THE COLORED PEOPLE AT THE NEW ORLEANS EXPOSITION.
The colored people of the United States are just twenty years out of the house of bondage. With long centuries of barbarism and two hundred and fifty years of slavery behind them, they started out homeless, landless, moneyless and experienceless. The New Orleans Exposition was to have exhibits from all lands: Asia, with its millennium of transmitted achievements; Europe, with its centuries of enlightened development; the United States, with their wonderful improvements on the best the world had produced, were all to be there. What show could the twenty-year-old freedmen make in such company? The very idea of their attempting to put in an appearance would seem absurd.
But the colored people desired at least to stand up and be counted. They determined to be there. The entire gallery in one end of the immense Government building was assigned them, and the specimens of their skill more than filled it. They came from nearly every State and Territory in the Union. Their exhibits represented almost every department of mechanical, agricultural and artistic skill. Excellence in workmanship, fertility in invention, tastefulness in the fine arts, were all displayed to a remarkable degree in the large collection. Southerners and Northerners were alike astonished at what their eyes beheld. Those who thought that the negro has no higher mission than to be a "hewer of wood and drawer of water," were compelled either to change their minds or else to say they did not believe that the colored people did the work. It was amusing to hear the remarks of some of the latter class, as they looked at some beautiful specimens of negro handicraft or ingenuity.
It may interest the readers of the MISSIONARY to glance at the great variety of lines along which negro ability put itself on exhibition.
Examination papers from schools were very numerous, showing proficiency in penmanship, spelling, arithmetic, algebra, geometry, free drawing, grammar and translations from the classics; fine needlework of all kinds; millinery; dress-making, tailoring; portrait and landscape painting in oil, water-colors and crayon; photography; sculpture; models of steamboats, locomotives, stationary engines, and railway cars; cotton presses, plows, cultivators, and reaping machines; wagons, buggies; tools of almost all kinds, from the hammer of the carpenter to the finely-wrought forceps of the dentist; piano and organ (both pipe and reed) making; carpentry, cabinet-making; upholstery; tin-smithing; black-smithing, boot and shoe making; basket and broom making; pottery, plain and glazed; brick-making; agricultural products, including all the cereals and fruits raised in the country; silk-worm culture; fruit preserving; flour from a mill, and machinery from a foundry owned by a colored man; patented inventions and improvements, nearly all of them useful and practical, were quite numerous; drugs and medicines; stationery, printing and publishing.