Focusing on Black Americans' participation in world's fairs,
Emancipation expositions, and early Black grassroots museums, Negro
Building traces the evolution of Black public history from the Civil
War through the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Mabel O. Wilson
gives voice to the figures who conceived the curatorial content: Booker
T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, Ida B. Wells, A. Philip Randolph,
Horace Cayton, and Margaret Burroughs. Originally published in 2012, the
book reveals why the Black cities of Chicago and Detroit became the
sites of major Black historical museums rather than the nation's
capital, which would eventually become home for the Smithsonian's
National Museum of African American History and Culture, which opened in
2016.