Circus Arabs, 19th c.
Buffalo Bill’s Wild West and many circuses featured Arab equestrians performing jaw-dropping feats on the world’s finest horses—Arabians whose bloodlines flow through today’s thoroughbreds. Their presence brought visions from the Arabian Nights to life and exposed Americans and Europeans in big cities and small towns alike to people who were not just presented as Moors but as Muslims. Performers came from Morocco, Egypt, and Syria. When they weren’t wowing crowds with their skill and bravery they could often be viewed by the public performing Muslim prayers between shows. Strobridge Lithograph, Co. c. 1895 Circus World Museum, Baraboo, WI.
An 1886 ad for the Abdallah Ben Said “Bedouin Troupe of Arabs,” showing their tumbling, leaping, rifle twirling, and pyramid building. The Said troupe featured four Hadjis who had made the pilgrimage to Mecca, three Ali's, and at least two acrobats who would go on to lead their own troupes, including Ambark Ali and Hassan Ben Ali. Barnum Circus 1886 Route Book, Circus World Museum, Baraboo, WI.
A lithograph for the Barnum & Bailey Circus showing one of many troupes of Arab acrobats and equestrians who were a mainstay of American and European circuses at the end of the nineteenth century. Strobridge Lithograph Co., Barnum & Bailey: Fierce Onslaught by Moorish Warriors, c. 1889. John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art.
Hassan Ben Ali’s Moorish Caravan, part of the Sells Brothers Circus, in 1893. Such displays not only commodified Moorish Muslim identities with performers who would have been considered Black in the US but also made a show of Muslim religious acts, in this case the hajj. John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art.
Walter Brister’s Old Kentucky Home,
1893-1898
The Woodlawn Wangdoodles, the Black juvenile band that starred in the hit Broadway show In Old Kentucky starting in 1893. Note diminutive bandleader Walter Brister holding a cornet. The show was so successful that it spawned more than a dozen imitators, became the most popular American play of all time by World War I, and was made into a movie four times. Its most popular feature was its kid band, led for the first five years of its run by coronet player Brister. So when young Louis Armstrong picked up a horn at the New Orleans Colored Waifs home in 1910, he was sliding into a musical role pioneered by Walter Brister. Bridgeman Images.
The horse race scene from the show In Old Kentucky, which used real racehorses galloping on a mechanical treadmill. Note the Black jockeys and the Black boys turning capers on the side. Bridgeman Images.
The Muslim Midway, 1893
Brister was on Broadway in 1893, but the Midway of Chicago’s Columbian Exhibition was a critical site for transmitting American fascination with the Islamic Orient. It was also where members of the U.S. secret society the Shriners, or the Nobles of the Ancient Arabic Order of the Nobles of the Mystic Shrine, passed their rituals to 13 African American freemasons, led by John George Jones. Noble Drew Ali would take his title, his fez, and many other attributes from the Shriners, whose secret initiation ritual centered on the early history of Islam and the life of the Prophet Mohammed. Shriners swore a “Moslem’s oath” to “Allah, the God of Arab, Moslem, and Mohammed,” and they used “Moslem Greetings” such as “Es Salamu Aleikum” (Peace be with you) and “Aleikum Es Salaam” (With you in Peace).
A watercolor of the Street in Cairo, the most popular attraction at the Midway Plaisance of the 1893 World’s Fair by Charles Graham, owned by the Field Museum, Chicago. Islamic nations were the most numerous grouping on the Midway. One US visitor wrote that “The Greek spirit in its best form still rules largely in the Exposition proper; but in the Plaisance it is Allah, who is supereminent, Allah Akbar, with Mohammed as his prophet. So the student is led to have a desperate grapple with Allah, if he is going to grasp this World’s Fair.”
Harry Houdini, c. 1899. Houdini transformed the escape magic of Hindu fakirs by using chains and locks instead of ropes. In this, his cabinet escape, and in his East Indian Needle Trick, he updated staples of Hindu magic for American audiences. Houdini and his brother dressed as Indians and performed “Hindoo magic” in front of the Algerian exhibit of the 1893 Midway that was owned by Sol Bloom, who became chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the House of Representative during WII and a founder of the United Nations.
Three boys who performed as part of the Street in Cairo exhibit at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition Midway. Many of the Arab and Muslim performers would have been considered Black in American racial terms. The Midway jumbled together people of all “races” and nations “like a kaleidoscope” according to one account. On the Midway, African Americans experienced “many pleasing incidents which made the race feel so much less distinction on account of color, at least within our sphere of observation,” in the words of William Sanders Scarborough.
A stereograph of the Street in Cairo, the most popular exhibit of the 1893 Midway, featuring Egyptian, Greek, Nubian, and Sudanese performers.
"Fire Fiends" put the torch to the White City of the 1893 Columbian Exposition amidst economic and social turmoil following the close of the fair and the Panic of 1893.
Two illustrations from San Francisco’s Islam Temple of the (white) Nobles of the Mystic Shrine. Both white and Black Shriners used Arabic passwords, venerated the Prophet Mohammed and the history of Islam, dressed in fezzes and turbans, and named their temples after cities and landmarks from the Islamic Orient. After 9/11, Shriners in fezzes came under attack, and two Shrines changed their names: Islam Temple and Rhode Island’s Palestine Temple.
Pawnee Bill’s
Wild West & Wild East
From 1898 to 1900, Walter Brister performed a new role as Hindoo Wonder Worker Armmah Sotanki in the Pawnee Bill Wild West Show, and he was joined by Eva Alexander, who was also from the Kentucky side of the Cincinnati area. They married in Cincinnati on August 18, 1900.
Gordon W. Lillie, aka Pawnee Bill, the "Hero of Oklahoma," and his sharpshooting wife, May.
Walter Brister as he appeared in the Pawnee Bill Wild West Show route book, 1899.
Walter Brister in the Pawnee Bill Wild West route book, 1900. These route books are available through Illinois State University here.
Eva Brister as Princess Sotanki, Pawnee Bill Wild West Show route book, 1900.
Eva Brister in the John Robinson Circus, 1902. Note that she was the first African American woman lion tamer, at a time when there had only been perhaps three Black male ones. Walter appeared in the same show.
The future Noble Drew Ali met the Ali Brothers, Arabian Acrobats, in the Pawnee Bill Show.
One of their members was a white diver named Charles Lewis, who took the name Charlie Lewis Ali, showing that the “Ali” surname could be assumed by show business people. Charlie and the other Alis once amazed and horrified spectators by performing stunts on a moving rollercoaster.
The Princeton Riot
May 15, 1899
“Cowboys Show Good Temper in Failing to Resort to the Use of Clubs.”—The Los Angeles Herald
The Pawnee Bill performers—mostly people of color— thrashed white male Princeton students who attempted to block their parade. The angry mob had let the Sotankis pass unmolested, as if by an orientalist Jedi mind trick. Black people in this era similarly discovered that if they donned a fez or a turban they could pass as foreign and escape the worst of Jim Crow segregation and humiliation. Some people then known as “Negroes” found freedom, identity, and self-expression by identifying with the Islamic Orient more totally, rejecting the racism of the white Christian West in the process.
Pawnee Bill had so many “Eastern” acts that he soon combined with his mentor Buffalo Bill as a combined Wild West/Far East Show, though by these years the Bristers had moved on to the Robinson Circus and to various vaudeville theaters and dime stores. Circus & Allied Arts Collection, Milner Library, Illinois State University.