From a modern perspective, the idea of “living history” has become not only common but popular, with influencers and fans eagerly engaging in historical costuming, re-enacting battles of the past, and chowing down on turkey legs at the local Renaissance Faire. The concept was relatively new in 1895, but that didn’t stop promoter Nate Salsbury from mounting a massive experiential production in Brooklyn on the Ambrose Park fairground. Entitled Black America, Salsbury’s show purported to show a genuine Southern Black community and demonstrate Black cultural progress in America, from enslavement to citizenship.
Black America opened on May 25, 1895, and played in New York, Boston, Washington, and Philadelphia before closing roughly six months later. Claiming to present as “the Negro as he really is…in the amusement world as an educator with natural surroundings,” the exposition presented a sprawling re-creation of plantation life and labor, concluding with an evening theatrical show. Arriving at the grounds, visitors stepped into a village of 150 log cabins with an acre of planted cotton in the near distance (Librarian Dorothy Berry notes that, for efficiency’s sake, the field was “ingeniously manufactured from real cotton plant stalks, with cotton fluff loosely attached by wire”). Military tents housed members of the all-Black United States Ninth Cavalry. Five hundred cast members, who were said to be regular people and most certainly not actors (ahem), played cards, worked, danced, and interacted with strolling patrons.
When evening fell, Black America offered an all-singing, all-dancing arena show for thousands of visitors. The stage elevated as many as four hundred singers, placing them amidst set dressing that showed a folksy steamboat wharf, mountains, hay bales, and barrels of sugar and molasses. Theater scholar Roger Allan Hall describes a show in three parts, all trading on stereotype and parallels to minstrel entertainment: first, a robust program of music and dancing, including “Watermelon Smiling on the Vine” and an accompanying pastiche.
“Even more popular,” Hall assures, “was the cakewalk.”
A second act presented military drills and conventional circus acts, including the contortionist Pablo Diaz, “billed as “the human corkscrew.” In the grand finale, entitled “Historical Apotheosis,” the full cast “appeared in various drills, and huge portraits of General Grant, Fred Douglass, Harriet Beecher Stowe, General Sherman, John Brown, and Abraham Lincoln were displayed as the chorus sang appropriate songs.”