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The Dahomey village housed sixty-nine people, "of whom twenty-one were Amazon warriors," notes the official history. "Sight-seers ... were fascinated with the savagery of the fetich war dance performed by the Amazons." This exhibit was particularly galling to African American writer and lecturer Frederick Douglass, an ex-slave: "As if to shame the Negro," he wrote, "the Dahomians are also here to exhibit the Negro as a repulsive savage.... It must be admitted that, to outward seeming, the colored people of the United States have lost ground and have met with increased and galling resistance since the war of the rebellion." Almost thirty years after the end of the Civil War, the black population of the country stood at more than 7.5 million, yet not one black person had been included in the planning committee for the exposition. "When it was ascertained that the seals and glaciers of Alaska had been overlooked in the appointment of National Commissioners, it was a comparatively easy task for the President to manipulate matters so that he could give the far away land a representative," observed Ferdinand L. Barnett, editor of Chicago's first black newspaper. "It was entirely different, however, with the colored people. When the fact was laid before the President that they had been ignored and were entirely unrepresented, he found his hands tied."

Not only had black people no representation on the planning committee, but they also had almost no formal presence at the fair. The White City housed more than sixty-five thousand exhibits, which seemed to one observer to be "the contents of a great dry goods store mixed up with the contents of museums." It included a Japanese teahouse, the dungeons of the Inquisition, and the electric chair; sea anemones, devilfish, sharks, catfish, and perch; Bach's clavichord, Mozart's spinet, and Beethoven's grand piano; almost every known fruit and vegetable seed; examples of pests that afflicted crops and pesticides used to counter them; more than a hundred exhibits on tobacco and more than another hundred on nuts; a Statue of Liberty carved out of salt; a thirty-five-foot tower of navel oranges—the oranges changed every few weeks—topped by a stuffed eagle; a Liberty Bell made out of wheat, oats, and rye; a map of the United States made out of pickles; and a 2 2,ooo-pound mass of cheese encased in iron. Within that glut of variousness, African Americans could claim only several exhibits by black colleges; a painting by George Washington Carver; Edmonia Lewis's sculpture of Hiawatha; and "Aunt Jemima," portrayed by a former slave who wore a red bandana and flipped pancakes outside the R. T. Davis Milling Company booth.

To counter and protest the lack of a dignified presence for blacks, Douglass, antilynching activist Ida B. Wells, Irvine Garland Penn, and Ferdinand L. Barnett published a pamphlet, The Reason Why the Colored American Is Not in the World's Columbian Exposition, which detailed the successes of blacks, the colleges they had established, and the inroads they'd made in medicine, law, and the arts. "We earnestly desired to show some results of our first thirty years of acknowledged manhood and womanhood," Douglass wrote in his introduction. "Wherein we have failed, it has been not our fault but our misfortune, and it is sincerely hoped that this brief story, not only of our successes, but of [our] trials and failures, our hopes and disappointments will relieve us of the charge of indifference and indolence.... And hence we send forth this volume to be read of all men."

The struggle of African Americans for a presence in the White City anticipated the inequalities to come concerning electric light in their lives. Although at the time of the fair, electric light in homes was still a luxury attainable by only the very wealthy, its ubiquity throughout the Court of Honor must have given people a sense that its place in everyday life was inevitable. But electric lines wouldn't arrive in ordinary