Black Politics in Black Space: The North Carolina Negro State Fair, 1879-1899

LaQuanda Walters Cooper

Advisor: Spencer Crew, PhD, Department of History and Art History

Committee Members: Yevette Richards Jordan and LaNitra Berger

Horizon Hall, #3223
July 08, 2025, 10:00 AM to 12:00 PM

Abstract:

The Black industrial fair emerged in the South as an annual exhibition of Black progress post-Emancipation. Developed on the local, regional, county, and state levels, the fairs were organized by industrial fair associations, themselves established by diverse groups of Black men across class and occupation. Despite their popularity, few historical studies examine either the form and function of the Black industrial fair or the associations that produced them. This dissertation focuses on the first two decades of the North Carolina Negro State Fair, first organized in 1879 by the North Carolina Industrial Association and held in the state capital of Raleigh for nearly fifty years. The study uses organizational records, personal correspondence, and articles from the Black press to place the fair in conversation with existing scholarship of an emerging New South in the late nineteenth century. As the political gains of Reconstruction gradually gave way to Jim Crow politics in the state, this dissertation asserts that the North Carolina Negro State Fair was more than an annual showcase of field crops, fancy cakes, and needlework. Political in both form and function, the fair was a public forum where Black North Carolinians expressed their political opinions on contemporary issues such as migration, public education, and voting rights. However, as the NCIA articulated a specific idea of racial progress rooted in the pursuit of education and the practice of agricultural labor, the fair and the association often found itself at odds with the larger Black community it claimed to represent.