The State’s Forgotten Exhibit at the 1940 American Negro Exposition
Updated: 17 hours ago
When Black West Virginia Stepped Onto a National Stage
Among the photographs preserved in West Virginia’s 1939–1940 Biennial Report of the Bureau of Negro Welfare and Statistics is an extraordinary image.
It shows a carefully arranged booth inside the American Negro Exposition in Chicago. Above the display are the words “West Virginia.”
Another photograph records a gathering of West Virginians at the exposition on August 19, 1940—a day officially set aside as West Virginia Day.
These images preserve a remarkable but little-known moment. In the summer of 1940, West Virginia carried the story of its Black citizens beyond the state’s borders and placed their achievements before a national audience.
The display celebrated Black West Virginians as businesspeople, industrial workers, educators, professionals, institution-builders, and essential contributors to the life and economy of their state.
At a time when segregation continued to restrict where African Americans could live, learn, work, travel, and participate in public life, West Virginia’s exhibit delivered a powerful message:
Black achievement existed, it mattered, and it deserved to be seen.
A Black World’s Fair
The American Negro Exposition opened at the Chicago Coliseum on July 4, 1940, and continued through September 2.
Its organizers presented it as the first great world’s fair devoted to African American history and achievement. The exposition commemorated what was described as 75 years of Black progress since emancipation.
Its purpose was larger than entertainment.
The official guide explained that the exposition was intended to promote racial understanding, inform the world about Black contributions to civilization, and help African Americans recognize the magnitude of their own progress.
Those goals were urgently needed.
African Americans had made enormous contributions to the nation, but their accomplishments were routinely excluded from textbooks, museums, public commemorations, and major exhibitions. When Black people did appear in popular culture, they were frequently represented through humiliating stereotypes.
The American Negro Exposition created a different kind of space.
Inside the Chicago Coliseum, visitors encountered art, literature, journalism, business, education, medicine, religion, music, theater, government programs, and African American history. A dramatic Court of Dioramas used three-dimensional scenes to illustrate Black contributions from the ancient world through modern America.
An extensive art exhibition brought together hundreds of works by Black artists. Displays honored Black newspapers, colleges, churches, businesses, physicians, writers, athletes, soldiers, and community organizations.
This was not an exhibition about what African Americans might someday accomplish.
It was an exhibition about what they had already achieved.
West Virginia Decides to Participate
The 1939–1940 Bureau report states that four West Virginia institutions cooperated in sponsoring the state’s exhibits:
The Bureau of Negro Welfare and Statistics
The office of Governor Homer A. Holt
Bluefield State Teachers College
West Virginia State College
The same partnership also sponsored a West Virginia exhibit at the “75 Years of Negro Progress Exposition,” held in Detroit from May 10 through May 19, 1940.
West Virginia’s participation in both events suggests an organized effort to place the accomplishments of the state’s Black population before audiences beyond West Virginia.
The Bureau’s report does not provide a single statement explaining exactly why state leaders decided to participate. Nevertheless, the purpose becomes clear when the report is read alongside the exposition’s official program.
The official guide describes West Virginia’s booth as showing the Black citizen in “business and industrial life.”
That was an especially significant choice for West Virginia.
Black workers had helped build the state’s coal industry, maintain its railroads, staff its factories, cultivate its farms, and sustain its towns. Black physicians, dentists, pharmacists, teachers, attorneys, ministers, and business owners served communities across the state.
Black West Virginians had also created and supported schools, hospitals, churches, fraternal organizations, women’s clubs, newspapers, professional associations, and charitable institutions.
The West Virginia booth brought that history together in a public display.
It declared that the state’s industrial and economic development could not be truthfully told without recognizing the Black men and women who helped make it possible.
The People Behind the Exhibit
West Virginia created a formal state commission to organize its participation in the Chicago and Detroit expositions.
Governor Homer A. Holt served as ex officio chairman. The commission’s other officers and members included:
E. L. Powell, president
Kermit J. Hall, secretary
John W. Davis, treasurer
Isaac M. Carper, member
H. L. Dickason, member
These names represented important areas of Black leadership in West Virginia.
