaved person for the first twelve years of his life—Whitman saw the technological advancements taking place during the years leading up to the end of the 19th century as a potential site for the realization of the promise of emancipation. Orphaned soon after the end of the Civil War, Whitman worked a variety of agricultural and industrial jobs, including five months as a railroad construction worker, before becoming a school teacher in 1870 and beginning to write poetry soon thereafter. Whitman received wider recognition in the 1880s, when he published a series of long narrative poems, which took up issues of African American political advancement in a romantic register reminiscent of Byron, Burns, and Longfellow.

Whitman read “The Freedman’s Triumphant Song” at the zenith of his career (and the beginning of its decline), for an audience of more than 2000 at the controversial Colored American Day celebration at Chicago’s World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893. The Exposition was an immense, lavish, and unapologetic celebration of American might, particularly invested in showcasing the nation’s rapidly advancing technological prowess, especially in the realm of energy, infrastructure, and electricity. Colored American Day had the mission of celebrating Black accomplishment and displaying evidence of the “progress” of African Americans which measured up to the “progress” symbolized by the Exposition’s thousands of electric lights and massive, whirring generators. Nonetheless, the day-long celebration was rejected by many African Americans at the time as a tokenizing and ultimately exclusionary gesture. Chief among these objectors were Ida B. Wells-Barnett and Frederick Douglass, who co-edited a widely distributed pamphlet condemning the Exposition as a celebration of modern white supremacy.

This didn’t stop Douglass, however, from featuring as the keynote speaker at Colored American Day, where, still forceful at 75, he followed up poetry readings by Whitman and then largely unknown Paul Laurence Dunbar with an energizing paean to decades of African American struggle. Whitman, on the other hand, made use of his moment in the bright lights of the fair to celebrate the onset of modernity as a time of profoundly felt Black liberation:

Forgetting all the ashen past —
The hounds, the whips, the wounds of caste,
The Negro lifts his manly brow
To God, and joins the glorious now!
He in the strongholds of the heights;
The beacon blaze of freedom lights;
And on our borders builds the fires
Whose girdling watch-light ne'er expires;
And with the tiller of the soil,
And every honest son of toil,
With eager stride, and hand in hand,
He joins to bless his native land.
In all the walks of enterprise
He hastens on 'neath happy skies,
His willing hands to now engage
And help round out this wonder age:
Help, till the force of harnessed steam,
The rushing strength of every stream,
She captured winds that round us stray;
And lightnings in their fiery play;
Are all compelled to serve the hour
And build the nation's wealth and power

In marked contrast to popular sentiments regarding the decades of ongoing exploitation and disenfranchisement of African Americans that stretched from the end of the civil war to the turn of the century, Whitman’s poem celebrates emancipation as rupture, as the end of “the hounds, the whips, the wounds of caste.” Leaving behind the signs of slavery, the titular “Freedman” will enter into the “glorious now!” as an anointed collaborator, eager to “bless his native land” and build “the nation’s wealth and power.” Central to this project is the process of securing and directing energy in its different states of matter, from the “force of harnessed steam” to the “rushing strength” of the nation’s rivers. Significantly, in Whitman’s view, African Americans will themselves figure as a vital “force” in the management and distribution of that energy: the Freedman’s “willing hands” will “now engage” in the capture and circulation of steam, wind, and water. For Whitman, then, African American engagement with energy and its infrastructures was not only important for the advancement of American modernity, but for the uplift of Black people in particular. “Next to the tilling of the soil,” Whitman argues in a sermon delivered not long after the Exposition, “the Negro must learn the value of being skilled in mechanics,” which, Whitman argues, allows the worker to “mingle his thoughts with his labor.” Modernizing tools, for Whitman, is a way of modernizing the mind.

While we might now understand this “civilizing” sentiment in relation to ideologies of imperialist expansion rather than African American uplift, Whitman’s poem embodies a certain utopian mode of thinking that remains relevant today. Certainly, more than a century of racially distributed climate and energy crises since Colored American Day suggest to us that Whitman’s poem evinces a certain naiveté in its uncritical attitude towards the possible convergence of American technological modernity and established systems of racial domination. Nonetheless, visions like Whitman’s are necessary as we work to imagine possible energy futures, while its problematic context reminds us of the importance of thinking across various lines of social struggle. The struggle for equal access to the fruits of technological progress—the fight for a sustainable climate future—must be conceived as inseparable from the continued battle for racial justice.

A Black Poet at the 1893 World’s Fair: Dreams of Equality Through Infrastructure

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