Hendricks calls the Lincoln commemoration of 1913 “the precursor to the grand celebration of fifty years of black freedom” because “A month-long Chicago Illinois National Half-Century Exposition was held two years later in August 1915” (165). Although dealing with the death of her mother in April 1915, Barrier Williams held positions on various committees of the Exposition. Unlike previous expositions which had marginalized and underrepresented Black accomplishments, at the National Half-Century Exposition, “there were to be over 800 exhibits that included artifacts and information related to tailoring, baking, literature, painting, historical collections, broom making, social settlement work, and domestic science and the 250 patents obtained by blacks for their inventions” (166).
While Black Americans affirmed their talents, poverty rates increased and the ghetto remained as a tool of white patriarchal control. Due to this spacial tension, “Barrier Williams wrote about the creation of the Douglass Neighborhood Association: ‘a most commendable enterprise has been inaugurated by the residents and property owners in the second and third wards of Chicago’” (167).
However, her part in the battle for Black spaces was again shaped by class difference: “Using the language of warfare, Barrier Williams argued that the notion of respectability was under attack” (167). Comparing impoverished migrants “to amoral invaders,” and arguing “the elites had to fortify their defenses,” Barrier Williams fought to create wealthy Black spaces because, she felt, they deserved a space of their own more than impoverished migrants and locals in Chicago. Hendricks writes, “[Barrier Williams and her colleagues] abhorred racial segregation but maintained a strict adherence to upper- and middle-class rules that excluded the poor, the unrefined, and the uneducated,” thus also perpetuating negative understandings of impoverished Black Americans (168). Near the end of the year, in November, Booker T. Washington also passed away, another severe blow to Barrier Williams.