The event would draw thousands of people from all over the world, enhance Chicago's image and leave a positive legacy for future residents.

The sales pitch may sound familiar -- but it's not an excerpt from Chicago's bid for the 2016 Olympic games. It's from 120 years ago, used by Chicago officials to promote the World's Columbian Exposition.

For Michelle Duster, great-granddaughter of the late civil-rights activist Ida B. Wells, the similarities don't end there. Duster, who speaks tonight at the Chicago Public Library's Roosevelt Branch, says the city's black residents were at least as concerned about the fair in 1893 as many of them are today about the Olympics.

Duster will read from her book "Ida: In Her Own Words," a compilation of Wells' writings around the time of the exposition. It includes a pamphlet titled "The Reason Why the Colored American Is Not in the World’s Columbian Exposition." Wells wrote it with a small group of other activists, including the slave-turned-scholar Frederick Douglass.

"There's actually, unfortunately, some similarities between what she wrote 120 years ago and what is going on today," Duster says. "I think people are just afraid that people are going to swoop down on a community, and that all of the people living there will get nothing."

City officials have stressed that Chicago's residents would share the Olympics' cultural and economic benefits. Part of their proposal includes plans for an Olympic park in South Shore, as well as several venues in Washington Park and Jackson Park, predominantly black neighborhoods in the city's South Side.

But Duster says that is partly what concerns her and other black residents in those areas. She says they fear that casting the world's eyes on Chicago's historic black neighborhoods could lead officials and businesspeople to gentrify them.

"There's a lot of paranoia — of, 'What's going to happen to us?" Duster says. "All of a sudden, that land is going to be considered prime. If they built that stadium in Washington Park, that will be a neighborhood the whole world will see. They are just afraid that they will be kicked out."

In 1893, she says, the concern among Chicago's black residents — many of them transplants from the South — was less about being kicked out and more about being let in. Black people, even prominent ones such as Wells, were all but banned from participating in the exposition, Duster says, even after racial reforms following the Civil War and Reconstruction.

"It was very, very deliberate — very systematic," she says. Wells' position was that, "if we cannot be represented, then we should not support the exhibition."

She explains that Douglass, perhaps the most prominent black figure of his time, could attend only at the invitation of Haiti — not the United States — because he was ambassador to that country, and it hosted a pavilion at the exposition.

The exposition dealt with black people as cruel stereotypes, Duster says, and included a representation of evolution in which the African was portrayed as merely a step toward full humanness.

She distinguishes between such overt racism and today's concerns over the Olympics. Even her great-grandmother did not absolutely oppose the fair, Duster says.

"I don't think that she had a problem with the concept of the Columbian Exposition as far as people from around the world coming to a show about how much this country, the United States, had progressed," she says of Wells. "What she and several other people had a problem with was that African-Americans were excluded from participating."

Duster's talk begins at 5:30 p.m. in the Chicago Public Library's Roosevelt Branch, 1101 W. Taylor St. It is scheduled to last about two hours.