John W. Davis was president of West Virginia State College. H. L. Dickason led Bluefield State Teachers College. Isaac M. Carper directed the Bureau of Negro Welfare and Statistics. Together, they connected state government with Black higher education and community leadership.
The commission was supported by an advisory committee that included educators, civic leaders, government employees, and representatives of Black institutions and organizations.
Among those named were J. M. Ellis, J. E. Banks, Mrs. M. P. Rogers, Walter R. Thurmond, Dave S. Ware, Mrs. John C. Norman, Fred R. Ramer, W. O. Armstrong, Mrs. Rosalie A. Robinson, Mrs. S. J. Bampfield, David Kirby, I. J. K. Wells, U. H. Prunty, and others.
Julius M. Gardner served as director of the exhibit.
The commission structure is important because it shows that West Virginia’s participation was not casual. The display required research, planning, fundraising, coordination, transportation, installation, programming, and cooperation among multiple institutions.
Black West Virginians were not simply the subjects of the exhibit. They were among the people who organized, directed, and presented it.
What Visitors Saw
The surviving photograph of the West Virginia booth does not allow every item to be identified clearly, and the Bureau’s report does not provide a complete inventory.
The official exposition guide, however, gives us its central theme: Black achievement in business and industry.
Visitors likely encountered photographs, printed information, statistics, and other materials illustrating the lives and work of Black West Virginians. The involvement of the Bureau and the state’s two principal Black colleges suggests that education, professional advancement, employment, and institutional development were important parts of the presentation.
The exhibit’s placement was also meaningful.
According to the official guide, the West Virginia booth stood near displays devoted to Black business, including exhibits from the National Negro Insurance Association and the Liberty Life Insurance Company.
West Virginia was therefore presenting its story within a larger national account of African American economic progress.
The booth challenged the idea that Black history consisted only of enslavement and hardship. It acknowledged that history while moving the story forward—to businesses established, professions entered, institutions created, industries strengthened, and communities sustained.
West Virginia Day in Chicago
The Bureau’s report includes a photograph captioned:
“West Virginians Attending Exposition for West Virginia Day, August 19, 1940.”
State and organizational days were an important part of the exposition’s schedule. They allowed delegations to gather, present programs, celebrate local achievements, and introduce visitors to the histories of particular communities.
For the West Virginians who traveled to Chicago, August 19 must have been a day of extraordinary pride.
They entered a vast exhibition devoted to Black accomplishment and found their own state represented within it. They saw “West Virginia” displayed before visitors from across the country.
Some may have recognized institutions they attended, organizations they supported, industries in which they worked, or leaders they knew personally.
The photograph does not preserve every person’s thoughts, but it preserves their presence.
They were there.
They stood together at an event created to tell the world that Black history was American history and that Black progress deserved national recognition.
Pride and Contradiction
West Virginia’s participation should be remembered with pride—but also with honesty.
In 1940, the state still operated segregated schools. Black children were frequently educated in buildings and classrooms that received fewer resources than those provided for white children. Black graduates encountered barriers to employment even when they possessed the required education and training.
Housing discrimination restricted where Black families could live. Hotels, restaurants, theaters, transportation systems, and other public accommodations did not always treat Black citizens equally.
Black miners were essential to West Virginia’s economy, but advancement into skilled and supervisory positions remained limited. Black professionals often built separate institutions because existing hospitals, schools, businesses, and professional organizations excluded them.
The state could celebrate Black progress at a national exposition while still failing to provide full equality at home.
That contradiction does not make the exhibit meaningless. It makes it more revealing.
The display demonstrated what Black West Virginians had accomplished despite segregation. At the same time, it gave those accomplishments a public visibility that could strengthen demands for fair employment, adequate schools, better housing, professional access, and equal citizenship.
The Bureau understood that recognition alone was insufficient.
In the same biennial report that documented the exposition, it asked the 1941 Legislature for increased appropriations. The Bureau wanted to employ a vocational and occupational coordinator, additional field representatives, and necessary clerical workers.
