Odes to Midtown Atlanta · Track 4 · middle
1895 Cotton States Exposition
The 1895 Cotton States and International Exposition — held at what is now Piedmont Park, Booker T. Washington's Atlanta Compromise speech, the 800,000+ visitors, the first electric lights in many Southern cities' delegations. The exposition that put Atlanta on the post-Reconstruction map. Dr.Pope reads the exposition catalog.
Lyrics
[Intro] The Official Catalogue. Cotton States and International Exposition. Atlanta, 1895. Printed on paper now the color of weak tea. [Verse 1] Page one. President Charles Collier welcomes the world. To the new Atlanta, risen from the embers. Here, on the grounds of what you call Piedmont Park, they built a city of staff and plaster. The Agricultural Building. The Manufacturers Hall. And at night, from six to eleven, the future arrived. The first electric lights many had ever seen. The air smelled of fresh-cut Georgia pine, and ozone. The constant hum of the generators, promising a new kind of power. [Chorus] And on the opening day, September 18, a man stood before the grandstand. Booker T. Washington. He offered a bargain, a compromise. He said, "In all things purely social, we can be as separate as the fingers." "Yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress." That was the sound. The sound of a lock clicking shut on a century. [Verse 2] I turn the pages. Exhibit Four-Oh-Seven: a working model of a cotton gin. Powered, it says here, by a live goat on a treadmill. One imagines the goat was not consulted. I look for the names of the Spanish-speaking men who tended the Texas livestock. They are not here. I look for the wife of the head groundskeeper. She is not here. I turn to the Negro Building appendix. Hundreds of exhibitors. Not one of them named. Just a number. Exhibit 612. Exhibit 743. [Chorus] He said, "In all things purely social, we can be as separate as the fingers." "Yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress." Eight hundred thousand people heard that sound. The sound of a deal being signed in the humid air. The Atlanta Compromise. [Bridge] They came to see a New South. A South of industry and invention, moving past the war. They saw the electric lights. They saw the goat. They saw a future where everyone had a place. A separate place. They called it progress. They called it peace. They did not call it what it was. [Outro] I close the catalog. The hum of the generator fades. But I can still smell it. The sawdust. The ozone. And something else. The slow, quiet catastrophe of a hand, closing its fingers into a fist.