April in Paris: A startling image at the Exposition Universelle
by Jack Neely
It was Paris, at the time of Toulouse-Lautrec and the Moulin Rouge, of Satie and Ravel, of Rodin and Matisse. It was the extravagant era the French would call the Belle Epoch.
That April was time for the opening of the Exposition Universelle 1900. Paris had never looked newer, or stranger. A new city had sprung up within old Paris, straddling the Seine. Exuberant, extravagant, even bizarre architecture combined medieval, oriental, Moorish, and modern styles, astonishing visitors and Parisians alike, from the Champ de Mars to the Place de la Concorde. To some, it looked like a scene from another planet in one of M. Lumiere's fanciful cinematographes.
The World's Fair was expected to draw more than 50 million, and it did. They came to see Sarah Bernhardt perform; they came to see the sculpture of Rodin; they came to ride the giant Ferris Wheel and the new underground Metro; they came to see the wonders of electricity, the new automobile, X-rays, wireless telegraphy, motion pictures. The Shah of Persia came, target of an unsuccessful bombing. They came to watch the second modern Olympic Games. They came to witness the new style and philosophy known as art nouveau.
There was plenty to do and see in Paris in 1900. But some visitors to the spectacular Exposition Universelle spent some of this rare season in Paris poring over photographs of a few wood-frame Victorian houses in Knoxville, Tennessee.
They were down on the Rue de Nations, on the left bank of the Seine. Down there, the buildings were simpler and more practical. A large white building housed exhibits on the theme Economie Sociale Congres. Included were exhibitions about social improvement in France, Belgium, Germany, Sweden, and the United States.
The most striking of the Knoxville pictures can nab your attention today. A family of five posing in and around a house surrounded by strikingly lush plantings, ferns, and fruit trees. A young man leaning jauntily out an open window. An older man standing on the front steps. A women in front of the front door. A young woman behind a luxuriant elephant-ear plant. A kid on the lawn. You rarely see people pose so intimately with their houses.
The caption was "Home of C.C. Dodson, Knoxville, Tennessee." The photograph was of special interest to the world because Dodson was a successful professional living in the American South, and because Dodson and his family were black.
That handsome home belonged to Charles C. Dodson, owner of Dodson & Co., a Vine Ave. jewelry and watchmaker's shop. That house was at 404 Patton Street, in what was then East Knoxville.
The picture hung in a section called "The Exhibit of American Negroes," organized by a young professor of history and economics at Atlanta University, a little-known 32-year-old from Massachusetts named W.E.B. Dubois.
They weren't the only pictures in this exhibition: Others of the dozens of photos in Dubois' collection included photos of black homes in Atlanta, Memphis, Chattanooga, and Wilberforce, Ohio. It's unclear how many were displayed there, but on a website devoted to the Paris exhibit, two of nine photos featured on a website devoted to the exhibit are Knoxville scenes. The other was a photograph of the three-story Victorian home that was apparently that of John W. Manning, the principal at old Austin School, the black high school on Central that was progenitor of Austin-East.
Dubois explained that his intention with the Paris exhibit was "to give, in as systematic and compact a form as possible, the history and present condition of a large group of human beings."
Parisians, indeed people from around the world, were curious about this particular group of human beings. In Europe, blacks were a rare, exotic species; American blacks were especially interesting because, only 35 years before, most of them had been slaves. Rarely in modern history had a people shifted their station so radically. Many European countries still had a large hereditary peasant class. Europeans watched free American blacks closely to see what would happen next.
Impressed by Dubois' collection of photographs, the exposition's judges awarded him a gold medal.
His motive was, in part, to prove that there was a black middle class, that black people were capable of taking care of their own homes. Dubois' Paris exhibition might have offered an optimistic view of the fate of black people in America.
But Dubois and many others were troubled about what was happening in in this new era, which in the South was not the Belle Epoch, but the era of Jim Crow. New segregationist laws were forcing blacks out of office, out of the voting booths, out of business. In Knoxville and elsewhere, blacks found themselves squeezed out of the good schools, out of city and county government, and eventually out of the middle class. The Dodsons remained in their fine house until about 1913, when they closed Dodson & Co. and apparently left town.
Like many of Knoxville's historic locations, the address that Parisians gawked at 103 years ago no longer exists in any form. Though a small section of old Patton Street survives just east of the Old City, its 400 block was urban-renewed into oblivion sometime in the 1960s. It's at some unlocatable coordinate along the eastern hillside above James White Parkway. Commuters drive past Mr. Dodson's old garden every day.
February 20, 2003 * Vol. 13, No. 8
© 2003 Metro Pulse
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