Showing the World

Paris 1900.tif

Exhibit of the American Negroes at the Paris Exposition, 1900, photograph, accessed March 28, 2023, https://www.loc.gov/resource/cph.3c32752/.

An exhibit on Black Americans for the 1900 World’s Fair in Paris was prepared by Du Bois and his Atlanta University students, and Daniel Murray (1852–1925), Assistant to the Librarian of Congress. Du Bois and his team created an extraordinary set of data visualizations on the progress and plight of Black people in the United States thirty-seven years after the end of slavery. They prepared sixty handmade poster-sized graphs for exhibition at the Fair, an event attended by fifty million people. 


C9-DuBois.jpg

W.E.B. Du Bois’s Data Portraits: Visualizing Black America. Amherst, MA: The W.E.B. Du Bois Center at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, 2018 [reprint from 1900].

This chart forced the viewer to see the appalling extent of slavery in the United States. It made the message more compelling by using an inverted scale and by associating dark colour with slavery and bright green with freedom. In 1863 almost ninety percent of Black people in America were slaves. The chart also confronts the viewer with the slow pace of change. While the Emancipation Proclamation was signed on 1 January 1863, it was not until at least five years later that all American slaves were freed following the enactment of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments to the United States constitution.

C8-DuBois.jpg

W.E.B. Du Bois’s Data Portraits: Visualizing Black America. Amherst, MA: The W.E.B. Du Bois Center at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, 2018 [reprint of 1900]

This chart delineates the kinds of educational training open to Black students in Georgia in the 1890s. Du Bois and his team chose to break the convention of horizontal lines in bar charts. While this makes it hard to compare the numbers in the different categories accurately, the snakelike line conveys a message: the number in the last category, ‘Industrial Training’, is so much greater than all the others, that it can’t even fit on the same page with a normal scale. More than a century later these visualizations remain striking.