The Hall of Negro Life

The Texas Centennial Exposition of 1936 was the first world's fair in the United States to give Black American life a building of its own. Texas and Dallas both declined to pay for it; a hundred thousand dollars of federal money was secured by two leaders of Black Dallas, A. Maceo Smith and Maynard H. Jackson, and construction began on 9 March 1936 to plans from George L. Dahl's office. Cross Construction finished it on 12 June and it was dedicated on 19 June, Juneteenth. Admission was free. Inside were six exhibit sections covering business and industry, art, mechanic arts, agriculture, health and education, and four murals by the Harlem Renaissance painter Aaron Douglas tracing Black history in Texas from Estevanico, the first Black man to set foot in it, through slavery to the present. More than four hundred thousand people went through it over six months, an estimated sixty per cent of them white, on a fairground that was otherwise segregated and where one day was set aside as theirs. Seventy thousand came for Negro Achievement Day, that same Juneteenth. It did not last. The Exposition closed in November 1936, a second season opened the next summer as the Greater Texas and Pan American Exposition, and the hall was pulled down that spring, one of only two exhibition buildings torn down rather than redecorated. Two of the Douglas murals went with it. Into Bondage is at the National Gallery now and Aspiration in San Francisco. The African American Museum, which opened in 1993, stands on very nearly the same ground, the hall itself having faced north a little further up beside the Exposition's replica Globe Theatre.