The colorful charts, graphs, and maps presented at the 1900 Paris Exposition by famed sociologist and black rights activist W. Du Bois's Data Portraits: Visualizing Black America It is, somehow, the first time that Du Bois’ groundbreaking data visualizations from the Paris World Fair have been collected together in color in a book format. Du Bois’s Data Portraits: Visualizing Black America. Du Bois Center, are the editors of a newly published book, W.E.B. Rusert and Whitney Battle-Baptiste, associate professor of anthropology at U-Mass and director of its W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. The project presented Du Bois with a way to further test the possibilities of visualizing the empirical data he and his Atlanta University students and alumni were collecting, says Britt Rusert, associate professor in the W. So he set about making approximately 60 carefully handmade data visualizations, to dictate, in full, vibrant color, the reasons why black America was being held back. While he wanted to use the photographs to undercut racist stereotypes about African-Americans, the images alone did not relay the underlining ways that the institution of slavery continued to impact African-American progress in the country. Part of his contribution was carefully curating 500 photographs to show a nuanced snapshot of what life was like for black Americans. With a short window of time before the fair, Calloway approached the leading African-American thinkers of the day to include their work in the upcoming exhibit, which was called “The American Negro.”įor Du Bois, the show presented both an opportunity and a challenge. The federal government’s department of education and social economy agreed to sponsor the exhibit, and in January 1899, it appointed Calloway a special agent to complete the task. government for space to display the progress made by African-Americans since slavery in the American display. It was in this capacity that a former classmate of Du Bois, Thomas Junius Calloway, approached Du Bois to ask if his old friend would contribute a social study about African-American life to the Exposition Universelle, the Paris World Fair of 1900.Ī photograph from the exhibit on African-American progress, on view inside the Palace of Social Economy at the 1900 World's Fair in Paris.Ĭalloway, an educator, journalist and lawyer, had petitioned the U.S. There, he established a sociology program, now recognized as the first school of American sociology. Park and the Chicago school were conducting ethnographic field work and statistical analysis, Du Bois pioneered a new way to use sociology: to use those methodologies to contextualize the historical realities resonating among African-Americans.Īfter embarking on a sprawling sociological study of African-Americans living in Philadelphia, he was hired as a professor at the historically black Atlanta University in 1897. ![]() Sociology’s scope in history, statistics, and demographics held the potential to quantifiably reveal "life within the Veil," as Du Bois called the structural forces of oppressions that separated black and white populations, whether that came to educational attainment, voting rights or land ownership.Īnd so, almost two decades before Robert E. To accomplish this goal, Du Bois turned to the burgeoning field of sociology. ![]() ![]() ”It is not one problem,” as Du Bois wrote in 1898, “but rather a plexus of social problems, some new, some old, some simple, some complex and these problems have their one bond of unity in the act that they group themselves above those Africans whom two centuries of slave-trading brought into the land.” Du Bois, the prominent African-American intellectual, sought a way to process all this information showing why the African disapora in America was being held back in a tangible, contextualized form. in history from Harvard University, W.E.B. All the while, new generations of African-Americans found ways to uplift themselves, despite discrimination, through grassroots efforts in education, work and community building.Īfter graduating with a Ph.D. In 1897, the United States Supreme Court would rule in Plessy v. The political obstacles were voluminous, with the failure of Reconstruction still lingering, and Jim Crow institutional racism ascendant. After three decades of emancipation, the gains made by African-Americans, those that existed at all, presented a decidedly mixed picture about the state of racial progress in the country.
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