The exhibit showed the progress that had already been made. The funding request acknowledged how much work remained.
More Than a Public-Relations Display
It would be easy to dismiss the West Virginia booth as a state-sponsored public-relations exercise. It certainly gave state officials an opportunity to present West Virginia favorably.
But the exhibit also performed a deeper historical function.
It collected evidence.
It placed Black businesses, workers, schools, colleges, professions, and organizations inside an official account of the state. It preserved information that might otherwise have been scattered, ignored, or lost.
That mission closely resembled the work of the Bureau of Negro Welfare and Statistics itself. Since its establishment in 1921, the Bureau had gathered statistics, investigated conditions, identified Black professionals and institutions, assisted residents, and reported its findings to the governor and Legislature.
The exposition transformed that documentary work into a public presentation.
Statistics became photographs.
Directories became names and faces.
Institutional reports became visible evidence of community achievement.
For two months in Chicago, the history of Black West Virginia was no longer confined to a government report in Charleston. It became part of a national exhibition.
Recovering the Meaning of the Moment
The American Negro Exposition has largely disappeared from popular memory. West Virginia’s participation is even less widely known.
Yet the surviving report gives us the foundation for recovering this story:
West Virginia officially participated.
The governor’s office supported the effort.
The Bureau of Negro Welfare and Statistics helped sponsor it.
West Virginia State College and Bluefield State Teachers College were partners.
A formal state commission and advisory committee organized the exhibits.
The booth presented Black achievement in business and industrial life.
West Virginians gathered for a designated West Virginia Day on August 19, 1940.
The Bureau preserved photographs of both the booth and the delegation.
Together, these facts reveal a remarkable moment of organized historical representation.
Black West Virginians and their institutions understood the importance of controlling how their story was told. They knew that achievement hidden from public view could easily be denied, forgotten, or credited to someone else.
The exposition gave them an opportunity to speak through photographs, objects, statistics, and institutional records.
WV was the ONLY state to have an exhibit. Individual US cities participated, WV was the only state to participate. It allowed them to say:
We educated children.
We built businesses.
We cared for the sick.
We worked the mines.
We strengthened the state.
We created institutions.
We made history.
A Story Worth Bringing Home
For the Eugene and Beverly Stradwick Heritage Foundation, the story of West Virginia’s exhibit carries special meaning.
Our work is rooted in the same belief that brought those photographs, statistics, and institutional histories to Chicago in 1940: Black achievement must be documented, preserved, interpreted, and shared.
The West Virginia booth existed for only a few months. The people who stood before it have largely passed from living memory. Many of the materials displayed there may no longer survive.
But the Bureau’s report preserved enough for us to find them again.
More than eight decades later, we can still see the name of West Virginia above that exhibit.
We can still recognize the pride of the delegation assembled for West Virginia Day. We can still understand why their presence mattered.
They carried the story of Black West Virginia to the nation.
It is now our responsibility to bring that story home.
-T
Historical Terminology Note
This article includes historical terms such as “colored” and “Negro” when quoting original sources or identifying organizations as they were known at the time. These terms reflect the language and racial conditions of their era; their inclusion is not an endorsement of their use today.
In our own narrative, we use Black and African American, as appropriate. We preserve historical wording to document the past faithfully while honoring the dignity, humanity, and experiences of the people whose stories we share.
Sources and Research Notes
Principal primary source: Isaac M. Carper, director, Biennial Report of the Bureau of Negro Welfare and Statistics of the State of West Virginia for the Period 1939–1940 (Charleston, WV, December 1940).
Relevant portions of the report include:
West Virginia booth photograph: p. 73.
West Virginia Day photograph, August 19, 1940: p. 74.
West Virginia State Commission and advisory committee: p. 75.
Summary of state sponsorship and participation: p. 92.
Exposition source: American Negro Exposition, 1863–1940: Official Program and Guide Book, Chicago Coliseum, July 4–September 2, 1940. View the digitized official guide.
Additional historical overview: “Black Chicago History: The 1940 American Negro Exposition,” WBEZ Chicago.
